FORMER SECRETARY of State Madeleine Albright acknowledges in her newly published memoirs that the US was wrong to oppose a large-scale intervention to halt the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

But Albright makes no admissions of error in regard to US handling of the terrorism threat that culminated in the August 7, 1998, bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Those attacks took the lives of 212 Africans and 12 Americans.

Entitled Madam Secretary, Albright's 562-page autobiography focuses on her years of service in the Clinton administration, first as US ambassador to the UN and then as secretary of state. Much of the account covers Albright's handling of crises in the Balkans and the Middle East. The book also includes a brief discussion of Africa in general in addition to a recounting of the tragedies in Rwanda and Kenya, specifically.

Albright does not refer to the warnings the US reportedly received regarding plans for a terrorist attack in East Africa. She reveals nothing about the intelligence findings which suggested that an Al Qaeda cell was operating in Nairobi.

Evidence introduced at the embassy bombing trial in 2001 showed that the US had carried out close surveillance of some of the suspected terrorists in the year prior to the attacks.

Albright's book also does not present a full accounting of American Ambassador Prudence Bushnell's complaints about inadequate security at the US embassy in Nairobi. It is known that Bushnell had warned the State Department about the vulnerability of the building on Moi Avenue and had asked that improvements be made expeditiously. Albright quotes a portion of a letter from Bushnell that points no accusing fingers.

"Everyone is doing the right thing given resource constraints," the ambassador to Kenya told Albright. "The constraints are the problem. The solution is to address the security of chanceries around the world."

Such a global upgrade of US installations was not feasible, Albright writes. And she adds that in the case of the Nairobi embassy, the only solution would have been to relocate it to a less busy area - a move that "would have cost millions of dollars and could not even have been started before August 7."

Madam Secretary also does not address charges that the Clinton administration erred in carrying out a retaliatory attack on a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. Subsequent investigations by journalists suggested that the factory was not used for chemical weapons production, as US officials were publicly maintaining at the time. In her book, Albright merely reiterates familiar assertions, though she is careful to attribute them to others.

"We were told by our intelligence people that bin Laden had invested in a military complex of which the factory was a part," she writes. "They said a soil sample indicated the presence of a degraded form of the compound VX, one of earth's most poisonous substances."

She describes August 7, 1998, as "my worst day as secretary of state." Albright was in Rome to attend an aide's wedding when she received news of the bombings. "I felt numb and outraged - I wanted to go to Africa immediately - but was persuaded my presence at that point would not help," she recalls.

Albright says she eventually arranged to fly to and from East Africa as rapidly as possible because the Clinton team was secretly preparing for the August 20 cruise missile strikes on both Sudan and Afghanistan. She flew on one of the US "Doomsday planes" that is equipped with mid-air refueling capability.

Albright's return flight to Washington carried the bodies of 10 of the Americans who had been killed at the Nairobi embassy.

An earlier section of the book on the Rwanda genocide confirms that both the UN and the US failed to heed repeated warnings and pleas from the commander of UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda. Albright, who was then serving as US ambassador to the UN, reveals that she was instructed by her government on April 15, 1994, to call for a full and prompt withdrawal of UN forces from Rwanda. The genocide, which would eventually take some 800,000 lives, was by then well underway.

But while listening to a Security Council debate on Rwanda, "I became increasingly convinced we were on the wrong side of the issue," Albright writes. She says she then called officials at the National Security Council in Washington. "I first asked for more flexible instructions, then yelled into the phone, demanding them."