Ambitious to be secretary of state, Susan Rice wanted to prove she had
the gravitas for the job and help out the White House. So the ambassador
to the United Nations agreed to a National Security Council request to
go on all five Sunday shows to talk about the attack on the American
consulate in Libya.
“She saw this as a great opportunity to go out and close the stature
gap,” said one administration official. “She was focused on the
performance, not the content. People said, ‘It’s sad because it was one
of her best performances.’ But it’s not a movie, it’s the news. Everyone
in politics thinks, you just get your good talking points and learn
them and reiterate them on camera. But what if they’re not good talking
points? What if what you’re saying isn’t true, even if you’re saying it
well?”
Testifying on Capitol Hill on Friday, the beheaded Head Spook David
Petraeus said the C.I.A. knew quickly that the Benghazi raid was a
terrorist attack.
“It was such a no-brainer,” one intelligence official told me.
Intelligence officials suspected affiliates of Al Qaeda and named them
in their original talking points for Rice, but that information was
deemed classified and was softened to “extremists” as the talking points
were cycled past Justice, State, the National Security Council and
other intelligence analysts.
As The Times’s Eric Schmitt wrote, some analysts worried that
identifying the groups “could reveal that American spy services were
eavesdropping on the militants — a fact most insurgents are already
aware of.”
Rice was given the toned-down talking points, but she has access to
classified information. Though she told Bob Schieffer on CBS’s “Face the
Nation” that the extremist elements could have included Qaeda
affiliates or Al Qaeda itself, she mostly used her appearances to
emphasize the story line of the spontaneous demonstration over an
anti-Muslim video. She disputed the contention of the president of
Libya’s General National Congress, who called the attack “preplanned”
when he talked to Schieffer just before Rice.
Some have wondered if Rice, who has a bull-in-a-china-shop reputation,
is diplomatic enough for the top diplomatic job. But she would have been
wise to be more bull-in-a-china-shop and vet her talking points, given
that members of the intelligence and diplomatic communities and sources
in news accounts considered it a terrorist attack days before Rice went
on the shows. (The president and his spokesman also clung to the video
story for too long.)
Rice should have been wary of a White House staff with a tendency to
gild the lily, with her pal Valerie Jarrett and other staffers zealous
about casting the president in a more flattering light, like national
security officials filigreeing the story of the raid on Osama to say Bin
Laden fought back. Did administration officials foolishly assume that
if affiliates of Al Qaeda were to blame, it would dilute the credit the
president got for decimating Al Qaeda? Were aides overeager to keep Mitt
Romney, who had stumbled after the Benghazi attack by accusing the
president of appeasing Islamic extremists, on the defensive?
An Africa expert, Rice should have realized that when a gang showed up
with R.P.G.’s and mortars in a place known as a hotbed of Qaeda
sympathizers and Islamic extremist training camps, it was not anger over
a movie. She should have been savvy enough to wonder why the wily
Hillary was avoiding the talk shows.
The president’s fierce defense of Rice had virile flare. But he might
have been better off leaving it to aides, so he did not end up going
mano a mano with his nemesis John McCain on an appointment he hasn’t
even made (though now Obama might feel compelled to, just to prove that
he can’t be pushed around), and so he could focus on fiscal cliff
bipartisanship.
His argument that Rice “had nothing to do with Benghazi,” raises the question: Then why was she the point person?
The president’s protecting a diplomatic damsel in distress made Rice
look more vulnerable, when her reason for doing those shows in the first
place was to look more venerable. (Full Story)
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