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Another Clinton Terror War Bungler in Key Kerry Post

Another ex-Clinton official who played a leading role in bungling efforts to capture and/or neutralize Osama bin Laden has turned up in a key advisory position with the Kerry campaign.

Susan Rice, who served as President Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, had earlier been tapped by Gov. Howard Dean’s anti-war campaign.

(Then) Rice emerged as a foreign policy advisor to the Kerry Edwards campaign, which was still reeling from revelations that another key advisor, former Clinton national security chief Sandy Berger, had stolen national security secrets.

Rice was also acting as the campaign’s designated apologist for former ambassador Joe Wilson (Valerie Plume’s husband), the Kerry advisor whose claims that “Bush lied” about Iraq uranium were exposed as bogus by the Senate Intelligence Committee two weeks ago.

“As far as I know, we have no reason to believe that Mr. Wilson’s words and deeds were not as he spoke them,” - Rice told reporters this week. “I have great respect for his integrity.”

The same can’t be said of Rice, however, at least according to several of her former colleagues,

who say she deserves a hefty portion of blame for the fact that Osama bin Laden wasn’t neutralized during the 1990s.

“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,” one-time Clinton diplomatic troubleshooter Mansoor Ijaz told radio host Sean Hannity in 2002.

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Richard Miniter, author of the book “Losing bin Laden,” concurred,

saying Rice played a key role in scuttling the deal that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.

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In November 2003, Miniter told World Magazine that while Sudan was anxious to turn bin Laden over to the U.S., Rice - then a member of Clinton’s National Security Council - questioned Khartoum’s credibility.

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By the end of summer 1997, [those officers] persuaded incoming Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to let at least some diplomatic staff return to Sudan to press for a resolution of the civil war and pursue offers to cooperate on terrorism.

“Two individuals, however, disagreed.

NSC terrorism specialist Richard Clarke,

and NSC Africa specialist Susan Rice...”

Rice and Clarke persuaded Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger to overrule Albright on the Sudanese terrorism overtures, said Ijaz and Carney.

Still, Sudan made yet another attempt to share intelligence on bin Laden and al-Qaida with the White House, repeating the unconditional offer to hand over terrorism data to the FBI in a February 1998 letter addressed directly to Middle East and North Africa special agent-in-charge David Williams.

“But the White House and Susan Rice objected,”

wrote Ijaz and Carney. “On June 24, 1998, Williams wrote to Mahdi, saying he was ‘not in a position to accept your kind offer.’”

U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were destroyed by bin Laden six weeks later, in a suicide bombing attack that killed 253.