LOS ANGELES, CA – Suzan Rice, who most believe was President Obama’s first choice to be the Secretary of State once Hillary Clinton stepped down, may have talked her way into another hole during an interview with John Stewart on his Comedy Central show. Apparently she thinks all the talk in Washington about the attack on U.S. embassy in Benghazi is a bigger tragedy than the death of a U.S ambassador and the brave people who sought to defend him.
Rice repeatedly called the incident a spontaneous attack stemming from reaction to a YouTube video. The administration finally admitted that the attack was a pre-planned terrorist attack.
During his interview with Rice, John Stewart went over his own summary of the timeline of events on September 11, 2012 and observed:
“There is an undercurrent in the Republican opposition that suggests a malevolence to this. But here is just what from my perspective does strike me as odd,” Stewart said. “So, you get talking points. On Nov. 16, Petraeus told Congress the CIA didn’t change the talking points. White House and State said they didn’t do it. CIA told CBS News changes were made at senior level and interagency process because they didn’t want al Qaeda being tipped off. Then the director of the Office of National Intelligence told CBS they made the changes, the al Qaeda links were too tenuous. Then the CIA director told McCain and Graham the FBI did it. Then Morell said, ‘Did I say FBI? I didn’t mean FBI, I meant CIA.’ Then Panetta said he believed at the time that it was a pre-planned terrorist attack.”
In conclusion Stewart asked, “So, you can see for people, it does look like there is a great deal of confusion there. Yes?”
Rice response was to instead point a finger at people like Senators John McCain (Rep-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (Rep-SC). In her opinion their talking points are more tragic than an attack on US soil and the first violent death of a US Ambassador since 1979.
“There’s always confusion when you have a tragedy of that sort and Americans are killed,” Rice said. “The bigger tragedy, Jon, is we’ve spent all of these months trying to figure out the origin of some talking points which were cleared at the highest levels of the intelligence community and, in my opinion, not enough time doing the service that we owe to our fallen colleagues.”
Even John Stewart, no friend of conservatives, didn’t look convinced by Rice’s response.