Susan Rice Revisits Benghazi on 'Daily Show'

The secretary of state confirmation hearings might be a thing of the past for U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, but her recent visit to political comedian Jon Stewart's Daily Show must have brought back memories, reports the Los Angeles Times.

"There's always confusion when you have a tragedy of that sort," she said. "The bigger tragedy is that 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."

Agreeing with Rice's assertion, Stewart asked why there seemed to be more effort put into ironing out talking points rather than preventing the attack in the first place. As he put it, "Why is there a bureaucratic system in place that is so tenacious with the explanation, yet seemingly abdicates a little bit of responsibility for the initial thing?"

Rice responded, rather indirectly, that the administration had convened an accountability review board and were implementing its recommendations. "That's what we ought to be focusing on, we ought to be focusing on what went wrong, why it went wrong, and how we get it right," she said.

Not entirely satisfied with Rice's answer, Stewart pressed her: "Do you think the bureaucracy is more tenacious and detail-oriented when it comes to the political aspects of their job and less efficacious when it comes to some of the more brass nuts and bolts thing?"

"Folks were doing their very best with what they had," she replied.

Read more at the Los Angeles Times and watch Rice's extended interview at the Daily Show.

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