Rice Testimony Is Now History
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 8, 2004; 12:35 PM
The rituals were all in place: the grand marble and wood hearing room, the assembled panel of wise men and women, the star witness striding in while a battalion of photographers on their knees snapped away.
NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox were rolling live as they do only rarely for big Washington events these days, elevating the moment to the status of the 1973 Senate Watergate hearings, the 1987 Iran-contra testimony of Oliver North, the 1991 Clarence Thomas hearings and the 1998 Clinton impeachment vote.
Condoleezza Rice began by reminding the 9/11 commission and the television audience that America wasn't prepared for Pearl Harbor either.
The key sound bite: While intelligence reports about a possible attack were troubling, "they don't tell us when, they don't tell us where, they don't tell us who, they don't tell us how." Message: How do you defend against something you can't anticipate?
In television terms, it started out politely and decorously, almost as if they were talking about the federal budget, in marked contrast to the horror of the worst terror attack on American soil. Rice appeared poised and relaxed, which may have been as important for the audience as anything she said.
The national security adviser backtracked slightly after a question by the chairman, Tom Kean, amending her earlier statement that "no one could have imagined" al Qaeda using airplanes as bombs to "I could not have imagined."
Within minutes the Woodward book came up. The vice chairman, Lee Hamilton, asked about the president's statement to Bob Woodward that pre-9/11 he did not feel the same sense of urgency about al Qaeda. Rice was ready, reading the fuller quote to Woodward and arguing that Bush had a plan to "eliminate" al-Qaeda.
Unlike Richard Clarke, Rice didn't apologize, but she did say: "I've asked myself a thousand times what more we could have done."
There would be no bipartisan lovefest. At 9:49 a.m., I received an e-mail from Jim Jordan, the former Kerry campaign manager now working for the independent advertising group the Media Fund, declaring: "Rice Continues to Stonewall and Mislead."
Things got testier when Democratic commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste recited various terror warnings, including an Aug. 6, 2001, memo that spoke of possible hijackings, and kept interrupting Rice. "This was not a warning. This was a historical memo," Rice said somewhat cryptically. At one point Rice said Bush was clearly concerned because he met with George Tenet almost every day -- which didn't help much because the head of the FAA was never told about the possibility of hijackings.
Rice took a mild slap or two at Clarke -- saying his recommendations would have taken the administration in the "wrong direction" on terrorism -- but nothing like the frontal assault she mounted in her blitz of TV interviews.
There was talk of "shaking the tree" and "connecting the dots," of "threat spikes" and "swatting flies," of "silver bullets" and "structural impediments" and other phrases that government people use.
The only real fireworks came from Bob Kerrey, who began with a speech about how U.S. operations in Iraq were going "dangerously off track" and that the country could be headed for "civil war."
When the former senator demanded to know why there wasn't a better response to the bombing of the USS Cole, Rice disarmed him by saying she was "blown away" by his "brilliant" speech after the bombing that we needed to go after Saddam.
They got into a spat when Kerrey contradicted Rice about a classified memo in January 2001 and tried to interrupt her lengthy response by saying, "Please don't filibuster me. It is not fair." Rice kept insisting on her right to answer the question, and Kerrey, who by then was calling her "Dr. Clarke," had to relent.
In the end, there was plenty of sparring, but no one really landed a solid blow against the national security adviser.
For all of Rice's talk about "structural problems" in the government and how the FBI and CIA weren't sharing intelligence, her answers boiled down to this: We did the best we could with what we knew at the time. That, of course, we already knew.
Insta-reaction: Rice did very well indeed.
"By any reasonable, objective analysis," Dan Rather said, "Doctor Rice's performance was steady and composed."
"In terms of the combat phase of it," said Fox's Brit Hume, "she gave as good as she got."
I had predicted the session wouldn't produce any real revelations, and Peter Jennings asked ABC's White House correspondent, Terry Moran, whether there had been "any brand-new news."
"Not really, Peter," Moran said.
But Tom Brokaw said there were "two big news bulletins": One, the title of that Aug. 6, 2001, classified memo used to brief Bush at Crawford: "Osama bin Laden Determined to Attack the United States." (Actually, that had been reported before.) Second, as Kerrey revealed, the memo said the FBI had seen evidence "consistent with preparations for hijacking."
That, said Chris Matthews, "does shatter the argument" that the administration thought the threats were concentrated overseas.
Now the theater critics will continue to rate Condi's performance and the partisans will pick apart her answers, while the violence continues in Iraq.
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