SUSAN RICE NOMINATION

There have been criticisms of her in the past.

A CNN article from 2008 discusses her involvement in the decision not to capture Bin Laden in the 1990s or help with the Rwandan genocide.

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 Clinton, the FBI had their efforts to capture bin Laden "overruled every single time by the State Department, by Susan Rice and her cronies, who were hell-bent on destroying the Sudan." In a Washington Post Op-Ed published in 2002, Mansoor Ijaz and Tim Carney, U.S. Ambassador to Sudan blamed Susan Rice for being a major obstacle to accepting offers of help from Sudan and to share their intelligence on bin Laden's terror network. Rice was also influential in the Clinton Administration's remaining uninvolved in the Rwandan genocide that took place in that nation in 1994.

And a 2001 article in the Atlantic by Samantha Powers is also critical of her decisions with regard to Rwanda. Evidently Rice has remorse for her involvement in failing to stop the genocide.  But the horrors were committed and in rereading the account, it is tragic that the Clinton administration was not held more accountable for its failure to act.  But today, I fear no one remembers the consequences of these decisions.

A few years later, in a series in The New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch recounted in horrific detail the story of the genocide and the world's failure to stop it. President Bill Clinton, a famously avid reader, expressed shock. He sent copies of Gourevitch's articles to his second-term national-security adviser, Sandy Berger. The articles bore confused, angry, searching queries in the margins. "Is what he's saying true?" Clinton wrote with a thick black felt-tip pen beside heavily underlined paragraphs. "How did this happen?" he asked, adding, "I want to get to the bottom of this." The President's urgency and outrage were oddly timed. As the terror in Rwanda had unfolded, Clinton had shown virtually no interest in stopping the genocide, and his Administration had stood by as the death toll rose into the hundreds of thousands.

Others, including a few members of the Africa subcommittees and the Congressional Black Caucus, eventually appealed tamely for the United States to play a role in ending the violence—but again, they did not dare urge U.S. involvement on the ground, and they did not kick up a public fuss.

November 29, 2012:  Further questions about her candidacy by Anne Bayefsky and Michael B. Mukasey in the Wall Street Journal.  There are many other questions about decisions she made in her various positions.  

From Foreign Policy (Nov. 29, 2012).   The ghosts of Rwanda's genocide are in her past.