Incompetence

For Susan Rice, Benghazi Was Kenya 1998 Deja Vu

Parallels: A mission was attacked after warnings, Americans were killed after security requests were denied, and a diplomat went on TV to explain it all — our current U.N. ambassador, after embassy bombings in 1998.

'What troubles me so much is the Benghazi attack in many ways echoes the attacks on both embassies in 1998, when Susan Rice was head of the African region for our State Department," Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said Wednesday after two hours with our U.N. ambassador. "In both cases, the ambassador begged for additional security."

In both cases, Susan Rice was involved more than she would like to admit.

In the spring of 1998, Prudence Bushnell, the U.S. ambassador to Kenya, sent an emotional letter to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright begging for a more secure embassy in the face of mounting terrorist threats and a warning that she was the target of an assassination plot.

The State Department had repeatedly denied her request, citing a lack of money. But that kind of response, she wrote Albright, was "endangering the lives of embassy personnel."

A matter of months later, on Aug. 7, 1998, the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were simultaneously attacked with car bombs. In Kenya, 12 American diplomats and more than 200 Africans were killed.

As in Benghazi, requests for more security were denied, warnings were issued, prior incidents were ignored and Susan Rice went on TV to explain it all.

Within 24 hours, Rice, then assistant secretary of state for African affairs, went on PBS as spokesperson for the administration — just as she was regarding Benghazi when she parroted the administration's false narrative on five Sunday talk shows on Sept. 16, 2012, that Benghazi was caused by a flash mob enraged by an Internet video. Then, as now, she worked for a Clinton.

Also then, as now, she went on TV to claim, falsely, that we "maintain a high degree of security at all of our embassies at all times" and that we "had no telephone warning or call of any sort like that, that might have alerted either embassy just prior to the blast." There were plenty of warnings and our East African diplomats were begging for help as Ambassador Chris Stevens was in Benghazi.

Eerie similarities between Benghazi and Nairobi are many. A review of the attacks showed the CIA repeatedly told State Department officials in Washington and in the Kenya embassy that there was an active terrorist cell in Kenya connected to Osama bin Laden, who masterminded the attack.

The CIA and FBI investigated at least three terrorist threats in Nairobi in the year before the bombing. Gen. Anthony Zinni, commander of the U.S. Central Command, had visited Nairobi on his own and warned that the Nairobi embassy was an easy and tempting target for terrorists.

For Susan Rice and her defenders to claim that she had "nothing to with Benghazi," that she was an innocent victim of altered talking points, is completely bogus. Did she also have "nothing to do with" Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania? She should have remembered Nairobi 1998, and perhaps she did. There was no flash mob then or now, only another willful disregard for American security, part of a naive dismissal of a very real terrorist threat.

Surely, Collins added, "given her position ... she had to be aware of the general threat assessment and the ambassadors' repeated requests for more security ... (h)er actions — and whether or not lessons were learned from the 1998 attacks on our embassies in Africa — are important questions."

Indeed they are, and we're still waiting for some real answers. One thing is clear — Susan Rice is unqualified to be secretary of state.