"There is plenty of oil as far as we will need it" End of the world coming soon?
Chilling implications from a cool, collected Rice
April 9, 2004
BY DEBRA PICKETT SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST Advertisement
Condoleezza Rice says she's asked herself a thousand times if there was anything she could have done to prevent the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
And the answer every time, apparently, has been no.
Which is either really impressive or simply terrifying.
My experience of the world is that it is a complex, messy place that constantly offers up unanswerable questions and choices between bad options and worse ones. And that's just how I feel when I'm deciding which coffee to buy.
The spectacle of Rice's testimony before the 9/11 commission -- a theatrical exercise in which the commissioners pretended to ask questions and Rice pretended to answer them -- was an impressive display of stonewalling and obfuscation. Rice, who is a hundred times more articulate than George W. Bush and John Kerry combined, smiled politely through the three-hour session, never raising her voice, never losing her cool and never, ever using the M-word.
Mistakes weren't made
If you are bothered by the smarmy, political non-apology-apologies that public figures tend to give -- saying things like "mistakes were made" -- when they are caught having screwed something up, Rice's testimony was a breath of fresh air. Not only did she not apologize for anything, she pretty much denied anything had gone wrong, national security-wise.
She laid some blame on the FAA, the FBI, the Pakistanis, past administrations and, of course, those namby-pamby civil libertarians who -- pre-Patriot Act -- tried to prevent the government from spying on Americans by keeping the FBI and CIA separate.
''The real lesson of Sept. 11,'' she said, ''is that the country was not properly structured.''
Which is a huge relief to those of us who thought the real lesson had something to do with the violent, suicidal hatred some people hold for the United States.
Question after question, Rice deflected any suggestion that the administration had failed to take the threat of terrorism seriously enough or to act on information they'd received, in the summer of 2001, about the possibility of attacks in the near future. She beat the commissioners at their own game, knowing that, since they were limited to 10 minutes each, the longer her answers were, the fewer questions they'd get to ask.
Her expression betrayed no reaction to the questions and no emotion except the calm that comes with total self-assurance.
It would have been cool -- at one point, I briefly imagined Anita Hill cheering, ''You go, girl'' -- if it hadn't been so scary.
(Bipartisan disclosure: I feel the same way when I hear Madeleine Albright discuss Rwanda. Apparently every administration now needs a woman to fill the affable, power-means-never-having-to-say-you're-sorry role.)
Rice looked attorney Richard Ben-Veniste dead in the eye as he began to ask her questions about the Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing, a document that's been characterized as having warned the president about the possibility of terrorists planning to hijack commercial planes within the United States.
What was the title of that document, he kept asking.
The title, which had been kept secret until Thursday morning, was "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the U.S."
"There was nothing in this memo that suggested an attack was coming," Rice said evenly.
When Tim Roemer, the former Indiana congressman, read from terrorism expert Richard Clarke's Sept. 4 memo to Rice, letting its words -- "we should not wait" -- hang hauntingly in the air, she did not take the bait. She returned, instead, to a previous question to coolly finish her point.
And, when she finally did get around to talking about Clarke's memo, she said calmly, ''That was not a premonition or a warning.''
What WOULD be a warning?
Basically, all Rice would tell the commission about threats and warnings was that if someone had told her who was planning to do what on which flights heading where, and given her a detailed plan for how to stop them, she'd have acted on it.
This suggests that the national security adviser has, um, a pretty limited approach to the whole concept of national security.
What she said about foreign policy was even weirder. She told the commissioners, for example, that the Bush administration is addressing the root causes of terrorism with its Middle East policy, which will ''spread the blessings of liberty as alternatives to instability and violence.'' As she spoke, the CNN "crawl" beneath her face reported Iraq's descent into ever-deadlier instability and violence.
Bob Kerrey, a commission member and former senator who, as a Vietnam vet, knows a little something about quagmires, began his 10-minute questioning period by remarking that he wondered if the U.S. occupation of Iraq was helping al-Qaida recruit new members.
Rice did not respond.
She just smiled, especially brightly when Kerrey's turn was done.
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