CHUCK KENNEDY | KRT CAMPUSNational security adviser Condoleezza Rice acknowledged under intense questioning Thursday that President Bush was told a month before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that al-Qaida terrorists seemed to be plotting to hijack airplanes.
But Rice insisted in three hours of testimony before the Sept. 11 commission that the government couldn’t have predicted or prevented the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
“The problem is that the United States was effectively blind to what was about to happen,” she told the ten-member panel. She refused to concede any mistakes by the Bush administration, standing her ground in the face of combative questioning from the commission and recent criticism from former White House counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke.
Rice initially refused to testify citing executive privilege. Pressure from a variety of sources, however, including victims’ groups and Democrats in Congress, convinced her to submit to the questioning.
“It was pretty clearly the political side of the Bush White House that prevailed in getting Bush to change his mind on allowing Condoleezza Rice to testify,” said Gary Miller, professor of political science. “[They] realized that there were a lot of political costs to be paid by not allowing her to testify, since she had [already spoken publicly on the issue]. The public was beginning to wonder why she wouldn’t testify under oath.”
Rice’s sworn testimony failed to resolve those questions about Bush’s approach to terrorism before 9/11. Clarke told the panel last month that the president and his advisors had failed to confront the threat and all but ignored repeated warnings of a possible attack.
“There was no silver bullet that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks,” Rice said.
Previously classified documents and other evidence compiled by the bipartisan commission show, however, that the attacks didn’t come as a complete surprise. In a series of tense exchanges, commissioners put Rice on the defensive on some key issues.
She backed away from her previous assertion that no one could have predicted that terrorists would use an airplane as a missile. In fact, various intelligence agencies had produced 12 reports over a seven-year time span suggesting the possibility.
“This kind of analysis about the use of airplanes as weapons actually was never briefed to us,” Rice said. “I cannot tell you that there might not have been a report here or a report there that reached somebody in our midst.”
Democrats on the panel grilled Rice about a special CIA briefing for Bush at his Texas ranch on Aug. 6, 2001 focusing on the possibility of an al-Qaida attack. While the actual document, known as the President’s Daily Briefing (PDB) remains classified, commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste pressed Rice to disclose its title: “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.”
Another commissioner, former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, revealed that the briefing included FBI reports of “suspicious activity in the United States consistent with preparations for a hijacking.”
Rice said she and Bush didn’t take additional action as a result of the briefing because the FBI was already investigating possible hijacking operations.
“There was nothing in this memo that suggested that an attack was coming on New York or Washington, D.C. There was nothing in this memo as to time, place, how or where,” she said. “This was not a threat report to the president or a threat report to me.”
Other commissioners challenged Rice’s assertion that FBI agents around the country were put on high alert in the spring and summer before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Rice said intercepted conversations included talk of a “big event” that would cause a “very, very, very, very big uproar,” but no specifics.
“To date, we have found nobody-nobody-at the FBI who knows anything about a tasking of field offices” to escalate anti-terror efforts, former Democratic Representative Tim Roemer of Indiana told Rice. “Nothing went down the chain to the FBI field offices on spiking of information, on knowledge of al-Qaida in the country.”
Commissioner Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, echoed Clarke’s complaint that Rice downplayed the terrorist threat by assigning a group of senior aides to deal with it. The first Cabinet-level meeting on al-Qaida only occurred on Sept. 4.
“The secretary of transportation had no idea of the threat. The administrator of the FAA, responsible for security on our airlines, had no idea,” Gorelick told Rice. “The attorney general was briefed, but there is no evidence of any activity by him on this.”
Sophomore Jeff Stepp felt that Rice’s testimony failed to offer any provocative information.
“I think it’s good that she testified, but nothing really revealing or overly interesting came out of it,” said Stepp. “Everyone made such a big deal out of [whether or not she would testify], but I think we all knew what she was going to say. It’s just the same stuff that [the administration has] been repeating elsewhere.”