UN Ambassador Rice helped thwart Bin Ladin capture.

Posted: Apr 6, 2017

altered Benghazi talking points, helped block attempts by Sudan to turn over the world's most wanted terrorist outright or share intelligence leading to his capture. Our U.N. ambassador, champion of the altered Benghazi talking points, played a key role in blocking attempts by Sudan to turn over the world's most wanted terrorist outright or share intelligence leading to his capture. It does not surprise us that U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice either willfully or blindly parroted altered Benghazi talking points, going on five Sunday news shows on Sept. 16 to push the false narrative that the attack on our consulate in Benghazi was not a terrorist attack but a flash mob inflamed by a months-old Internet trailer insulting to Islam. This isn't the first time she has been clueless about and blind to the reality of terror. As we mentioned in an earlier editorial about her possible appointment as secretary of state, "In 1996, while serving as assistant secretary of state for African affairs under former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Rice helped persuade President Clinton to rebuff Sudan's offer to turn Osama bin Laden, who was then living there, over to U.S. authorities." Richard Miniter, author of the book "Losing bin Laden," told World Magazine in 2003 that Rice played a primary role in scuttling the deal in which Sudan could have turned over bin Laden to the U.S. As a member of Clinton's National Security Council, he wrote, she doubted Sudan's credibility. "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," Miniter said. Miniter noted that "Rice (cited) the suffering of Christians (in Sudan) as one reason that she doubted the integrity of the Sudanese offers. But her analysis largely overlooked the view of U.S. Ambassador to Sudan Tim Carney, who argued for calling Khartoum's bluff." Rice wanted to punish Sudan rather than cooperate with it and accept its offer. Carney co-authored a Washington Post op-ed with former Bill Clinton diplomatic troubleshooter Mansoor Ijaz in 2002 in which they detailed how Rice had frustrated attempts to get bin Laden even as Sudan had agreed to cooperate in 1997 to aid in rooting out terrorists without the U.S. dropping sanctions against it. In the op-ed, Carney and Ijaz wrote that Rice and Richard Clarke persuaded Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger to overrule Albright on the Sudanese terrorism overtures to turn Osama bin Laden over to us. When Sudan tried again to share intelligence on bin Laden, and sent a February 1998 letter addressed directly to Middle East and North Africa special agent-in-charge David Williams, "the White House and Susan Rice objected. On June 24, 1998, Williams wrote to Gutbi al-Mahdi, head of Sudan's intelligence agency, saying he was 'not in a position to accept your kind offer.'" Rice was also influential in the Clinton Administration's remaining uninvolved in the Rwandan genocide that took place in that nation in 1994. In an article in the Atlantic (September 2001) by Samantha Power titled "Bystanders to Genocide," Rice is quoted as saying : "If we use the word 'genocide' and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November congressional election?" She seems to have made a similar calculation regarding Benghazi and President Obama's re-election in 2012. Five Democratic women in the House on Thursday blasted Republican attacks on U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice, whom they said is an "American treasure," and, hinting at racism as a motivation, condemned the "troubling remarks" of her GOP critics. Susan Rice, who in 2005 co-authored an academic article which postulated that terrorism was "a threat borne of both oppression and deprivation," not malice towards the West, is no American treasure. Her entire career has been a national embarrassment. ;