Former U.S. National Security Advisor Susan Rice is in the news again. Yesterday’s news reports all centered on her possible role in “unmasking” the names of the Trump transition team who got caught up in incidental surveillance, and then leaking the information to individuals both within and without the government who were not legally entitled to have such information.
These are only allegations of course, but they do tie in with the fact that former President Obama made it possible on January 12 when his administration finalized new rules that allowed the National Security Agency (NSA) to share information it gleans from its vast international surveillance apparatus with the 16 other agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community.
Rice first came up on my news radar following the attack on our Consulate at Benghazi on September 11, 2012, when she was sent out to five news outlets, under the tutelage of Ben Rhodes, to inform the American people that we had nothing to worry about with regard to terrorism because the Benghazi attacks were caused by an obscure Mohammed video that had outraged a few people out walking the streets of Benghazi that night and incited them to murder our Ambassador David Stephens and three other Americans on a spontaneous whim.
We now know of course that her story was a false narrative designed to mislead the American people. Rhodes was a deputy national security adviser at the time and an email obtained by Judicial Watch shows that he prepared Rice for the Sunday talk shows and gave her the talking points.
The Benghazi story bears an eerie resemblance to the 1998 car bombings in Tanzania and Kenya. In that incident, the U.S. Ambassador to Kenya, Prudence Bushnell, wrote to Secretary of State Madeleine Ablbright begging for more security, saying that there were mounting terrorist threats and that she was the target of an assassination plot, telling the Secretary that a denial of her request was endangering the lives of embassy personnel. A few months later, the embassy was attacked and 12 American diplomats and more than 200 Africans were killed.
Enter Susan Rice, then assistant secretary of state for African affairs, who within 24 hours went on PBS as spokesperson for the administration where she claimed, falsely, that “we maintain a high degree of security at all of our embassies at all times” and that we “had no warning of any sort that might have alerted either embassy just prior to the blast.”
Rice is no stranger to spreading misinformation. You will recall that she went on ABC- TV on June 2, 2014, to claim that army deserter
Bowe Bergdahl “served the United States with honor and distinction and that Sergeant Bergdahl wasn’t simply a hostage; he was an American prisoner of war captured on the battlefield.”
So that brings us up to today, when Columnist Daniel John Sobieski wrote Tuesday morning that Circa News had reported that according to computer logs discovered by National Security Council staff in the White House, Rice accessed numerous intelligence reports during Obama’s last seven months in office. This would coincide with the time President Trump secured the GOP nomination and continued through January 2017 as the transition team worked to put the new Trump administration in place. Circa goes on to say that only three people, CIA Director John Brennan, and then Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and Rice were cleared to request and read the NSA-based intelligence reports.
Terrorism experts blame Rice for having played a key role in blocking efforts to neutralize Osama bin Laden in the 1990s. According to Mansoor Ijaz, a former trouble shooter for Bill Clinton, the FBI had their efforts to capture bin Laden “overruled every single time by the State Department by Susan Rice who was “hell bent on destroying the Sudan.” In a Washington Post Op-Ed published in 2002 Ijaz and Tim Carney, U.S. Ambassador to Sudan, blamed Rice for being a major obstacle to accepting offers of help from Sudan and to share their intelligence on bin Laden’s terror network.
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