National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) testifies before the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks Thursday, April 8, 2004, in Washington. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Posted on 04/08/2004 8:21:50 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
WASHINGTON -
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) testified Thursday "there was no silver bullet that could have prevented" the Sept. 11, 2001 terror strikes, conceding the United States was ill-prepared despite a threat two decades in the making.
President Bush (news - web sites) "understood the threat, and he understood its importance," in advance, she told a national commission in implicit rejection of claims made last month by former terrorism aide Richard Clarke.
Rice said the president came into office determined to develop a "more robust" policy to combat al-Qaida. "He made clear to me that he did not want to respond to al-Qaida one attack at a time. He told me he was 'tired of swatting flies'," she told the commission delving into the attacks that killed nearly 3,000, destroyed the twin World Trade Center towers in New York and blasted a hole in the Pentagon (news - web sites).
In widely anticipated testimony, Rice offered no apology for the failure to prevent the attacks — as Clarke did two weeks ago. Instead, she said, "as an officer of government on duty that day, I will never forget the sorrow and the anger I felt."
But she also said, "Tragically, for all the language of war spoken before Sept. 11, this country simply was not on a war footing."
Rice's testimony, under oath and on live national television, came after weeks of White House resistance. Bush yielded in response to repeated public requests from members of the commission — as well as quiet proddings of Republicans in Congress — that an on-the-record rebuttal was needed in response to Clarke's explosive charges.
The former White House aide testified last month that the Bush administration gave a lower priority to combatting terrorism than had former President Clinton (news - web sites), and that the decision to invade Iraq (news - web sites) undermined the war on terror. In addition to raising questions about administration attention to the threat of terrorism, his remarks implicitly challenged a key underpinning of Bush's campaign for re-election.
Rice's appearance was businesslike for the most part, but turned contentious when Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic member of the commission, pressed her on what was known about the terrorist threat in advance of the Sept. 11 attacks. They interrupted one another repeatedly, the interrogator and the witness.
"I would like to finish my point," she said when he began speaking while she was.
"I didn't know there was a point," he replied.
Under questioning, Rice acknowledged that she had spoken too broadly once when she said that no one had ever envisioned terrorists using planes and crashing them into buildings. She said that aides came to her within days and said there had been reports or memos about that possibility, but that she hadn't seen them.
Pointing a finger of blame, she said that senior officials "have to depend on intelligence agencies to tell you what is relevant."
She also directly challenged one of the claims made by Clarke, who said earlier that the administration had moved slowly on some of the recommendations he and others made before the attacks.
"I'm now convinced that while nothing in this strategy would have done anything about 9-11, if we had in fact moved on the things that were in the original memos that we got from our counterterrorism people, we might have even gone off course," she said.
Asked to rebut Clarke's claim that Bush pressed him to find an Iraq connection to the suicide hijackings, Rice said she did not recall such a discussion but that "I'm quite certain the president never pushed anybody to twist the facts."
She added, "It is not surprising that the president would say 'What about Iraq?'" But she said that when Bush's top advisers met after Sept. 11, none recommended action against Iraq before taking military action against Afghanistan (news - web sites).
In her prepared testimony, Rice neither criticized Clarke nor offered a point by point rebuttal of his appearance.
She said she made the unusual decision to retain him when the new administration came into office, saying, he was an "expert in his field, as well as an experienced crisis manager."
She said confronting terrorists competed with other foreign policy concerns when the president came into office, but added that the administration's top national security advisers completed work on the first major national security policy directive of the administration on Sept. 4. The subject, she said, was "not Russia, not missile defense, not Iraq, but the elimination of al-Qaida."
Bush, she said, "understood the threat, and he understood its importance," she said.
"He made clear to me that he did not want to respond to al-Qaida one attack at a time. He told me he was 'tired of swatting flies'," Rice told the commission.
Rice slid into the witness chair before an audience that included relatives of victims of the attacks, in which terrorists flew hijacked jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. A fourth plane — presumably on course for the Capitol or another high-profile target in Washington — crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after passengers engaged in a struggle with the hijackers.
Commission chairman Thomas Kean extended a welcome to Rice, and the panel's co-chairman, former Indiana Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton, promised "some searching and some difficult questions."
With that, Rice stood and swore to tell the truth as Kean, a Republican and former New Jersey governor, opened the hearing.
She sat alone at a witness table draped in red cloth, an American flag pin on the lapel of her gray jacket. In front of her sat the members of the commission. Behind her, in the front rows of the cavernous hearing room, sat relatives of some of the victims of the attacks. Bush was at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, and aides declined to say in advance whether he intended to watch an event with so much meaning for his political future.
Rice was emphatic on one point — that the threat of terrorism had been building for years.
"The terrorists were at war with us, but we were not yet at war with them.
"For more than 20 years, the terrorist threat gathered, and America's response across several administrations of both parties was insufficient," she said.
"In hindsight, if anything might have helped stop 9/11, it would have been better information about threats inside the United states, something made difficult by structural and legal impediments that prevented the collection and sharing of information by our law enforcement and intelligence agencies," she said.
Rice read some of the "chatter" that the United States picked up during the spring and summer that raised alarms about a possible attack: "Unbelievable news in coming weeks." "Big event ... there will be a very, very, very, very big uproar." "There will be attacks in the near future."
"Troubling, yes," Rice said. "But they don't tell us when, they don't tell us where, they don't tell us who and they don't tell us how."
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On the Net:
Link to Rice Testimony: http://wid.ap.org/transcripts/rice.html
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) testifies before the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks Thursday, April 8, 2004, in Washington. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
US national security advisor Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) is sworn-in before the commission investigating the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington on Capitol Hill.(AFP/Nicholas Roberts)
US national security advisor Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) is sworn-in before the commission investigating the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington on Capitol Hill.(AFP/Nicholas Roberts)
US national security advisor Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) defended the Bush administration's counter-terrorism action before the September 11 attacks and insisted 'no silver bullet' could have prevented the devastating strikes.(AFP/Paul Richards)
Amen, Dr. Rice!
The spinning has begun...
Commission Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste asks speaks to National Security Advisor Dr. Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) during her testimony before the 9-11 Commission in the Hart Senate office building on Capitol Hill in Washington April 8, 2004. Ben-Veniste, a Democrat, was the first to take on Rice, focusing on a briefing given Bush on Aug. 6, 2001, at which a document was presented entitled 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.' REUTERS/Jim Bourg
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