Rice Says Bush Understood al-Qaida Threat

WASHINGTON - Under contentious questioning, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice testified Thursday "there was no silver bullet that could have prevented" the deadly terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and disputed suggestions that President Bush failed to focus on the threat of strikes in advance.

Bush "understood the threat, and he understood its importance," she told a national commission investigating the worst terror attacks in the nation's history.

In nearly three hours in the witness chair, Rice stoutly defended Bush when Democrats on the commission raised questions about the administration's attentiveness to terrorism, and implicitly and explicitly rebutted a series of charges made two weeks ago by former terrorism aide Richard Clarke.

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."

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.

But she also said, "Tragically, for all the language of war spoken before Sept. 11, this country simply was not on a war footing."

Her comment about swatting flies drew a sharp response from former Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey, who noted the administration made no military response to an attack on the USS Cole in 2000.

"Dr. Rice, we only swatted a fly once ... How the hell could he (Bush) be tired," Kerrey asked.

"I think it's only a figure of speech," she replied, adding that Bush felt that the CIA was "going after individual terrorists."

She later said a further, similar attack may have emboldened the perpetrators, and American interests were better served by a broader response designed to undermine al-Qaida.

Rice also clashed with Richard Ben Veniste and former Democratic Rep. Tom Roemer when they pressed her to say how much the president had been informed of the threat of terror activity.

She said a classified briefing paper prepared for the president on Aug. 6, 2001 was a "historical" document despite its title: Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States." She said it contained no "actionable" intelligence, meaning it lacked information that would have alerted agencies to the imminent threat.

Thomas Kean, the commission Republican chairman, said at hearing's end that he would ask the White House to declassify the document.

Rice was emphatic on one point _ that the threat of terrorism had been building for years, and the administration was only in office 233 days before al-Qaida struck.

"The terrorists were at war with us, but we were not yet at war with them," she said.

"For more than 20 years, the terrorist threat gathered, and America's response across several administrations of both parties was insufficient," Rice acknowledged.

"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'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, and that the decision to invade Iraq 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, first turning contentious when Ben-Veniste 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.

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.

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."

Ramzi, forgive the late reply. I had to FReep and run the other day, and just checked my replies this morning. I thought I had the article bookmarked, but did not and had to search it up. It reads as follows, copied & pasted from FR.

Bush Nominees Still Awaiting Confirmation

Politics/Elections News

Source: CNSNews.com

Published: August 02, 2001 Author: Lawrence Morahan Posted on 08/02/2001 05:36:43 PDT by Stand Watch Listen

(CNSNews.com) - When the Senate goes into August recess next week, it will leave unprocessed more than half of President Bush's nominations to cabinet and agency positions, effectively ensuring that the Bush administration will govern in name only for the foreseeable future.

The confirmation process was moving at a snail's pace since Bush's inauguration six months ago.

But the defection from the Republican Party of Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont, which resulted in a changeover in the Senate leadership from Republican to Democratic control, brought the process practically to a halt, said Roger Pilon, vice president for legal affairs at the Cato Institute.

Backlogs are more extensive that in any other administration, said Pilon, who believes the holdup is "a manifestation of the willingness of the Democrats to fight the 2000 election and the Florida recount through the course of the Bush administration."

At stake are sub-cabinet level jobs, including assistant secretaries and deputy assistant secretaries.

As of July 27, some 197 nominees had gone through the nomination process and been confirmed, leaving 310 nominations to go, said Sandra Stencel, executive director of the Brookings Institution Presidential Appointee Initiative. These figures do not include ambassadorships, U.S. marshals and U.S. attorneys, she said.

The number of positions that require Senate confirmation has grown exponentially in the past 40 years. In 1961, President Kennedy had to fill 196 cabinet department positions. When President Clinton took office 30 years later, he had to fill more than 800 such positions.

The time it takes to confirm appointed positions also has grown over the past 40 years, from 2.4 months under Kennedy to 8.5 months under Clinton. Today, analysts say it could take a year to fill all positions in the Bush administration.

A federal workforce of some 2 million employees, not counting employees of the Defense Department, come under the direction of 3,000 political appointees, more than 800 of whom require Senate confirmation.

"The top posts are unfilled or are filled by acting people from the previous administration. Nowhere is the situation more appalling than in the case of judges where thus far only three out of more than 100 vacancies have been given hearings," Pilon said.

"If the Bush administration does not get on top of this and start making the case for itself, it will be an administration that will be for a substantial part of its tenure a Bush administration in name only," he said.

Republicans are outraged at some of the more public holdups, including the nomination of John Negroponte as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Analysts believe Negroponte will be confirmed, but not before Democrats get a chance to question him about his tenure as U.S. ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s, when the Honduran military was accused of human rights abuses.

The White House also is calling for the swift confirmation of James W. Ziglar to head the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Ziglar sailed through a confirmation hearing two weeks ago and is expected to win the endorsement of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and possibly a floor vote on his confirmation, before Congress takes its August recess.

Last week, the Bush administration was embarrassed when INS officials denied political asylum to a 4-year-old Thai boy who is HIV positive and who had been used as cover in a human smuggling operation.

U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft granted temporary residency status to the boy, signaling an interpretation of the Human Trafficking Victims Protection Act that is friendlier to people seeking political asylum.

INS analysts praised Ashcroft's action: "The attitude at INS has always been one of 'keep people out.' It's the border patrol mindset that dominates INS," said one. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 Posted on 08/02/2001 05:36:43 PDT by Stand Watch Listen

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