The Rice Version
The New York Times
Editorial
April 9, 2004
In her long-awaited public testimony yesterday, Condoleezza Rice,
the most diligent of public servants, made it clear that under her direction the
Bush administration touched all the proper bases in planning an antiterror program.
The State Department was told to "work with" other
countries. F.B.I. field offices were "tasked" to increase surveillance on known terrorists.
Warnings were issued, meetings were held. But Ms. Rice
was utterly unconvincing when she tried to portray Al Qaeda as anything
approaching a top concern for the White House.
If President Bush were not making 9/11 the center of his re-election campaign,
it might be possible for the country to settle on a realistic vision of
how the White House handled the threat posed by Al Qaeda before
the terrible attacks on New York and Washington occurred. The administration
tried to behave responsibly, but it missed the boat.
Ms. Rice was at her weakest in her testimony before the independent
commission investigating the 9/11 attacks when she attempted to portray
Mr. Bush himself as a hands-on administrator with a particular concern
about terror threats. Her description of the president as tired of "swatting
flies" and spoiling for a real fight with Osama bin Laden was especially
poorly chosen. "Can you tell me one example where the president swatted a
fly when it came to Al Qaeda prior to 9/11?" asked former Senator Bob Kerrey.
The administration argument that it had only gotten intelligence about
potential terrorist attacks abroad in the summer of 2001 was rather
drastically undermined when Ms. Rice revealed, under questioning,
that the briefing given Mr. Bush by the C.I.A. on Aug. 6, 2001, was titled "Bin
Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States." Ms. Rice continues
to insist that the information was "historical" rather than a warning of
something likely to occur. The briefing memo has been withheld from the public,
but the White House is doing the right thing in rethinking that
position. It should also rethink the president's insistence on answering
the committee's questions only briefly, in private and - most strangely -
only in the company of Vice President Dick Cheney.
The question of most concern to the public, and particularly the tortured families
of the 9/11 victims, was whether the attack could have been
averted if Al Qaeda had been something more than one policy
concern among many for the administration. Certainly, if the president had reacted
quickly and aggressively to the C.I.A.'s August briefing, he might
have convened a cabinet meeting and directed every official to come up with
immediate antiterrorism plans - including the totally out-of-the-loop
transportation secretary, Norman Mineta. But even if Mr. Bush had
attempted to move the federal bureaucracy with optimum energy,
it's likely the short-term outcome would have been more warnings issued and
more studies planned.
The central role of the F.B.I. in failing to predict the attacks is one of the
many things on which Ms. Rice seems to basically agree with Richard
Clarke, the administration's former counterterrorism coordinator turned
chief critic. Both officials drew pictures of an agency that dragged its feet
and failed to report information from field agents that would have pointed
to a possible terrorist attack from the sky. The Bush administration, after
some early resistance, has tried since 9/11 to get the F.B.I. and C.I.A.
to share information with each other and the rest of the administration. It
will be important to hear the investigating committee's thoughts on what
further action is needed to retool the F.B.I. for the modern world.
If Ms. Rice were not set on burnishing the commander in chief's image
as the hero of 9/11, she might have been able to admit that Mr. Bush is a
hierarchical manager who expects his immediate underlings to run things,
and who guessed wrong about what deserved the administration's most
immediate and intense attention. The president and his top foreign policy
advisers came into office determined to build a missile defense shield,
fixated on Iraq as the top problem in the Middle East and greatly concerned
about China. But there's no reason to doubt Ms. Rice's contention that
after 9/11, Mr. Bush unequivocally picked Afghanistan as the first military target.
Given the overwhelming evidence of the partnership between
the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, any other decision would have been
inconceivably irresponsible.
The real challenge came after the Afghan invasion, when Mr. Bush
had to decide what to do next - rethink the outdated world view his advisers
had brought into office, or snap back into old reflexes and go after Iraq,
the enemy of the last generation. It was then that he chose the wrong path.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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