Susan Rice. Pudding or Toast?

© Miri WTPOTUS November 27, 2012

In light of the events in Benghazi and the spotlight now shining upon UN Ambassador Susan Rice, it behooves us to take a closer look at this woman, who apparently has been groomed for decades for positions of power in Washington DC.

The Democrats are now lining up behind Rice, playing the race card and the sexism card, doing anything to salvage something from the investment they’ve made in her career.

How many people know that Susan Rice was a particular protege of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who many believed was her godmother? Albright, in fact, was simply a lifelong friend of Rice’s family, according to the Washington Post, in a fawning story that is not available online.

How many know that Rice’s parents are well connected, politically, socially, and academically? From the Washington Post (“She’s on Top of the World; At the State Department, Susan Rice Has Trained Her Sights on U.S. African Policy”, by Lonnae O’Neal Parker, March 30, 1998):

Rice grew up in Washington’s Shepherd Park neighborhood. Political and arts activist Peggy Cooper Cafritz was her surrogate godmother. When she couldn’t decide between law school and a doctorate in international relations, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) took her to lunch so they could powwow. And though Rice denies State Department rumors that [Madeleine] Albright is her godmother, she readily acknowledges that the secretary of state has been a lifelong family friend.

Her mother, Lois Rice, whose parents immigrated from Jamaica to Maine and worked as domestics, is a director at several corporate and nonprofit organizations, and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. Her father, Emmett Rice, now retired, was an economics professor at Cornell, and has worked as an adviser to the Central Bank of Nigeria, in the Treasury Department, at the World Bank and as a governor on the Federal Reserve Board.

Rice has always been surrounded by a family, both immediate and extended, that was obsessed with education. It is liberally sprinkled with physicians, scientists and Ivy League PhDs. …

Rice enjoys a great deal of support in the [Clinton] administration and among venerable Africa activists, such as TransAfrica head Randall Robinson and Jesse Jackson.

How many people know that Susan Rice was instrumental in preventing the Clinton administration from taking custody of Osama bin Laden and thereby saving the lives of 3000 people murdered in cold blood by Islamist al Qaeda terrorists on 9/11/2001? From a 2004 Newsmax story:

Another ex-Clinton official who played a leading role in bungling efforts to capture and/or neutralize Osama bin Laden has turned up in a key advisory position with the Kerry campaign. Susan Rice, who served as President Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, had earlier been tapped by Gov. Howard Dean’s anti-war campaign. This week, however, Rice emerged as a foreign policy advisor to the Kerry Edwards campaign, which is still reeling from revelations that another key advisor, former Clinton national security chief Sandy Berger, had stolen national security secrets. Rice is also acting as the campaign’s designated apologist for former ambassador Joe Wilson, the Kerry advisor whose claims that “Bush lied” about Iraq uranium were exposed as bogus by the Senate Intelligence Committee two weeks ago.“As far as I know, we have no reason to believe that Mr. Wilson’s words and deeds were not as he spoke them,” Rice told reporters this week. “I have great respect for his integrity.”

The same can’t be said of Rice, however, at least according to several of her former colleagues, who say she deserves a hefty portion of blame for the fact that Osama bin Laden wasn’t neutralized during the 1990s.

“The FBI, in 1996 and 1997, had their efforts to look at terrorism data and deal with the bin Laden issue overruled every single time by the State Department, by Susan Rice and her cronies, who were hell-bent on destroying the Sudan,” one-time Clinton diplomatic troubleshooter Mansoor Ijaz told radio host Sean Hannity in 2002.

Richard Miniter, author of the book “Losing bin Laden,” concurred, saying Rice played a key role in scuttling the deal that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.

So Susan Rice was to Bill Clinton as Valerie Jarrett is to Barack Obama. Jarrett was instrumental in preventing earlier “hits” on Osama bin Laden.  Or so the story goes.

Joe Wilson. Susan Rice defended Joe Wilson. And Sandy Berger.  Unbelievable.

What becomes obvious upon perusing the history of Susan Rice’s meteoric political rise is that she seems to have acted less often as a public servant and more often as a campaign spin doctor and media spokesperson for whichever campaign or administration hired her. There’s some previous research here, and this comes from Wikipedia:

Rice said that her parents taught her to “never use race as an excuse or advantage”, and as a young girl she “dreamed of becoming the first U.S. Senator from the District of Columbia“. She also held “lingering fears” that her accomplishments would be diminished by people who attributed them to affirmative action. …

Rice attended Stanford University, where she received a Truman Scholarship, and graduated with a B.A. in history in 1986. She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

Awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, Rice attended New College, Oxford, where she earned a M.Phil. in 1988 and D.Phil. in 1990. The Chatham House-British International Studies Association honored her dissertation entitled, “Commonwealth Initiative in Zimbabwe, 1979-1980: Implication for International Peacekeeping” as the UK’s most distinguished in international relations. …

Rice was managing director and principal at Intellibridge from 2001 to 2002. In 2002, she joined the Brookings Institution as senior fellow in the Foreign Policy and Global Economy and Development program. At Brookings, she focused on U.S. foreign policy, weak and failing states, the implications of global poverty, and transnational threats to security. During the 2004 presidential campaign, Rice served as a foreign policy adviser to John Kerry. …”

Nepotism, given that her mother is at the leftist Brookings Institution, too? Rice is married to a (white) Canadian TV producer named Ian Cameron.

Consider the irony of Rice’s statements about not wanting ever to use race “as an excuse or advantage.” One would think, therefore, that she would be asking all of her supporters, including Barack Obama, to cease and desist with the unfair and unfounded accusations against her critics–accusations of racism as well as sexism.

Her tenure with the Kerry campaign brings us to one of the absolutely most ironic articles that I have ever read, considering recent events in Benghazi and the aftermath. This is a transcript (sorry, now scrubbed) of a conversation between Joe Lockhart and Susan Rice released by the Kerry campaign in 2004.  Lockhart began the conversation by speaking about how, before the Iraq war, President George W. Bush was advised of the existence of a

“bonanza of explosives,” 380 tons of high-grade explosives and we did nothing as a country to protect those and they’ve now gone missing, presumably stolen. …

This President was warned by the IAEA, he was warned by his own military commanders on what it would take to secure Iraq in the aftermath of the initial assault on Iraq in Baghdad. He chose to ignore those warnings, and we’re just now understanding more fully the consequences of the President’s arrogance, his stubbornness and rush to war. …

[T]he President clearly had no intention of sharing this information with the American people…

[H]e’s going to have to deal, with both the facts of this story, and the cover-up of the story…

Were they talking about WMDs?  Those WMDs that didn’t exist?  At this point, Susan Rice weighed in:

I would just add that this underscores the obvious — that the President’s failed policies and wrong choices in Iraq and elsewhere have made America quite evidently less secure. I think it’s important to recall, just for context, that the bomb that took down Pan-Am 103 over Scotland used less than one pound of the sort of explosives that has gone missing. There were 760,000 pounds of this material at Al Qaqaa which has now disappeared, presumably in the hands of insurgents and terrorists.

That’s an extraordinary failure, it’s a catastrophic failure, it’s evidence of incompetence of the highest order and particularly so when warnings were provided to the administration, prior to the start of the conflict, immediately after major combat operations ended, and repeatedly thereafter.

I also want to stress that this may well prove to be the tip of the iceberg. … I think it’s long past time that we have an explanation from the administration as to how this happened. …

So, the administration really needs to answer a number of questions, such as why it ignored warnings from IAEA to secure these 380 tons of explosives. …

We also need to know how many terrorist bombings, insurgent bombings, whether in Iraq or Egypt, and elsewhere were carried out using this sort of explosives since 2002. And also, who knew what when? When was the civilian leadership at the Pentagon told about the missing explosives? When did Secretary Rumsfeld learn they had gone missing? When did the National Security Council learn they were gone? When did Condoleezza Rice get briefed, and when did she tell the President? And what was the President told and when? These are all critical questions that the American people deserve urgent answers to.

Consider the irony. The Obama administration was told numerous times that the security in Benghazi was sorely lacking. After the attack on the “mission”, the building was not secured for weeks, if ever. Whatever documents and data storage devices were there–all of it was looted and is now in the hands of al-Qaeda affiliates. This president, with the assistance of Susan Rice, kept information from the American people and has steadfastly refused to answer questions about who knew what and when. He will not release photos from the Situation Room. He goes all chivalrous whenever anyone tries to question Susan Rice’s competency and truthfulness. Talk about the tip of the iceberg and a coverup!  Susan Rice’s five appearances on national TV, where she misled the public about the events in Benghazi, made her the point person on this particular coverup. 

Worse, they will not answer questions about why no military assistance was sent to Benghazi, despite Obama’s claim that he ordered everyone to do everything possible to save lives. 

Why, when Woods was “painting” with his laser the mortar that eventually killed him, was no order to “fire” ever given?  Why did these men die?

We still don’t know exactly what was the mission of those CIA people at the annex. Were there prisoners there? Were there heavy weapons there, which were gathered up from within Libya by Woods and Doherty, intended to be passed via a middle man to “rebels” in Syria? (Rebels who just happen to be associated with al Qaeda!) If so, where are those weapons now?

What damage has already been done with weapons that may have been illegally provided to the rebel “militias” in Libya? Where did the al-Qaeda-associated terrorists who carried out the attack in Benghazi, murdering Stevens, Smith, Woods, and Doherty, get the weapons that they used? How many other attacks have been perpetrated throughout the world with weapons that our CIA may have supplied to Muslim “rebels” and “freedom fighters”? The questions go on and on.  Mostly unanswered.

Today, Susan Rice met with Republican critics in the Senate, hoping to explain away their concerns about her ability to be Secretary of State. It doesn’t look hopeful.

Possible promotions for U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and acting CIA Director Michael Morell remain in jeopardy after the two officials met Tuesday with three of their Republican critics regarding how the Obama administration responded to the attacks on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Libya.

“Bottom line, I’m more disturbed now than I was before,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), one of the critics, said after the meeting. …

Speaking after the meeting, McCain said he and his colleagues remain “significantly troubled by many of the answers that we got and some that we didn’t get concerning evidence that was overwhelming leading up to the attack on our consulate that we tried to get.”

“It was clear that the information she gave the American people was incorrect, when she said that it was a spontaneous demonstration triggered by a hateful group. It was not and there was compelling evidence at the time that that was certainly not the case,” McCain said.

Graham added: “The American people got bad information on 16 September, they got bad information from President Obama days after, and the question is, should they have been giving the information at all? If you can do nothing but give bad information, isn’t it better to give no information at all?”

In a “that’s the ticket” moment worthy of Jon Lovitz, Susan Rice says she didn’t mean it:

Under fire from congressional critics, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice stressed in a Tuesday statement that she did not intend to mislead the public about the September 11th attacks on the Benghazi consulate.

“Neither I nor anyone else in the administration intended to mislead the American people at any stage in this process, and the administration updated Congress and the American people as our assessments evolved,” Rice said. …

“In the course of the meeting, we explained that the talking points provided by the intelligence community, and the initial assessment upon which they were based, were incorrect in a key respect: there was no protest or demonstration in Benghazi,” Rice said.

“While, we certainly wish that we had had perfect information just days after the terrorist attack, as is often the case, the intelligence assessment has evolved,” she said. …

“The administration remains committed to working closely with Congress as we thoroughly investigate the terrorist attack in Benghazi and bring to justice the terrorists responsible for the tragic deaths,” she said.”

One former CIA official doubts her story:

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA operations officer and now an analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a conservative think tank, says Rice’s performance after the Benghazi attack raises a red flag.

“These officials are supposed to assess these things for themselves,” Gerecht said. “If you see a situation where a consulate safe house is being attacked by mortars and organized teams, that should tell you this was planned before that video came out.”

Rice knew the narrative that would satisfy the White House, Gerecht said. Included in that narrative is that al-Qaeda is losing ground, public sentiments toward the United States are improving in the Middle East, and the attack was not connected to U.S. foreign policy. But she still would have had access numerous news reports that contradicted that narrative, he said. [We did!]

Graham and McCain would not say on Tuesday whether they planned to block her potential nomination.

“I have many more questions that have to be answered,” Ayotte said.

Ayotte would be FEMALE Senator Kelly Ayotte, whom the Rice apologists currently playing the sexism card studiously ignore. It destroys their entire narrative if another woman questions Rice’s credibility.

If Obama does put Rice’s name forward for Secretary of State, then let’s hope they get her under oath during the confirmation process and that they ask her the questions to which We the People deserve to have answers.

After all, Susan Rice would be quite the hypocrite if, believing the American people deserved answers about Iraq, she suddenly decided that we have no business getting answers from her about Benghazi.