Susan Rice fails in attempt to win over Republican senators on Benghazi
response
By Lee-Anne Goodman, The Canadian Press November 28, 2012
WASHINGTON - Susan Rice's closed-door meeting on Tuesday with three
Republican lawmakers did nothing to ease their criticisms of the UN
ambassador's public proclamations over the September attack on the U.S.
consulate in Libya that killed four Americans, including envoy Chris
Stevens.
"I'm more disturbed now than I was before," South Carolina Sen. Lindsey
Graham told reporters after Rice explained why she initially characterized
the Benghazi attack as a spontaneous eruption of violence over an anti-Islam
video.
"I think it does not do justice to the reality at the time and in hindsight
clearly was completely wrong.... In real time, it was a statement
disconnected from reality."
Rice's 90-minute meeting with Graham and fellow senators John McCain and
Kelly Ayotte came amid the roar of speculation in the U.S. capital that
she's about to be tapped by the Obama administration, possibly as early as
this week, to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state.
Clinton wants out of the job so Rice, who's been serving as the U.S.
ambassador to the United Nations since 2009, is making the rounds on Capitol
Hill this week on an apparent "charm offensive" aimed at getting lawmakers
behind her potential nomination.
Her first foray onto the Hill on Tuesday with acting CIA director Michael
Morell, however, backfired badly, thanks to the trio of senators who have
been bitterly maligning her Benghazi response for weeks.
All three of them emerged from the meeting to say they're more bothered now
about her public remarks on Sunday morning talk shows a few days after the
Sept. 11 attack than they were before she attempted to explain herself.
"I'm significantly troubled by the answers we got and didn't get," McCain
said.
"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."
Ayotte, meantime, said she had "many more questions that need to be
answered" and suggested she'd vote against Rice's nomination as secretary of
state.
Rice, 48, has said her public remarks about the Benghazi attack were based
on talking points provided by U.S. intelligence agencies.
Those in intelligence circles suggest the talking points were deliberately
vague in order to protect covert operations in Libya in the aftermath of the
attack, adding that an investigation was still underway when Rice made the
rounds of talk shows on Sept. 16.
Republicans, meantime, suspect Rice was covering up for U.S. President
Barack Obama, charging the administration didn't want an al-Qaida terrorist
attack to taint his re-election chances.
Obama has defended Rice, most fiercely in a White House news conference held
soon after his re-election.
White House spokesman Jay Carney came to Rice's defence again on Tuesday,
shortly after her ill-fated visit to Capitol Hill.
"Ambassador Rice has no responsibility for collecting, analyzing and
providing intelligence, nor does she have responsibility ... for diplomatic
security around the globe," he said.
"The focus on - some might say obsession (with) - comments made on Sunday
shows seems to me, and to many, to be misplaced. What is the point of the
focus on this?"
Rice, a Rhodes scholar who's married to Canadian television producer Ian
Cameron, has risen through Democratic ranks over the years to counsel
presidential candidates that include Michael Dukakis and John Kerry, himself
a potential Hillary Clinton replacement.
She has an impressive pedigree - her father was the first black governor of
the Federal Reserve Board, her mother a renowned education scholar - but
Rice's legendary abrasiveness has prompted misgivings about her suitability
for the job from both the left and right.
"She is ill-equipped to be the nation's top diplomat for reasons that have
little to do with Libya," Dana Milbank, a left-leaning Washington Post
columnist, wrote recently in a piece that recounted how she once gave
respected diplomat Richard Holbrooke the middle finger when she worked in
the Bill Clinton White House.
He called her an "undiplomatic diplomat."
The New York Times' Maureen Dowd, also a liberal columnist, took aim as
well, arguing Rice's foreign policy stances are primarily motivated by
professional ambitions.
Rice also has a reportedly uneasy relationship with Hillary Clinton. She was
among the first of Bill Clinton's former officials to back Obama over his
wife in 2008, and frequently criticized her throughout primary season.
In 2008, she also repeatedly slagged McCain, whose memory is long. Among
other insults, she mocked his trip to Iraq during the presidential election
campaign and called him reckless and belligerent.
Some in the international community are reportedly nervous about the
prospect of Rice as secretary of state. An anonymous Russian foreign
ministry official was recently quoted describing her as "too ambitious and
aggressive," adding her appointment would strain relations between Russia
and the United States.
Under Bill Clinton, Rice had a critical say in several foreign policy
decisions - some of them controversial. Among other moves, she advised
against accepting Sudan's help in capturing Osama bin Laden in the 1990s.
She later expressed regret over the Clinton administration's failure to
prevent massive genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Canada's Romeo Dallaire, head of
the overwhelmed UN peacekeeping forces at the time, had urged the
international community to take action.
"I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come
down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was
required," Rice later recounted.
There's even a Canadian angle to some of her public remarks. As Obama ran
for president, Rice insisted his campaign had never assured Canadian
officials that his opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement was
"just politics."
"The Canadian ambassador issued a statement that that story was absolutely
false," Rice said in a television interview, making reference to Michael
Wilson's denial of a report that an Obama official had personally made NAFTA
assurances to him in a phone call.
"There had been no contact. There had been no discussions on NAFTA."
Obama later acknowledged Austan Goolsbee, his economic adviser, had in fact
talked to a senior Canadian official in Chicago about his stance on the
trade pact.
Rice certainly has no shortage of defenders - including her ninth grade
teacher, who wrote the Post to dispute Milbank's column.
"She was one of the most outstanding students I encountered in my 40-year
teaching career," wrote John Wood of D.C.'s National Cathedral School.
A sole Republican is also defending her. Jon Huntsman, the former Republican
presidential hopeful, said that criticism of Rice's failure to immediately
describe the Benghazi attack as an act of terrorism was unfair.
"The issue of Benghazi, I think you can attribute to the fog of war, more
than anything else," Huntsman, the former governor of Utah, said this week.
"It takes a while to sort through the details. And it doesn't do a whole lot
of good for the political class to point fingers before you even know what
was behind it."
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