'My son is NOT very optimal... he is very dead': Mother of U.S. diplomat killed in Libya attack slams 'insensitive' Obama's comment about security fiasco

President told Jon Stewart, 'If four Americans get killed, it's not optimal'

Remarks sparked massive backlash from conservatives on social media

Mother of slain diplomat Sean Smith says Obama was 'disrespectful'



The mother of an American diplomat killed during a terrorist raid on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi has hit out at Barack Obama for describing the attack as 'not optimal', saying: 'My son is not very optimal - he is also very dead.'



During an interview shown on Comedy Central, Obama responded to a question about his administration's confused communication after the assault by saying: 'If four Americans get killed, it’s not optimal.'

Speaking exclusively to MailOnline today, Pat Smith, whose son Sean died in the raid, said: 'It was a disrespectful thing to say and I don't think it's right.



'How can you say somebody being killed is not very optimal? I don't think the President has the right idea of the English language.'

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Not optimal: President Barack Obama, pictured left, discussed the killing of four men in Benghazi while speaking to Jon Stewart, right, on The Daily Show Criticism: Pat Smith, left, whose diplomat son Sean, right, died in the raid, slammed the President's remarks



Speaking from her home in San Diego, Mrs Smith, 72, continued: 'It's insensitive to say my son is not very optimal - he is also very dead. I've not been "optimal" since he died and the past few weeks have been pure hell.



'I am still waiting for the truth to come out and I still want to know the truth. I'm finally starting to get some answers but I won't give up.



'There's a lot of stupid things that have been said about my son and what happened and this is another one of them.'

Obama was speaking to Jon Stewart of The Daily Show for a programme that was broadcast last night. Stewart, a liberal whose young audience is full of potential voters prized by the Obama campaign, asked the president about his handling of the aftermath of the Benghazi attack.

But Obama's response sparked outrage among Republican commentators including the website Breitbart and prompted a vicious backlash from the Twitter community.

Killed: U.S. ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens was one of four Americans who died in the assault

Heroic: Former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods, right, and Glen Doherty, left, were also killed in the mortar attack



Ambassador Chris Stevens, diplomat Sean Smith and security men and former U.S. Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods were killed by terrorists on the 11th anniversary of 9/11 - an attack that the White House initially blamed on a spontaneous protest about an anti-Islam movie made in California. Mrs Smith has previously attacked the Obama administration for keeping her in the dark over how her only child died.

She told Anderson Cooper last week that top officials had told her 'outright lies', adding: 'Everyone of them, all the big shots over there told me - they promised me, they promised me that they would tell me what happened.

'I told them, please don't give me any baloney that comes through with this political stuff. 'I don't want political stuff. You can keep your political, just tell me the truth - what happened. And I still don't know.' Watch the video here... Attack: The men were killed in the September 11 assault on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, pictured

Rage: A protester hols his rifle during the assault on the Benghazi consulate

Stewart asked: 'Is part of the investigation helping the communication between these divisions? Not just what happened in Benghazi, but what happened within.



'Because I would say, even you would admit, it was not the optimal response, at least to the American people, as far as all of us being on the same page.'

Obama responded: 'Here's what I’ll say. If four Americans get killed, it’s not optimal.'

He continued: 'We’re going to fix it. All of it. And what happens, during the course of a presidency, is that the government is a big operation and any given time something screws up.

'And you make sure that you find out what’s broken and you fix it.

'Whatever else I have done throughout the course of my presidency the one thing that I’ve been absolutely clear about is that America’s security comes, and the American people need to know exactly how I make decisions when it comes to war, peace, security, and protecting Americans.



'And they w ill continue to get that over the next four years of my presidency.'

The word 'optimal' was first used by Stewart in the question. But Obama's use of it, in a sound bite that could be used to portray him as somewhat casual about the deaths, lit up conservatives on the internet after it was first reported in a White House pool report by Mike Memoli of the Los Angeles Times.

The Daily Show: Mr Obama, left, was responding to a question from Jon Stewart, right

The website Breitbart criticised the President for playing down the deaths of the four Americans when he used words such as 'crude and disgusting' to describe the anti-Muslim YouTube video that was initially linked to the attacks.

'To reiterate: deaths of Americans are "not optimal," and "bumps in the road." A YouTube video is "bigotry," "blasphemy," "crude and disgusting," an "insult," and inhuman,' commentator Ben Shapiro wrote.



'The left is already saying that the "not optimal" quote has been taken out of context; they were saying that Stewart used the word "optimal" first.

'The problem: it's far worse in context. Stewart said that the White House response was "not the optimal response". Obama responded not by tackling the White House response, but by calling the murders "not optimal"'

Shapiro added: '"Not optimal". Now that's disgusting.'



The Twitter backlash was almost instantaneous, with the president's use of Stewart's phrase giving birth to the hashtag #NotOptimal. The dedicated hashtag was trending from around 7.30pm ET.



Obama's slip could help Mitt Romney recover from an awkward moment in the presidential debate in Long Island, New York on Tuesday when he challenged Obama over whether he had initially characterised the Benghazi attack as terrorism.

On the trail: President Obama at a campaign event in Fairfax, Virginia on Friday



During a question about security at the Benghazi compound, Obama said he was ultimately responsible as commander-in-chief. Romney then questioned whether or not Obama had called the consulate attack an 'act of terror' in his Rose Garden address the following day.

While Obama cut across Romney - saying 'get the transcript' - the Republican turned to Candy Crowley, the CNN anchor and moderator, and said; 'I want to make sure we get that for the record, because it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.'

Crowley responded: 'He did in fact, sir.' To clapping in the debate hall, including from Obama's wife Michelle, in breach of the debate rules, Obama said: 'Can you say that a little louder, Candy?'

She continued: 'He did call it an act of terror. It did as well take two weeks or so for the whole idea of there being a riot out there about this tape to come out. You are correct about that.'

The Romney campaign blasted Crowley and sai d that Obama had been referring only in general terms to 'acts of terror' rather than talking specifically about Benghazi, which Obama and White House blamed on the anti-Islam video for a fortnight.

Joe Trippi, the veteran Democratic strategist, told Fox News that the exchange was 'going to help the president', adding: 'There’s a ref, and the ref just threw the flag.'

TIMELINE OF ADMINISTRATION'S SHIFTING POSITION ON DEADLY ATTACK

September 11: Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others are killed in an attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

September 12: Barack Obama makes a statement saying, 'No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation,' but does not explicitly label the raid a terrorist attack.

September 13: White House press secretary Jay Carney blames the assault on a U.S.-made YouTube video mocking the Prophet Muhammad.

September 16: Susan Rice, American ambassador to the UN, says she believes the attack 'began as a spontaneous, not premeditated, response' to protests over the video.

September 20: Carney says, 'It is self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack.'

September 25: Obama declines to label the attack as terrorism during an appearance on The View.

October 9: State Department officials insist they never linked the attack to the video protests.

Inferno: Armed attackers dumped cans of diesel fuel and set ablaze the consulate's exterior In the Comedy Central interview, Stewart referred to 'the perception that State was on a different page than you', noting that Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, falsely tied the attack to a protest over the video on a raft of Sunday talk shows some five days after the murders. Obama interrupted him, saying: 'Jon, the truth is that information comes in, folks put it out throughout the process, people say it is still incomplete. What I was always clear about was we are going to do an investigation and figure out what happened.' It recently emerged that the U.S. government was told that the attack had been carried out by militants, not a spontaneous mob, within just 24 hours of its taking place.

A diplomatic cable sent the day after the raid suggested that militants had previously planned to attack the consulate, and used the excuse of protests against the anti-Muslim video as cover for their assault.

It is unclear who, if anyone, saw the cable outside the CIA at that point and how high up in the agency the information went.

But the statement directly contradicts the explanation of the attack given by the administration over the following two weeks.

Haven: Ambassador Stevens and Sean Smith were hiding in a safe room which later filled with diesel smoke

Flames, grenades and gunfire: A burnt-out car in front of the U.S. consulate

Asked by Stewart what caused the confusion about what was behind the attack, Obama replied: 'Well, we weren't confused about the fact that four Americans had been killed, I wasn't confused about the fact that we needed to ramp up diplomatic security around the world right after it happened, I wasn't confused about the fact that we had to investigate exactly what happened so it gets fixed and I wasn't confused about the fact that we were going to hunt down whoever did it and bring them to justice.

'So, as I said during the debate, nobody is more interested in figuring this out than I am. When a tragic event like this happens on the other side of the world immediately a whole bunch of intelligence starts coming in and you try to piece together exactly what happens.

'And what I have always tried to do is just get all the facts figure out what went wrong and make sure it doesn't happen again and we're still in that process now. But every piece of information that we got as we got it we laid it out for the American people, and the picture eventually gets fully filled in and we know how to prevent it in the future.'

Stewart also asked whether Obama - who nearly three years ago ordered the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison within a year - had changed during his four years in office and whether he still believed 'we don't have to trade our values for our security'.

Obama said: 'We don't, there's some things that we haven't gotten done, I still want to close Guantanamo, we haven't been able to get that done. One of the things that we've got to do is put a legal architecture in place and we need congressional help to do that to make sure that not only am I reigned in, but any president's reigned in in terms of some of the decisions that we're making.

'Now there's some tough trade-offs, I mean there are times when there are bad folks somewhere on the other side of the world and you've got to make a call and it's not optimal.