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A Washington Post insider, over the weekend on the syndicated Inside Washington show, discounted the relevance of a Thursday front page Washington Post story, about how a speech on threats in the world that National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to deliver on September 11, 2001, focused "largely on missile defense, not terrorism from Islamic radicals." Colbert King, a liberal who is the Deputy Editor of the Washington Post's editorial page and a weekly op-ed page columnist, demurred from defending the article. "I cannot with a straight face," he admitted. He acknowledged: "It was not the strongest story, although...

Sept. 11 Commission to Query Rice on What Went Wrong and How Administration Plans to Fix It he commission looking into the Sept. 11 attacks will ask Condoleezza Rice why government anti-terror efforts failed to stop the strike and how the Bush administration plans to fix the problems, panel members said Sunday. "Nineteen men with $350,000 defeated every single defensive mechanism we had up on the 11th of September, 2001, and they defeated it utterly," said former Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska. President Bush's national security adviser, in her public testimony Thursday, will need to answer how that happened,...

Campaigns have turning points, and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's coming testimony to the 9-11 Commission might be one. If it is, it can only be for the worse. If it is not, it will remove from center stage the controversy begun in the carefully planned and stage-managed testimony of former White House terrorism adviser Richard Clarke. Dr. Rice, a Southern gentlelady, will need to perform out of character, more with the power of fact and rhetoric than grace. She is the President's principal surrogate spokesman on the policy of countering terrorism, and she needs to do more than just...

he chairman of the national commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks outlined his strategy yesterday for questioning national security adviser Condoleezza Rice when she appears Thursday for public testimony. homas H. Kean (R), the former governor of New Jersey, told NBC's "Meet the Press" that the commission would probe Rice for any contradictions between her recollections of the Bush administration's anti-terrorism policy-making process and those of former National Security Council counterterrorism aide Richard A. Clarke. Rice will be before the committee for 21/2 hours, "as long a session as we've had with any witness," Kean said. "We expect...

When Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security advisor, testifies this week before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, much of Washington will be watching raptly — not just to hear what she says, but to see whether she blows her chance of getting a Cabinet post if Bush is reelected. Rice has been a focus of controversy since her former counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, accused her of failing to focus on the threat posed by Al Qaeda. But around water coolers and at dinner parties in Washington, much of the gossip isn't about life-and-death matters of national security...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — With Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, set to testify before the 9/11 commission on Thursday, much attention is being focused on the expected discrepancies between her recollections of the Bush administration's response to terrorism issues and those of Richard Clarke. One of the two, popular thinking goes, will ultimately be caught in a lie. Already, differences have come to light between how Mr. Clarke, the former counterterrorism director for President Bush, and another White House colleague remember the specific events of 9/11. In Mr. Clarke's book, "Against All Enemies," he recounts the responses of senior administration...

The architect Frank Lloyd Wright warned of the floo floo bird, "the peculiar and especial bird who always flew backward … because it didn't give a darn where it was going, but just had to see where it had been." That's us. With our eyes fixed on our rearview mirror, we obsessively review catastrophes past when we should be looking through our windshield at dangers ahead. Today we are engaged in the wrong debate. The brouhaha about whether the new Bush administration treated the threat of Al Qaeda as "important" versus "urgent" is history almost as ancient as whether F.D.R....

WASHINGTON, April 4 — Condoleezza Rice was, perhaps, in the best position to galvanize the government to prevent terrorist attacks before Sept. 11, 2001. As national security adviser she sat at the nexus of the intelligence, foreign policy, defense and law enforcement agencies who shared responsibility for counterterrorism. That is why, as the White House scrambles to defend against charges that President Bush and his advisers paid too little heed before Sept. 11 to potential for terror attacks on American soil, Ms. Rice finds herself at the center of the storm. On Thursday, testifying publicly in front of the commission...

National Security Adviser Condi Rice's recent troubles haven't deterred her many fans. They just kicked off www.rice2008.com. The new site offers this scenario: Vice President Cheney bows out, and Rice is tapped as veep. Then she runs in 2008 with Florida Gov. Jeb Bush as her running mate.

Ever since former Bush counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke testified that National Security Adviser Condeleezza Rice was largely to blame for the lack of preparedness before the 9-11 terror attacks, the tongues have wagged furiously about her future. A White House damage-control effort has been busily under way, and Rice has dropped her opposition to publicly testifying under oath before the 9-11 Commission. Yet it will take much work to undue the collateral damage from Clarke's attack and Rice's week of foot-dragging before finally succumbing to public pressure. Conventional wisdom holds that her days in politics are numbered. Some predict she...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Some close to the White House believe this week's public testimony by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice before the 9/11 commission could help restore President Bush's image in the war on terrorism, a central campaign plank. Democrats, however, are hoping Rice's testimony will bolster their case that former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke was right when he said Bush was basically asleep at the helm in the months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Bush's leadership was thrown into doubt two weeks ago by Clarke, who said the president was slow to grasp the threat from al Qaeda...

What will Condoleezza Rice face when she appears this week, publicly and under oath, before the commission investigating 9/11? Sources close to the inquiry tell TIME that panelists will probably grill Rice not only on questions raised by critics like former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke but also on issues raised by Administration officials like John McLaughlin, a career CIA officer and deputy to director George Tenet. According to a staff report, McLaughlin told the commission in private that amid a major spike in terrorist-threat intelligence in the summer of 2001, he "felt a great tension—especially in June and July 2001—between...

Critics of the Bush administration are all atwitter over the front page Washington Post story on Thursday by Robin Wright pointing out that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to give a speech on September 11, the focus of which "was largely on missile defense, not terrorism from Islamic radicals." The piling on has begun. New York Senator Charles Schumer weighed in saying "Dr. Rice's speech suggests that at the very least there was a disconnect between the public security message and the policy prescriptions top White House officials were pushing and the private warnings federal agencies were...

This week President Bush's National Security Adviser, and his most trusted aide, will be grilled on why she failed to warn her government about the attacks of 11 September. But did she fail to understand the extent of the threat to America, or is she the target of jealous colleagues? Peter Beaumont Sunday April 4, 2004 The Observer History is shaped in the oddest of places. Six years ago in the gym of the Bush family estate in Kennebunkport, Maine, as the President worked out, a similarly obsessive exerciser was running on the treadmill beside him. The conversation they would...

WASHINGTON — It has become a political cliché of Washington to say that Condoleezza Rice's upbringing at the hands of ambitious parents who pushed her to excel - as a concert pianist, a competitive ice skater and a young girl tutored in Spanish and French - created a woman who has lived on stage for most of her life. It is not a cliché to say that on Thursday, when Ms. Rice publicly testifies to the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, she will have to turn in a show-stopping performance as the woman on whose shoulders the credibility of...

Sometimes, you just have to leave your mentor behind. In an interview with TIME in August 2001, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said her "model" for the job was Brent Scowcroft, the only person to serve in the post under two Presidents, and the man who, in 1989, had brought Rice from Stanford University to work with him in the White House of George H.W. Bush. Scowcroft was self-effacement personified. For most of his time in office, he would not have been recognized by tourists squeezing their faces between the bars of the north fence of the White House. Indeed,...

<p>The White House scheduled Thursday as the day for National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to testify under oath publicly before the September 11 commission.</p> <p>In her testimony, Miss Rice will dispute statements by former counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke that President Bush ignored the al Qaeda threat before the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center that killed about 3,000 people.</p>

<p>From the moment the September 11 commission was authorized, the only important question was when it would propitiate the media gods. That moment has arrived. We have finally reduced the entire story of September 11, as always, to heroes and villains, winners and losers.</p>

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House, feeling the heat over charges that President Bush failed to make terrorism an urgent priority before Sept. 11, on Thursday released documents showing that one week before the 2001 attacks he ordered plans for military action against al Qaeda. Portions of a Sept. 4, 2001, national security presidential directive were released as plans were set for national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to testify publicly on April 8 before the Sept. 11, 2001, commission. Responding to strong political pressure from both Republicans and Democrats, the White House made an abrupt about-face on Tuesday and agreed...

Was the Democratic diatribe over the failure of White House National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to testify publicly – under oath – before the 9-11 Commission politically motivated? Of course it was! Is it a good idea for the Bush administration to allow her to break precedent and do just that? You bet! Did the Democrats win one? Absolutely ... but their victory will be short-lived. They picked the wrong battle, and ultimately this victory will cost them the war they are waging to win back the White House. Unlike a certain junior senator from New York, Condoleezza Rice didn't...