Rice plays the indignation card again (and again and again)
October 03, 2006
blogs.chron.com
What's worse than someone who responds to all criticism with indignation that verges on a tantrum? Someone who does that and gets her facts wrong. That's our secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice. I wrote recently about how she sees herself as a "true believer." Unfortunately, what we could have used over the last five years was a true thinker as national security adviser and in her current position.
The latest, of course, is her indignation that anybody could suggest that she didn't pay enough attention to warnings that al Qaeda was intent on attacking on US soil before 9/11:
Rice acknowledged Sunday that the White House was receiving a "steady stream of quite alarmist reports of potential attacks" during daily meetings from Tenet during that period. But she said the targets were assumed to be in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Israel and Jordan. She said no reports mentioned the United States.
"What I am quite certain of, however, is that I would remember if I was told -- as this account apparently says -- that there was about to be an attack in the United States. The idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible," she told reporters.
Rice said her staff is now going back to check if there even was a meeting on July 10, 2001.
Well, there was a meeting. From the New York Times:
A review of White House records has determined that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, did brief Condoleezza Rice and other top officials on July 10, 2001, about the looming threat from Al Qaeda, a State Department spokesman said Monday.
The account by Sean McCormack came hours after Ms. Rice, the secretary of state, told reporters aboard her airplane that she did not recall the specific meeting on July 10, 2001, noting that she had met repeatedly with Mr. Tenet that summer about terrorist threats. Ms. Rice, the national security adviser at the time, said it was "incomprehensible" she ignored dire terrorist threats two months before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mr. McCormack also said records show that the Sept. 11 commission was informed about the meeting, a fact that former intelligence officials and members of the commission confirmed on Monday.
When details of the meeting emerged last week in a new book by Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, Bush administration officials questioned Mr. Woodward's reporting.
Now, after several days, both current and former Bush administration officials have confirmed parts of Mr. Woodward's account.
Officials now agree that on July 10, 2001, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism deputy, J. Cofer Black, were so alarmed about an impending Al Qaeda attack that they demanded an emergency meeting at the White House with Ms. Rice and her National Security Council staff.
According to two former intelligence officials, Mr. Tenet told those assembled at the White House about the growing body of intelligence the Central Intelligence Agency had collected pointing to an impending Al Qaeda attack. But both current and former officials took issue with Mr. Woodward's account that Mr. Tenet and his aides left the meeting in frustration, feeling as if Ms. Rice had ignored them.
Tenet's no hero in this; it seems he failed to mention some of this to the 9/11 commission. The picture that emerges is that of an administration so dysfunctional that it was unable to respond to the intelligence before it.
This brings us into familiar Condi Rice territory, though: getting indignant and losing her grip on facts when people criticize or question her. There was her recent complaint that the Clinton people left her no plan for fighting terror. Here's what the 9/11 Commission Report has to say on that:
As the Clinton administration drew to a close, Clarke and his staff developed a policy paper of their own [which] incorporated the CIA's new ideas from the Blue Sky memo, and posed several near-term policy options. Clarke and his staff proposed a goal to "roll back" al Qaeda over a period of three to five years ...[including] covert aid to the Northern Alliance, covert aid to Uzbekistan, and renewed Predator flights in March 2001. A sentence called for military action to destroy al Qaeda command-and control targets and infrastructure and Taliban military and command assets. The paper also expressed concern about the presence of al Qaeda operatives in the United States." [p. 197]
Okay, so it wasn't a plan... it was just ideas about how to fight terrorism and specific options that could be implemented. In other words, the kind of thing one administration would normally leave for its successor, assuming that they should know what was being considered, but would make their own plans. (Or, in this case, not.)
And then there were the Senate confirmation hearings when she was selected as Secretary as State, where her reaction to inconsistencies in her statements was to go off on Sen. Boxer and complain that they were questioning her integrity. When faced with inconsistencies, from an appointee, it's the Senate's job to ask questions; Rice could have clarified things, but instead she threw a tantrum.
This is a woman who in 2002 was telling us in press briefings that there was "no way" anyone could have predicted that terrorists would use airplanes as weapons... but who in August, 2001 read a briefing that said that al Qaeda was planning a major strike against the US that could involve hijacking of airplanes.
There's a convenient list of Rice's incorrect statements to the 9/11 Commission here, if you're curious. It certainly sheds some light on why she was so resistant to testifying to the commission under oath (which she did, in the end, do).
After watching her for years, it's easy to see the pattern: when something goes wrong on her watch, she looks for someone to blame, and makes things up to support it... complete with an indignant complaint that people are impugning her integrity.
This isn't what we should expect from a secretary of state. This is behavior better suited to a petulant sixth-grader who's been caught not doing her homework and is looking for a convenient dog to accuse of eating it.
Posted by John Whiteside at October 3, 2006 12:23 PM |
