Posted on 04/08/2004 11:20:17 PM PDT by ETERNAL WARMING
Thursday, April 08, 2004
The following is the full text of Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on April 8, 2004:
Speakers:
• THOMAS H. KEAN, Commission Chairman • LEE H. HAMILTON, Commission Vice Chair • RICHARD BEN-VENISTE, Commission Member • MAX CLELAND, Commission Member • FRED F. FIELDING, Commission Member • JAMIE S. GORELICK, Commission Member • SLADE GORTON, Commission Member • JOHN F. LEHMAN, Commission Member • TIMOTHY J. ROEMER, Commission Member • JAMES R. THOMPSON, Commission Member • BOB KERREY, Commission Member • PHILIP ZELIKOW, Commission Executive Director • CHRISTOPHER KOJM, Commission Deputy Executive Director
Witnesses:
• CONDOLEEZZA RICE, National Security Adviser
Hearing Transcript:
KEAN: Good morning. As chair of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, I hereby convene this hearing. This is a continuation of the commission's previous hearings on the formulation and conduct of U.S. counterterrorism policy. The record of that hearing, by the way, including staff statements, is available on our Web site, www.911commission.gov.
We will hear from only one witness this morning, the distinguished Dr. Rice, Condoleezza Rice, assistant to the president for national security affairs.
Dr. Rice, we bid you a most cordial welcome to the commission.
Before I call on Dr. Rice, I would like to turn to our vice chair for brief opening remarks.
HAMILTON: Good morning.
Good morning, Dr. Rice. We're very pleased to have you with us this morning.
Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the opportunity to make a statement. I will be very brief.
The purpose of our hearing this morning is very straightforward. We want to get information, and we wanted to get it out into the public record. If we are going to fulfill our mandate, a comprehensive and sweeping mandate, then we will have to provide a full and complete accounting of the events of 9/11. And that means that we are going to ask some searching and difficult questions.
HAMILTON: Our purpose is not to embarrass, it is not to put any witness on the spot. Our purpose is to understand and to inform.
Questions do not represent opinions. Our views will follow later after reflection on answers.
We want to be thorough this morning, and as you will see in a few minutes, the commissioners will show that they have mastered their briefs. But we also want to be fair.
Most of us on this commission have been in the policymaking world at some time in our careers. Policymakers face terrible dilemmas: information is incomplete; the inbox is huge; resources are limited; there are only so many hours in the day. The choices are tough, and none is tougher than deciding what is a priority and what is not. We will want to explore with Dr. Rice, as we have with other witnesses, the choices that were made.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
KEAN: Thank you.
Dr. Rice, would you please rise and raise your right hand?
Do you swear or affirm to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?
RICE: I do.
KEAN: Thank you.
I understand, Dr. Rice, that you have an opening statement. Your prepared statement will be entered into the record in full, and we look forward to it. If it's a summary statement, that's fine.
Dr. Rice?
RICE: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I thank the commission for arranging this special session.
RICE: I thank you for helping us to find a way to meet the nation's need to learn all we can about the September 11th attacks, while preserving important constitutional principles.
The commission, and those who appear before it, have a vital charge. We owe it to those that we lost and to their loved ones and to our country, to learn all that we can about that tragic day and the events that led to it.
Many families of the victims are here today, and I want to thank them for their contributions to the commission's work.
The terrorist threat to our nation did not emerge on September 11, 2001. Long before that day, radical, freedom-hating terrorists declared war on America and on the civilized world. The attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, the hijacking of the Achille Lauro in 1985, the rise of Al Qaeda and the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the attacks on American installations in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996, the East Africa bombings of 1998, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000 -- these and other atrocities were part of a sustained, systematic campaign to spread devastation and chaos and to murder innocent Americans.
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. Historically, democratic societies have been slow to react to gathering threats, tending instead to wait to confront threats until they are too dangerous to ignore or until it is too late.
Despite the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 and continued German harassment of American shipping, the United States did not enter the First World War until two years later.
RICE: Despite Nazi Germany's repeated violations of the Versailles treaty and provocations throughout the mid 1930s, the western democracies did not take action until 1939. The U.S. government did not act against the growing threat from imperial Japan until it became all too evident at Pearl Harbor. And tragically, for all the language of war spoken before September 11th, this country simply was not on war footing.
Since then, America has been at war and under President Bush's leadership, we will remain at war until the terrorist threat to our nation has ended. The world has changed so much that it is hard remember what our lives were like before that day. But I do want to describe some of the actions that were taken by the administration prior to September 11th.
After President Bush was elected, we were briefed by the Clinton administration on many national security issues during the transition. The president-elect and I were briefed by George Tenet on terrorism and on the Al Qaeda network.
Members of Sandy Berger's NSC staff briefed me, along with other members of the national security team, on counterterrorism and Al Qaeda. This briefing lasted for about an hour, and it reviewed the Clinton administration's counterterrorism approach and the various counterterrorism activities then under way.
Sandy and I personally discussed a variety of other topics, including North Korea, Iraq, the Middle East and the Balkans.
Because of these briefings, and because we had watched the rise of Al Qaeda over many years, we understood that the network posed a serious threat to the United States. We wanted to ensure that there was no respite in the fight against Al Qaeda.
RICE: On an operational level, therefore, we decided immediately to continue to pursue the Clinton administration's covert action authority and other efforts to fight the network.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
KERREY: Dr. Rice, everybody who does national security in this town knows the FBI and the CIA don't talk.
Senator Kerrey has been in Washington for years. He acknowledges everybody knew what the problems were. Yet - while he did nothing to solve those problems over all that time - he has the audacity to attack Dr. Clarke for not solving the problem.
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We're about to have to excerpt all news sources... sad really... but in this case... just remember this testimony was 3 hours long. 3 hours!!
How many < p>'s do you think that is??
Fewer than the live FR thread on the Emmy Awards. lol
Testimony:
Paragraphs: 933 Words 28,420 Characters (no spaces) 131,746
I would assume if you eliminated the words uttered (i.e. self-serving dem propaganda) by spinmeister windbags like Ben-Veniste and Kerrey, it would be much fewer. But I ain't gonna count 'em!!!
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