Obama warns against jumping to conclusions over ‘act of terror’
The president’s approach underscores the struggle to piece together information about what happened Monday, as well the White House’s lessons learned from previous terrorist incidents, including last year’s deadly attack on a US diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.
Obama was criticised by Republicans throughout the final weeks of the presidential campaign for being reluctant to call the incident an act of terror and for statements administration officials made about the attack that were later proved false.
The circumstances surrounding the marathon bombing and the Libya attack may be different, but many of the considerations for the White House are the same — in particular, how quickly should the president address the nation, and when he does, how should he characterise an incident when an investigation is in its infancy?
In this case, the answers were “quickly” but “carefully”. The president spoke to the nation just three hours after the explosion, but he waited until his next-day remarks to declare it terrorism.
“Any time bombs are used to target innocent civilians it is an act of terror,” Obama said from the White House briefing room. “What we don’t yet know, however, is who carried out this attack, or why; whether it was planned and executed by a terrorist organisation, foreign or domestic, or was the act of a malevolent individual.”
Obama plans to travel to Boston today to attend a service for the three people killed and more than 170 wounded in the attack. The bombs that ripped through the crowd at the marathon were fashioned out of pressure cookers and packed with metal shards, nails and ball bearings to inflict maximum carnage.
Administration officials say those details and others had not been confirmed when Obama made his initial comments on Monday, leading them to conclude that it was best for the president to avoid publicly calling the attacks terrorism. Yet White House officials told reporters in the moments after the president’s statement that the incident was, in fact, being treated as terrorism.
Richard Grenell, a former UN official who briefly served as a foreign policy adviser to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, took issue with the initial differences between the White House’s public and private characterisations.
“You don’t get to play both sides,” he said. “By playing both sides, it’s clear they’re nervous about the political implications of their words.”
Former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice said that terrorist attacks like Boston present presidents with a leadership dilemma. Rice was then president George W Bush’s national security adviser on Sept 11, 2001.
