The Rice Version

Published: April 9, 2004
(NY Times)

In her long-awaited public testimony yesterday, Condoleezza Rice, the most diligent of public servants, made it clear that under her direction the Bush administration touched all the proper bases in planning an antiterror program. The State Department was told to "work with" other countries. F.B.I. field offices were "tasked" to increase surveillance on known terrorists. Warnings were issued, meetings were held. But Ms. Rice was utterly unconvincing when she tried to portray Al Qaeda as anything approaching a top concern for the White House.

If President Bush were not making 9/11 the center of his re-election campaign, it might be possible for the country to settle on a realistic vision of how the White House handled the threat posed by Al Qaeda before the terrible attacks on New York and Washington occurred. The administration tried to behave responsibly, but it missed the boat.

Ms. Rice was at her weakest in her testimony before the independent commission investigating the 9/11 attacks when she attempted to portray Mr. Bush himself as a hands-on administrator with a particular concern about terror threats. Her description of the president as tired of "swatting flies" and spoiling for a real fight with Osama bin Laden was especially poorly chosen. "Can you tell me one example where the president swatted a fly when it came to Al Qaeda prior to 9/11?" asked former Senator Bob Kerrey.

The administration argument that it had only gotten intelligence about potential terrorist attacks abroad in the summer of 2001 was rather drastically undermined when Ms. Rice revealed, under questioning, that the briefing given Mr. Bush by the C.I.A. on Aug. 6, 2001, was titled

"Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States."

Ms. Rice continues to insist that the information was "historical" rather than a warning of something likely to occur. The briefing memo has been withheld from the public, but the White House is doing the right thing in rethinking that position. It should also rethink the president's insistence on answering the committee's questions only briefly, in private and — most strangely — only in the company of Vice President Dick Cheney.

The question of most concern to the public, and particularly the tortured families of the 9/11 victims, was whether the attack could have been averted if Al Qaeda had been something more than one policy concern among many for the administration. Certainly, if the president had reacted quickly and aggressively to the C.I.A.'s August briefing, he might have convened a cabinet meeting and directed every official to come up with immediate antiterrorism plans — including the totally out-of-the-loop transportation secretary, Norman Mineta. But even if Mr. Bush had attempted to move the federal bureaucracy with optimum energy, it's likely the short-term outcome would have been more warnings issued and more studies planned.

The central role of the F.B.I. in failing to predict the attacks is one of the many things on which Ms. Rice seems to basically agree with Richard Clarke, the administration's former counterterrorism coordinator turned chief critic. Both officials drew pictures of an agency that dragged its feet and failed to report information from field agents that would have pointed to a possible terrorist attack from the sky. The Bush administration, after some early resistance, has tried since 9/11 to get the F.B.I. and C.I.A. to share information with each other and the rest of the administration. It will be important to hear the investigating committee's thoughts on what further action is needed to retool the F.B.I. for the modern world.

If Ms. Rice were not set on burnishing the commander in chief's image as the hero of 9/11, she might have been able to admit that Mr. Bush is a hierarchical manager who expects his immediate underlings to run things, and who guessed wrong about what deserved the administration's most immediate and intense attention. The president and his top foreign policy advisers came into office determined to build a missile defense shield, fixated on Iraq as the top problem in the Middle East and greatly concerned about China. But there's no reason to doubt Ms. Rice's contention that after 9/11, Mr. Bush unequivocally picked Afghanistan as the first military target. Given the overwhelming evidence of the partnership between the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, any other decision would have been inconceivably irresponsible.

The real challenge came after the Afghan invasion, when Mr. Bush had to decide what to do next — rethink the outdated world view his advisers had brought into office, or snap back into old reflexes and go after Iraq, the enemy of the last generation. It was then that he chose the wrong path.



In Testimony to 9/11 Panel, Rice Sticks to the Script

By DAVID E. SANGER

Published: April 9, 2004


ASHINGTON, April 8 — When Condoleezza Rice took the national stage on Thursday morning, her task was to defend President Bush against the accusation that he was inattentive to terrorism before the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and to defuse a debate that threatens his re-election campaign. She mounted the defense vigorously, but in the hours after she returned to the White House, it was evident that she had not defused the arguments.

At every turn in her three hours of often-contentious testimony, she stuck to the White House script: Everything that could have been done to prevent the attacks had been done. She did not acknowledge failings, apart from the institutional tensions that have long plagued the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a culture that made it impossible for a succession of administrations to see the threat unfolding in front of them.

She also did not concede that the newly arrived Bush administration was part of that problem, or that it, too, underestimated what it confronted or was distracted by other issues like tax cuts, China and missile defense. Moreover, her tone — as controlled as her delivery at one of her Stanford seminars — left many panel members wondering if she was defending a position that several of them have publicly said is indefensible.

For viewers who have not been following the details of the argument, there was the lingering question of whether anyone in the Bush White House is capable of admitting error — a step many of Ms. Rice's current and former colleagues said would help calm the political waters.

"If Dr. Rice wanted to change some minds, she needed to come out and admit that the administration — like so many of its predecessors — had made mistakes in addressing international terrorism," said Ken Pollack, a former analyst at the national security council and C.I.A. and now a scholar at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution. "Simply denying that this administration has underestimated the threat is unlikely to convince Americans who see the manifest failures of the United States government to address a systemic problem."

As expected, Ms. Rice was polite, brisk and precise, if a bit apprehensive-sounding at the start. But by the end of the three hours, her tone was so emphatic and unemotional that she may have created as many new debates about the administration's reaction as she settled old ones.

"This isn't over," one senior administration official said after watching her. "But we may have turned a corner."

Yet on Thursday evening, the White House was still trying to substantiate Ms. Rice's argument earlier in the day that an Aug. 6 intelligence briefing prepared for Mr. Bush about the deadly mix of Qaeda terrorists and airplanes contained nothing about "time, place, how or where" that the president could have acted upon. It was a sign of the political pressure on the White House, however, that at Mr. Bush's orders lawyers were finally racing to declassify the document, which they have kept out of view for more than two years.

Ms. Rice's strongest moments came when she made the case that a month and a half after settling into her office, she started developing a comprehensive — if long-range — strategy to upend Al Qaeda. She argued that the man who has been her harshest critic, Richard A. Clarke, had not left her with a plan, but rather a series of steps to lash out at Al Qaeda. She said that "we might have gone off-course" if the administration had pursued the group without trying to line up Pakistan and other key players.

Hiding the anger at Mr. Clarke that she has vented to friends, she praised him highly in public, and then said she had turned over responsibility for designing the administration's strategy to him. "He was to put that strategy together," she said, essentially putting the failures back in his lap.

But on the other major subject of the hearings — her response to the threats in the summer of 2001 — she was far less persuasive.

In one tangle after another with members of the commission, she did not put to rest questions about why the administration had not taken stronger action after learning of evidence that not only was Al Qaeda intent on striking the United States, but also that airplanes could somehow figure in the attack. She argued, for example, that the F.B.I. was conducting "70 full-field investigations" of Qaeda cells in the United States. Counterterrorism officials said on Thursday that the number overstated the intensity of their search, opening up a new line of inquiry even as Ms. Rice closed off others.

And then there was Ms. Rice's statement on Thursday morning: "There was nothing demonstrating or showing that something was coming in the United States. If there had been something, we would have acted on it."

Yet the declassified version of the joint Congressional inquiry into the warnings that preceded the attacks determined that in May 2001, "the intelligence community obtained a report that bin Laden supporters were planning to infiltrate the Untied States by way of Canada to carry out a terrorist operation using high explosives. This report mentioned without specifics an attack within the United States." That information was "included in an intelligence report for senior government officials in August," it concludes.

That is just one example of how many disparities remain between the administration's account of what it knew in 2001 and what its critics said it should have pieced together. Ms. Rice kept arguing there was no "silver bullet." Several commission members, led by Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democrat best known for his role as a Watergate prosecutor, suggested that there were plenty of bullet fragments, and that the administration failed to put them together.

Addressing Ms. Rice with a tone of impatience that she rarely hears in the quiet halls of the West Wing, he demanded that she reveal to the world the title of that Aug. 6 briefing.

"I believe the title was `Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States,' " she said, immediately trying to explain that it was a historical document, not one containing an explicit warning. "I would like to finish my point here," she said as Mr. Ben-Veniste interrupted.

Mr. Ben-Veniste shot back, "I didn't know that there was a point."

The subtext of such angry exchanges was that Ms. Rice, while seeking to defuse criticism, was in no mood to move to a middle ground. There is too much at stake — starting with the president's reputation as the world's No. 1 warrior against terror, before and after Sept. 11.

But in the end, Ms. Rice's most effective argument may have been her acknowledgment that the country did not have the political will to organize against terrorism until blood was shed on American soil.

"The restructuring of the F.B.I. was not going to be done in the 233 days in which we were in office," she said. Nor, she said, was the country about to make its aircraft cockpits more secure, or threaten to invade Afghanistan, or conduct any other kind of preemptive military strike in the name of counterterrorism.

It was that way before World War I, she argued with the air of the academic she once was. It was that way before Pearl Harbor.

"And tragically," she told the commission, "for all the language of war spoken before Sept. 11, this country simply was not on a war footing."

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라이스 왈: ..."빈 라덴이 공격을 결정했다"는 제목의 8월 6일 FBI/CIA 보고서를 보면, 언제, 어디서, 어떻게 테러가 있을 것이라는 내용이 없어서 9월 11일에 쌍둥이 빌딩에 공격이 가해질 줄은 몰랐다...

고... (제길, 이게 말이나 되는 소립니까? )

미국은 예전보다 더 안전해졌지만, 아직 안전하지는 않다
(We are safer, but we are not safe.)

라는 명언을 남겼지요. 어디서 소프즘(궤변론)은 배워가지고...
그 엄청난 구라와 거짓 기교/화술에 기가 막혀 말이 안나옵니다.

한마디로, 많이 배워 (스탠포드 학장까지 지낸 라이스 이지요) 팽팽 돌아가는 대가리를 돈많은 지주(양치기 부시) 밑에서 하인 노릇하는데 굴리고 있다는 얘기이지요. 팀버튼이 만든 영화 혹성탈출(Planet Ape)에 나오는 유인원이 연상되었습니다. 어제 증인으로 채택되어 카랑 카랑한 목소리로 미리 준비해온 답변 외워서 암송하던 라이스의 얼굴이 흡사 Planet Ape에 등장하는 원숭이랑 꼭 같더군요. 백악관에서 퇴임하고 나면 팀 버튼이랑 혹성탈출 II편 제작에 참여하리라 예상합니다. 다만 팀 버튼 감독이 저런 류의 원숭이 경우는 혐오스러워, 영화출연이 불가능할 수도.