I haven't noticed this Howard Fineman column that is making the rounds. Some comments in Dem columns that Fineman might be the canary on this one. If he is this critical, he might take other media types with him.
A Bureaucrat Testifies
Condoleezza Rice didn't embarrass anyone. But her appearance certainly won't help George Bush win re-election WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Howard Fineman
Newsweek
Updated: 8:44 p.m. ET April 09, 2004April 8 -
Republicans who had been hoping that Condi Rice would calm the political waters with her testimony to the 9/11 commission have to be disappointed. Stylistically and tactically she was serviceable. Her voice seemed to quaver at times, but overall she was a confident master of detail, choosing, for the most part, to praise rather than confront the accusatory Richard Clarke. But the larger picture she painted of herself, her president and the administration certainly won’t help George W. Bush’s re-election chances.
A self-proclaimed expert at understanding “structural” change in large institutions, Rice wasn’t aware—may still not be aware—that the nature of her job had changed by the time she took over as national-security adviser in January 2001. Reared in the cold war era, she saw herself following in the footsteps of Henry Kissinger. “National security” was largely a matter of global state-to-state diplomacy.
In fact, as her predecessor in effect warned her when he was turning over the keys, the model was no longer so much Kissinger as it was, say, Elliott Ness or J. Edgar Hoover. If, as she said, we had been at war with terrorism for 20 years, and if, as she said, the terrorists are determined to attack America, then the NSC chief has to be a ruthless hunter for clues around the world—and on American soil.
Asked at the hearing why she hadn’t pressed the FBI more closely about what it knew, or didn’t know, about domestic terrorist threats, Rice acted as though the question was an odd one: it wasn’t her job. Well, in retrospect, it was and now certainly is.
Rice identified the chief “structural” problem—that the CIA and FBI don’t share information—in a speech she gave in October 2000. She even said that the problem could result in a disastrous domestic terrorist attack. And yet, based on her own testimony, she did little or nothing before 9/11 to break down those walls. The student of bureaucratic change didn’t really attempt to foment any, at least not with the kind of urgency we know she needed to have. |
