CONDOLEEZZA RICE (Cont'd)
Raw Data: Full Hearing Transcript
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KEAN: Senator Gorton?
GORTON: Before 9/11, did any adviser to you, or to your knowledge to this administration or to its predecessor, counsel the kind of all-out war against the Taliban and Al Qaida in Afghanistan that the United States actually conducted after 9/11?
RICE: No, sir. No one counseled an all-out war against Afghanistan of the kind that we did after 9/11.
RICE: There was a good deal of talk about the inadequacy of military options to go after Al Qaida. Dick Clarke was quite clear in his view that the very things that had been tasked were inadequate to the task.
And so, people were looking for other kinds of military options. But no, an all-out invasion of Afghanistan, it was not recommended.
GORTON: Was it possible to conduct that kind of war in Afghanistan without the cooperation of Pakistan?
RICE: It was absolutely not possible.
And this goes also to the point that I was making to Commissioner Gorelick. You can have lots of plans but unless --eans, or no longer protected -- the United States sits across oceans -- unless you find a way to get regional cooperation from Pakistan, from the Central Asian countries, you're going to be left with essentially stand-off options, meaning bombers and cruise missiles, because you're not going to have the full range of military options.
GORTON: Now, your written and oral statement spoke of a frustrating and unproductive meeting with the president of Pakistan in June. Let me go beyond that.
How much progress had the United States made toward the kind of necessary cooperation from Pakistan by say the 10th of September, 2001?
RICE: The United States had a comprehensive plan that the deputies had approved that would have been coming to the principals shortly -- and I think approved easily, because the deputies are, of course, very senior people who have the consonance of their principals -- that was going to try to unravel this overlapping set of sanctions that were on Pakistan. Some because of the way Musharraf had come to power, some because of nuclear issues. We were looking to do that.
Rich Armitage tells me that when he approached the Pakistanis after September 11th, he did presage that we would try and do this also with a positive side, but the plans were not in place. Changing Pakistan's strategic direction was going to take some time.
GORTON: Would the program recommended on September 4th have prevented 9/11 had it been adopted in, say, February or March of 2001?
RICE: Commissioner, it would not have prevented September 11th if it had been approved the day after we came to office.
GORTON: Now, in retrospect, and given the knowledge that you had, you and the administration simply believed that you had more time to meet this challenge of Al Qaida than was in fact the case. Is that not true?
RICE: It is true that we understood that to meet this challenge it was going to take time. It was a multiyear program to try and meet the challenge of Al Qaida.
That doesn't mean that when you get immediate threat reporting that you don't do everything that you can to disrupt at that particular point in time.
But in terms of the strategy of trying to improve the prospects of Pakistan withdrawing support from Taliban, with presenting the Taliban with possible defeat because you were dealing not just with the Northern Alliance but with the southern tribes, that, we believed, we going to take time.
GORTON: It turned out, in retrospect, you didn't have the time to do it.
RICE: We didn't. Although, I will say that the document that was then approved by the president after September 11th, what happened was that the NSPD was then forwarded to the president in a post- September 11th context, and many of the same aspects of it were used to guide the policy that we actually did take against Afghanistan.
And the truth of the matter is that, as the president said on September 20th, this is going to take time. We're still trying to unravel Al Qaida. We're still trying to deal with worldwide terrorist threats.
So it's obvious that, even with all of the force of the country after September 11th, this is a long-term project.
GORTON: One subject that certainly any administration in your place would not like to bring up but I want to bring up in any event is, the fact is that we've now gone two and a half years and we have not had another incident in the United States even remotely comparable to 9/11.
GORTON: In your view -- there have been many such horrific incidents in other parts of the world, from Al Qaida or Al Qaida lookalikes.
In your view, have the measures that have been taken here in the United States actually reduced the amount of terrorism, or simply displaced it and caused it to move elsewhere?
RICE: I believe that we have really hurt the Al Qaida network. We have not destroyed it. And it is clear that it was much more entrenched and had relationships with many more organizations than I think people generally recognize.
I don't think it's been displaced. But they realize that they are in an all-out war. And so you're starting to see them try to fight back. And I think that's one reason that you're getting the terrorist attacks that you are.
But I don't think it's been displaced; I think it's just coming to the surface.
GORTON: Well, maybe you don't understand what I mean by displacement. Do you not think that Al Qaida and these terrorist entities are now engaged in terrorism where they think it's easier than it would be in the United States? That's what I mean about displacement.
RICE: Oh, I see. I'm sorry. I didn't understand the question.
I think that it is possible that they recognize the heightened security profile that we have post-September 11th, and I believe that we have made it harder for them to attack here.
I will tell you that I get up every day concerned because I don't think we've made it impossible for them.
RICE: We're safer, but we're not safe.
And as I said, they have to be right once; we have to be right 100 percent of the time.
But I do think some of the security measures that we have taken, some of the systemic and systematic security measures that we have taken, have made it a lot harder for them.
GORTON: I think, in one sense, there are three ways in which one can deal with a threat like this, and I would like your views on how well you think we've done in each of them and maybe even their relative importance.
So one is hardening targets, like kind of disruptions we have every time we try to travel on an airplane.
The second is prevention. And a lot has been spoken here about that, whether we're better able to find out what their plans are and frustrate those plans.
And the third is one that you talked about in your opening statement: preemption, going at the cause.
How do you balance, in a free society, those three generic methods of going after terrorism?
RICE: I sincerely hope that one of the outcomes of this commission is that we will talk about balance between those, because we want to prevent the next terrorist attack. We don't want to do it at the expense of who we are as an open society.
And I think that, in terms of hardening, we've done a lot. If you look at the airport security now, it's considerably very much different than it was prior. And there's a transportation security agency that's charged with that.
Tom Ridge and his people have an actual unit that sits around and worried about critical infrastructure protection and works with local and state governments to make sure the critical infrastructure is protected.
I think we're making a lot of progress in hardening. In terms of -- but we're never going to be able to harden enough to prevent every attack.
We have, in terms of prevention, increased the worldwide attention to this problem.
When Louis Freeh put together the Legat System, the Legal Attache System, abroad, it was -- and I'm sure that you, Commissioner Gorelick, as a former deputy attorney general, will remember that -- it became a very important tool also post-9/11 to be able to work with the law enforcement agencies abroad now married up with foreign intelligence in a way that helps us to be able to disrupt abroad in ways that I think we were not capable of disrupting before.
RICE: Many of our democratic partners are having some of the same debates that we are about how to have prevention without issues of civil liberties being exposed.
We think the Patriot Act gets just the right balance and that it's extremely important to prevention because it makes law enforcement -- usually in law enforcement you wait until a crime is committed and then you act. We cannot afford in terrorism to wait until a crime is committed.
And finally, in terms of preemption, I have to say that the one thing I've been struck by in the hearings is when I was listening to the former secretaries and the current secretaries the other day, is the persistent argument, the persistent question of whether we should have acted against Afghanistan sooner.
Given that the threats were gathering, given that we knew Al Qaida had launched attacks against us, why did we wait until you had a catastrophic attack to use strategic military power -- not tit for tat, not a little tactical military strike -- but strategic military power against this country.
And the president has said many times that after September 11th, we have learned not to let threats gather. And yet we continue to have a debate about whether or not you have to go against threats before they fully materialize on your soil.
GORTON: Well, Ms. Rice, one final comment.
I asked both the secretary of state and secretary of defense that question about whether or not they didn't think we had more time than we were actually granted the luxury of having; they both ducked the question totally. You at least partly answered it.
Thank you very much.
RICE: Thank you.
KEAN: Thank you, Senator.
End of part eight...... |
