Friday, Jul 4, 2008
Bush's national security advisor dodged the 9/11 commission, but she can't evade its judgment.
Mar 25, 2004 | It was a catastrophic Wednesday for Condoleezza Rice, the worst of her more than three years as national security advisor.
First, the Bush administration's former counterterrorism chief, Richard A. Clarke, told the commission investigating the 9/11 terrorist attacks that only a week before the attacks he had sent Rice a powerful and prophetic letter warning of the danger that hundreds of Americans could die in a terrorist strike.
"You urge policymakers to imagine a day after hundreds of Americans lay dead at home and abroad after a terrorist attack and ask themselves what else they could have done. You write this, seven days before 9/11?" former Democratic Rep. Tim Roemer asked Clarke in a nationally televised open session of the commission.
Clarke tersely confirmed he had sent the letter with a single word, "Yes."
It is a matter of record what Rice did on receiving this warning from her own top expert on the imminent mega-terrorist threat facing the United States. She did nothing.
The commissioners had more bad news for Rice. They were highly critical of her refusal to face them in public and testify openly about the Bush administration's counterterrorism policy, even though she has actively defended it on television and in the Op-Ed pages of the Washington Post.
Even the prominent Republican commission chairman Tom Kean, the former governor of New Jersey, was obviously irritated. "We are disappointed she is not going to appear to answer our questions," he said.
Commissioner Roemer was equally scathing. Rice's argument "belongs not on the airwaves" but in testimony before the commission, he said.
Clarke's dramatic letter, coupled with Rice's devastating refusal to risk appearing publicly to defend her record, may do what nothing else has done to strip the Teflon off Rice's questionable record as national security advisor.
It came in a week that started badly for her two days ago and only has gotten worse since.
The furor over Clarke's explosive new book, "Against All Enemies," about Bush administration incompetence and irresponsibility before and after 9/11, has so embarrassed and alarmed Rice that Monday she took the almost unprecedented step of responding to criticism publicly with a signed article on the Op-Ed page of the Post.
The article is a masterly example of evasion, answering accusations that have not been made and neatly avoiding troubling ones that have. Rice was briefly allowed to enjoy the perception that she had answered criticisms, even though she had not. But within two days, a claim she made in the Op-Ed was disputed head on.
For on Wednesday, commissioner Jamie Gorelick, the former deputy attorney general, asked Clarke, "When Dr. Rice writes in the Washington Post, 'No al-Qaida plan was turned over to the new administration [by the Clinton team when it left office],' is that true?"
Clarke again replied with a devastating single-word answer. This time it was: "No."
And he had the chapter and verse to prove it.
"I think what is true is what your staff found by going through the documents ... Early in the administration, within days of the Bush administration coming into office, we gave them two documents ... In fact, I briefed Dr. Rice on this even before they came into office," he told the commission.
In her article, Rice further claimed that through the summer of 2001 "increasing intelligence chatter" focused almost exclusively on potential attacks overseas. But this presumably was only true of National Security Agency intercepts. She acknowledges that U.S. officials realized that the potential for some kind of imminent airline hijacking operation was very real. She admits in the same article that the Federal Aviation Authority "even issued a warning to airlines and aviation personnel that 'the potential for a terrorist operation such as an airline hijacking to free terrorists incarcerated in the United States remains a concern.'"
In her Washington Post article, Rice also acknowledges that "according to the FBI, by June 2001, 16 of the 19 hijackers were already here" -- that is, within the United States. She argues that even if the United States had moved more forcefully to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan during 2001, it still would not have averted the hijack plot within the United States.
That part is obviously true, but of course it neatly sidesteps the real issues. For its full first eight months in office, the Bush administration never took seriously the threat of any kind of al-Qaida terrorist attack, let alone a mega one within the continental United States.
This complacent blindness toward the threat of al-Qaida continued right down to the wire. On Sept. 9, 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told senators on Capitol Hill that the president was prepared, with his approval, to veto their efforts to shift $600 million from his precious anti-ballistic missile development to counterterrorism security precautions. Rice did not object.
Rice is, in fact, a classic example and beneficiary of the political mores of Bush's Washington. In the second Bush administration, to a degree unprecedented among any of its recent predecessors, Democratic or Republican, courtier skills matter far more in rising to and prospering in high political office than political skill, sagacity or knowledge of the issues. Being too attached to any principles or prudence will assuredly mar or destroy your career if they get in the way of key policy goals -- like blaming Iraq for 9/11, or backing the drive to conquer it. Rice has thrived in this environment.
Rice had neither academic background nor serious policy experience in dealing with the Middle East, terror groups or extreme Islam. She was the top national security official on watch for eight months before 9/11. As Clarke has made clear, that should have been ample time for her to ratchet up the national government's level of alert and efficiency against the well-documented threat about which she had been exhaustively and presciently warned. She did no such thing. Instead, she has used her first-rate forensic and diplomatic skills only to obfuscate, excuse and sidestep to protect Bush and maintain her own perfect record. In the year and a half since 9/11 Rice has compliantly served the personal obsession of the president and the neocon clique running the Pentagon to rush to war in Iraq.
Her unimpeded rise is especially remarkable because Rice's actual record as national security advisor has been, to say the least, spotty and controversial.
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