Tag: U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice

Earlier this week, the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee questioned Marine Lt. Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, President Obama’s nominee to become the next four-star general commanding AFRICOM, the U.S. Africa Command. Most of the discussion focused on the conflict in Libya, where territory is now controlled by seven different forces. KPFA’s Ann Garrison has more.

Less than a month after Col. Qaddafi’s assassination, in a Nov. 16, 2011, “Tripoli Situation Report” in Hillary Clinton’s e-mail archive, “country managers of the three U.S. firms comprising the Waha Group (Marathon, Conoco Phillips and Amerada Hess) said meetings with its Libyan joint venture partner and the National Oil Company [NOC] this week were ‘extremely positive’ and that they were encouraged by an apparent sea change in the NOC’s attitude toward its U.S. partners.”

The brief visit of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Libya in October 2011 was referred to by the media as a “victory lap.” “We came, we saw, he died!” she crowed in a CBS video interview on hearing of the capture and brutal murder of Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi. But the victory lap, write Scott Shane and Jo Becker in the New York Times, was premature. Libya was relegated to the back burner by the State Department.

An AP newswire posted to outlets all over the world said that the Democratic Republic of the Congo has sent 500 troops to join a Uganda-led military effort to hunt down Joseph Kony, the fugitive head of the Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA rebel group, bringing the number of African soldiers deployed against the LRA up to 3,350, assisted by U.S. Special Forces.

Bruce Dixon, managing editor of the Black Agenda Report and author of “Did Bloody Hands, Not Black Womanhood Sink Susan Rice Nomination?” spoke to KPFA about U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice’s withdrawal from consideration to become President Obama’s next secretary of state.

The Obama administration was on the defensive about the U.S. relationship with Rwanda and its U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice at the Dec. 11, 2012, U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on the conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Two days after the hearing, Rice withdrew her name from consideration to become secretary of state. In President Obama’s statement on Susan Rice, issued the same day, he praised her work but did not mention Rwanda, Uganda or Congo.

Imprisoned Rwandan opposition leader Victoire Ingabire and her supporters await a Kigali court’s verdict in her case this coming Friday, Sept. 7. Ingabire has been in prison for nearly two years, charged with giving financial support to a terrorist group, planning to cause state insecurity, and divisionism, a violation of Rwanda’s “genocide ideology” statute.

The inescapable implication of the U.N. report on the Congo is that Rwandan President Kagame could be legally proven to be a genocidaire, or perpetrator of genocide. President Obama must use the U.N. report to distance his administration from Mr. Kagame.