The problem with Rice's appearance is there is
no "upside." She is expected to do well, and the media
will stress any negatives. They have already spent four
hours interviewing her. The public testimony will be
grandstanding with "gotcha" questions. - From: LindyBill
Commissioners Eager to Question Rice
Focus on Pre-9/11 Policy Development For Terrorist Threat
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 31, 2004; Page A12
Members of the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks said yesterday that they will closely question national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on the claims made last week by former White House counterterrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke: that the White House did not urgently react to warnings of an impending terrorist attack and waited too long to develop a response plan.
The battle between the two White House aides that has played out for more than a week in Clarke's book, at the commission's most recent hearing and in the media will be reenacted to some extent when Rice testifies publicly and under oath.
"We want to hear from Dr. Rice about the development of policy in the first eight months of the Bush administration to the kind of threats and dangers that were apparent to her before 9/11," commission chairman Thomas H. Kean, a Republican and a former New Jersey governor, said at a news conference yesterday.
"We want to talk about the day of, and the immediate response of, the White House," he continued. "We want to understand what substantive differences there are, perhaps in testimony, between Dr. Rice and any other witnesses."
The disagreements between Rice and Clarke center more on matters of emphasis than questions of fact. Clarke, who led counterterrorism efforts under three presidents, proposed on Jan. 25, 2001, a series of measures to combat the al Qaeda terrorist network and its Taliban sponsors in Afghanistan, but the administration did not adopt a formal set of policies until the days before the attacks on New York and Washington.
Clarke pointed to this delay and other alleged incidents to bolster his argument that, while the Clinton administration made battling al Qaeda "the highest priority," the Bush administration "considered terrorism an important issue but not an urgent issue" during its first eight months.
While the Clinton White House held near-continuous meetings and actively sought information in response to warnings of a terrorist attack before the millennium celebrations, the Bush White House was more lackadaisical when confronted with similarly urgent warnings during the summer of 2001, Clarke has claimed.
Rice has heatedly disputed those characterizations during recent television interviews and media events, portraying the Bush White House as keenly focused on the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda but intent on undoing the mistakes of the previous administration. In an interview on CBS's "60 Minutes" broadcast Sunday, Rice said: "We needed to build a new strategy that had a chance this time to eliminate al Qaeda."
Bob Kerrey, a former Nebraska senator and a Democratic member of the commission, said in an interview yesterday that two key questions for Rice will be whether the Bush team ranked terrorism as a significant priority before the al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington and, if not, why not.
"The contradictions [between Rice and Clarke] are really centered on how serious did you regard terrorism and where did you put it on the list?" Kerrey said. "When you came into transition, what did you regard as the number one strategic threat to the United States? What did you regard as the number two threat? . . . They had criticized the Clinton administration's policies during the campaign and set out to change those policies. That's really the central question."
Timothy J. Roemer, another Democratic commissioner, said he will focus on several topics when questioning Rice: how urgently the administration viewed the al Qaeda threat; how quickly they responded with strategies; and whether there was a workable plan handed over by the Clinton administration.
"The administration engaged in a bottom-up review of the al Qaeda policy," said Roemer, a former Indiana congressman who participated in a congressional inquiry into intelligence failures before Sept. 11. "Did that review ultimately result in a continuity of policy [rather than] subsequent policy?"
Clarke writes in his book, "Against All Enemies," that senior Bush officials, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, were largely uninterested in bin Laden and al Qaeda and were focused instead on Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Furthermore, Clarke writes, President Bush approached him the day after the hijackings and urged him to investigate any possible Iraq tie to the attacks.
Rice said "the president asked a perfectly logical question. . . . 'Did Iraq have anything to do with this, were they complicit in it?' This was a country with which we'd been to war a couple of times. . . . It made perfectly good sense to ask about Iraq." She also said "Iraq was put aside" when it became clear al Qaeda was responsible and that the administration would focus on invading Afghanistan.
It is not clear how much the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States will focus on the question of Iraq and its impact on U.S. counterterrorism policy, however. The panel's reports have so far largely avoided the issue, and Lee H. Hamilton, the panel's Democratic vice chairman, cautioned yesterday that examining the Iraq war "is not in the mandate of the commission. That's a very important foreign policy question, but it's really not in our responsibility."
© 2004 The Washington Post Company |
