Mary Commaday, the mother of slain U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, on Thursday again dismissed the politicization of her son's death during the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya.
"I don't think it is productive to lay blame on people," Commaday said during a segment aired on CBS News.
The sentiment echoes her response to a San Francisco television station two weeks ago. In her first in-depth interview after Stevens' death, Commaday refused to point fingers.
"How can anyone place blame for his death -- these were circumstances beyond our government’s control," Commaday told NBC Bay Area. "I am perfectly aware that there was danger. But he was a grown man, well-educated and careful. I knew he was out there doing good work.”
Commaday's latest remarks come just two days after Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney criticized President Barack Obama during the second presidential debate for his alleged mishandling of the Benghazi attacks in the days after.
"There were many days that passed before we knew whether this was a spontaneous demonstration, or actually whether it was a terrorist attack," Romney said in response to a question about Benghazi. "Whether there was some misleading, or instead whether we just didn’t know what happened, you have to ask yourself why didn’t we know five days later when the ambassador to the United Nations went on TV to say that this was a demonstration. How could we have not known?"
Obama sharply retorted that politics had no place in something as fundamental as the nation's security.
"The suggestion that anybody in my team, whether the Secretary of State, our U.N. Ambassador, anybody on my team would play politics or mislead when we’ve lost four of our own, governor, is offensive," Obama said. "That’s not what we do."
Jan Stevens, the ambassador's father, has characterized efforts to use the four American deaths in Benghazi for campaign purposes as "abhorent."
“The security matters are being adequately investigated,” Stevens told Bloomberg News. “We don’t pretend to be experts in security. It has to be objectively examined. That’s where it belongs. It does not belong in the campaign arena.”
The mother of a Navy SEAL killed alongside Stevens in the consulate attack also decried Romney's attempt to use the situation to score political points.
"I don't trust Romney. He shouldn't make my son's death part of his political agenda," Barbara Doherty told a Boston television station. "It's wrong to use these brave young men, who wanted freedom for all, to degrade Obama.”
Other family members of the American servicemen killed in Benghazi have expressed disappointment with the scarcity of information the Obama administration has provided about their loved ones' deaths.
And the controversy looks far from settling down. Conservative super PAC American Crossroads put out a new web ad Thursday that aggregates all of the statements from Obama administration officials on whether the Benghazi incident was a strategic attack or the result of a spontaneous protest over an offensive, anti-Islam video.
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