WASHINGTON, Oct. 24 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday advised against "cherry-picking" shreds of information in approaching a "complex" issue like the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi of Libya, a focus now of the heated presidential election campaign.
The top U.S. envoy was responding to a newly-leaked email that was reportedly sent from the State Department to notify the White House two hours after the attack on September 11 that a militant group was claiming responsibility.
"The independent Accountability Review Board is already hard at work looking at everything -- not cherry-picking one story here or one document there -- but looking at everything, which I highly recommend as the appropriate approach to something as complex as an attack like this," she told reporters after meeting with her Brazilian counterpart Antonio Patriota at the State Department.
The Obama administration initially called the assault, in which four Americans were killed including the ambassador, a spontaneous rather than a planned attack ensuing from protests over a film that denigrated the Prophet Mohammed, but it later called the assault a "terrorist act."
Mitt Romney, Obama's Republican challenger in the November 6 election, and his team have taken advantage of the evolving viewpoints to attack the administration's policy for the region, making it a hot-button issue in a dead heat jousting.
The email, leaked to some media outlets a day earlier, noted that the Islamist group Ansar al-Sharia claimed responsibility on Facebook and Twitter, and called for an attack as well on the U.S. embassy in Tripoli, capital of Libya.
"Posting something on Facebook is not in and of itself evidence, and I think it just underscores how fluid the reporting was at the time and continued for some time to be," Clinton remarked.
"What I keep in mind is that four brave Americans were killed, and we will find out what happened, we will take whatever measures are necessary to fix anything that needs to be fixed, and we will bring those to justice who committed these murders," she added.
White House spokesman Jay Carney also dismissed the email.
"The email you're referring to was an open-source, unclassified email referring to an assertion made on a social media site that everyone in this room had access to and knew about instantaneously, " he told reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Iowa.
"There was a variety of information coming in," he added. "The whole point of an intelligence community and what they do is to assess strands of information and make judgment about what happened and who was responsible."
The administration said it based its sayings about the attack on the assessments of the intelligence community.
