Hillary Clinton takes responsibility for Benghazi Incident

In an interview on Monday with CNN, Clinton took the blame for the recent incident in Libya, stating,  "I take responsibility, I’m in charge of the state department’s 60,000-plus people all over the world [at] 275 posts".  In a later interview with NBC news (full transcript available here), she  also stated:

“What we had to do in the state department was keep focused not on why something happened – that was for the intelligence community to determine – but what was happening and what could happen, and that’s what I was very much working on, day and night, to try to make sure that we intervened with governments. We did everything we could to keep our people safe, which is my primary responsibility.”

The incident, in which a terrorist attack on a US consulate led to the deaths of 4 american citizens, has been blamed on the reduction of US security in Libya even though the violence in the area was rising.

The event in Benghazi has been used by many Republicans to criticize President Obama, who claim that he is the one responsible for the security failure. The timing of this statement almost seems too perfect, since it was given the day before the second presidential debate, where many expected Romney to bring up the security breach in order to criticize Obama's stance on foreign policy. However, now that Clinton has assumed the blame, the criticisms of the Republicans (and Romney) now seem somewhat invalid. Therefore, it seems almost as if this statement was made in order to protect Obama from further criticism in the debate yesterday.