Former National Security Adviser during President Obama’s administration, Susan Rice, is in the news again and as usual the details are not what she could have wished for.
Rice was recently discovered, as reported by Bloomberg News and Fox, as the person that authorized the “unmasking” of US president Donald Trump and his campaign associate’s names when they were “incidentally” caught up in surveillance operations with a foreign counterpart. It is important to note that no crime has been committed yet but it is the contradictions in her defense during TV interviews that is raising eyebrows.
According to the Washington Times, in 1996 when as the Clinton National Security Council’s senior director for African affairs, Rice successfully urged the Clinton White House to refuse a Sudanese offer to turn al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden over to the United States.
Susan Rice, According to Bloomberg news, as at September 2012, was ambassador to the United Nations and was President Barack Obama’s first choice to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. But her nomination was called off after she appeared on several US Sunday primetime TV news shows and claimed that month’s attacks on a U.S. special mission and CIA annex in Benghazi was due to an internet video, later discovered to be actually due a planned Al-Qaida attack.
Since Obama nominated Susan Rice for the position of National Security Adviser, questions have been asked in the Nigerian media about allegations of her alleged role in the death of the winner of Nigeria’s annulled 1993 presidential election, Chief MKO Abiola.
The circumstances leading to the sudden death of Chief Abiola after regaining his freedom from years of detention by the repressive Abacha regime, still remains a mystery.
Efforts by the members of the Nigerian media to interview Susan Rice was rebuffed as she declined to comment on allegations that she served MKO Abiola, winner of Nigeria’s 1993 presidential election, the controversial “poisoned” cup of tea.
Susan Rice and former US Ambassador Thomas Pickering, on July 7, 1998, led a US delegation to visit the Nigerian president-elect, the same day the government had announced Abiola would be released. Abiola suffered a fatal heart attack during the meeting. The information was later leaked that Rice had served him tea… and that he developed cardiac symptoms and died within minutes of taking the tea.
Thomas Pickering also declined to comment on the allegations when contacted at his Woodrow Institute office, for security reasons.
MKO Abiola won the June 12 1993 presidential election, considered as the freest and fairest election in Nigeria’s history, but the military regime of General Ibrahim Babangida annulled the election, leading to a five-year political impasse that brought the nation into economic and political stagnation.
