Condoleezza Rice Testimony
Ms. Rice's testimony was just as expected. She made her usual one sided apology for the President (she never admits the President makes any mistakes) and repeatedly blamed the government's problems on such structural matters as lack of communication and turf battles. She claimed the White House inner circle spent most of its time on broad strategy and defaulted to the intelligence bureaucracy to decide what specifically had to be done. Incredibly, she claimed there was no real follow-up from the White House. Contrast this with the passion the White House has for pushing the Justice Department and Congress for more Patriot Act types of restrictions on liberty for Americans. That's a telling message about who the administration thinks is the real threat.
In the three hours allotted for questioning, Rice received a few questions that could be considered "hard ball" but when she gave predictable soft ball answers, no tough cross-examination style questions were forthcoming. At times the Commission even descended to what one reporter described as the "T-ball level" of questioning, serving up pro-Bush leading questions that allowed Rice to pontificate on his "great leadership."
Ms. Rice also took advantage of her televised appearance to further justify the President's invasion of Iraq. Never mind that this was not directly related to her purpose of being before the Commission. In this latest version of the administrations ever-changing rationalizations, no mention was made of Iraq's supposed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Incredibly, Ms. Rice said the invasion was justified by Iraq's violation of the UN's No Fly Zone, and because Saddam had tried to assassinate President Bush. Both are misrepresentations of the truth. As to the No Fly Zone, the US established them unilaterally and was enforcing them unilaterally. Worse, the US was using the No Fly Zone as an excuse to soften up Iraq prior to the invasion. The assassination claim is simply bogus, and without credible backup confirmation from any other source.
What wasn't asked of Ms. Rice is much more telling than what she said. No one asked about her apparent foreknowledge of 9/11 when she warned SF Mayor Willie Brown not to fly on that day. No one asked what part she played in the changing of the National Security procedure on June 1, 2001 that took away from NORAD the authority to intercept hijacked airliners and transferred it to Sec. of Def. Rumsfeld. No one asked, in light of the above, why Rumsfeld should be believed when he said he was at his desk at the Pentagon until that building was attacked and never got a call from NORAD. No one asked why the head of the White House situation room was not at his post during 9/11. Was Rice filling in for him? As National Security Advisor, she should know the answers to all these crucial questions.
No one asked if she met with Pakistani ISI Chief Mahmoud Ahmad during his visit to Washington a week before 9/11. Did she or others on the NSC know about the reported $100,000 wire transfer sent to Mohamed Atta, one of the alleged leaders of the 9/11 attacks? She and the White House must know something embarrassing because there was a clear reference to Mahmoud Ahmad in a question asked by the press of Rice on May 16, 2002. She dodged the question and the White House transcribers later claimed that portion of the news conference was "inaudible." It wasn't inaudible to the Federal News Service which reported on it.
Everyone was expecting the Commission to concentrate on the differences between Richard Clarke's testimony and Rice's version of events. But this was downplayed. Clarke, himself, kept a low profile after the hearing, merely describing her testimony as reasonable and only mildly criticizing her claims. For example, Rice claimed she held 33 meetings of top White House leaders (the so-called principals committee), and admitted that NONE of those meetings focused on al Qaeda. Rice downplayed this error of omission, but Clark said it "indicates it [al Qaeda] was not a priority." Of course, the Clinton administration during Clarke's tenure did exactly the same thing.
After Rice asserted that Bush had been briefed more than 40 times by CIA director Tenet on intelligence reports about al Qaeda (a distinct contradiction to her remark about the 33 National Security briefings), Clarke rightly questioned, "What does a person do in this situation?...The only thing the president does is, in May, he says, "I want to stop swatting flies." But there's no evidence that he did anything."
Of course, the real reason why no one ever did anything is because al Qaeda is a US controlled terrorist shell organization used to create politically explosive incidents that can be used to undermine American constitutional protections. As I wrote previously, Clarke's claim that al Qaeda was and is considered a major threat is not borne out by historical documents of either the Bush or Clinton administrations. Even the invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11 really wasn't aimed at al Qaeda, since the so-called training camps were already empty. The purpose of that invasion was to wrest control of Afghanistan from the Taliban.
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Incidentally, another piece of hypocrisy has emerged relative to Richard Clarke's testimony before the 9/11 Commission. As reported by the Washington Times, "The final policy paper on national security that President Clinton submitted to Congress '45,000 words long' makes no mention of al Qaeda and refers to Osama bin Laden by name just four times. The scarce references to bin Laden and his terror network undercut claims by former White House terrorism analyst Richard A. Clarke that the Clinton administration considered al Qaeda an 'urgent' threat, while President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, 'ignored' it. The Clinton document, titled "A National Security Strategy for a Global Age" is dated December 2000 and is the final official assessment of national security policy and strategy by the Clinton team."
World Affairs Brief, April 9, 2004 Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen's World Affairs Brief (http://www.JoelSkousen.com).
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