Thursday,
April 8
Rice's Testimony
before the Sept. 11 Commission
A text of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's testimony as delivered
before the Sept. 11 commission on Thursday, as transcribed by eMediaMillWorks
Inc.:
>> Rice's
opening statement.
Q & A
RICE: Thank you very
much. And now I'm happy to take your questions.
KEAN: Thank you very
much, Dr. Rice. I appreciate your statement, your attendance and your service.
I have a couple of
questions. As we understand it, when you first came into office, you just
been through a very difficult campaign. In that campaign, neither the
president nor the opponent, to the best of my knowledge, ever mentioned
al-Qaida. There had been almost no congressional action or hearings about
al-Qaida, very little bit in the newspapers.
And yet, you walk in
and Dick Clarke is talking about al-Qaida should be our number-one priority.
Sandy Berger tells you you'll be spending more time on that than anything
else.
What did you think, and
what did you tell the president, as you get that kind of, I suppose, new
information for you?
RICE: Well, in fact,
Mr. Chairman, it was not new information. I think we all knew about the 1998
bombings. We knew that there was speculation that the 2000 Cole attack was
al-Qaida. There had been, I think, documentaries about Osama bin Laden.
I, myself, had written
for an introduction to a volume on bioterrorism done at Sanford that I
thought that we wanted not to wake up one day and find that Osama bin Laden
had succeeded on our soil.
It was on the radar
screen of any person who studied or worked in the international security
field.
But there is no doubt
that I think the briefing by Dick Clarke, the earlier briefing during the
transition by Director Tenet, and of course what we talked with about Sandy
Berger, it gave you a heightened sense of the problem and a sense that this
was something that the United States had to deal with.
I have to say that of
course there were other priorities. And indeed, in the briefings with the
Clinton administration, they emphasized other priorities: North Korea, the
Middle East, the Balkans.
One doesn't have the
luxury of dealing only with one issue if you are the United States of
America. There are many urgent and important issues.
But we all had a strong
sense that this was a very crucial issue. The question was, what do you then
do about it?
And the decision that
we made was to, first of all, have no drop- off in what the Clinton
administration was doing, because clearly they had done a lot of work to deal
with this very important priority.
And so we kept the
counterterrorism team on board. We knew that George Tenet was there. We had
the comfort of knowing that Louis Freeh was there.
And then we set out _ I
talked to Dick Clarke almost immediately after his _ or, I should say,
shortly after his memo to me saying that al-Qaida was a major threat, we set
out to try and craft a better strategy.
But we were quite
cognizant of this group, of the fact that something had to be done.
I do think, early on in
these discussions, we asked a lot of questions about whether Osama bin Laden
himself ought to be so much the target of interest, or whether what was that
going to do to the organization if, in fact, he was put out of commission.
And I remember very well the director saying to President Bush, Well, it
would help, but it would not stop attacks by al-Qaida, nor destroy the
network.
KEAN: I've got a
question now I'd like to ask you. It was given to me by a number of members
of the families.
Did you ever see or
hear from the FBI, from the CIA, from any other intelligence agency, any
memos or discussions or anything else between the time you got into office
and 9-11 that talked about using planes as bombs?
RICE: Let me address
this question because it has been on the table.
I think that concern
about what I might have known or we might have known was provoked by some
statements that I made in a press conference. I was in a press conference to
try and describe the August 6th memo, which I've talked about here in my
opening remarks and which I talked about with you in the private session.
And I said, at one
point, that this was a historical memo, that it was _ it was not based on new
threat information. And I said, No one could have imagined them taking a
plane, slamming it into the Pentagon _ I'm paraphrasing now _ into the World
Trade Center, using planes as a missile.
As I said to you in the
private session, I probably should have said, I could not have imagined,
because within two days, people started to come to me and say, Oh, but there
were these reports in 1998 and 1999. The intelligence community did look at
information about this.
To the best of my
knowledge, Mr. Chairman, this kind of analysis about the use of airplanes as
weapons actually was never briefed to us.
I cannot tell you that
there might not have been a report here or a report there that reached
somebody in our midst.
Part of the problem is
_ and I think Sandy Berger made this point when he was asked the same
question _ that you have thousands of pieces of information -- car bombs and
this method and that method _ and you have to depend to a certain degree on
the intelligence agencies to sort to tell you what is actually relevant, what
is actually based on sound sources, what is speculative.
RICE: And I can only
assume or believe that perhaps the intelligence agencies thought that the
sourcing was speculative.
All that I can tell you
is that it was not in the August 6th memo, using planes as a weapon. And I do
not remember any reports to us, a kind of strategic warning, that planes
might be used as weapons. In fact, there were some reports done in '98 and
'99. I was certainly not aware of them at the time that I spoke.
KEAN: You didn't see
any memos to you or any documents to you?
RICE: No, I did not.
KEAN: Some Americans
have wondered whether you or the president worried too much about Iraq in the
days after the 9-11 attack and perhaps not enough about the fight ahead
against al-Qaida.
We know that at the
Camp David meeting on the weekend of September 15th and 16th, the president
rejected the idea of immediate action against Iraq. Others have told that the
president decided Afghanistan had to come first.
We also know that, even
after those Camp David meetings, the administration was still readying plans
for possible action against Iraq.
So can you help us
understand where, in those early days after 9-11, the administration placed
Iraq in the strategy for responding to the attack?
RICE: Certainly. Let me
start with the period in which you're trying to figure out who did this to
you.
And I think, given our
exceedingly hostile relationship with Iraq at the time _ this is, after all,
a place that tried to assassinate an American president, was still shooting
at our planes in the no-fly zone _ it was a reasonable question to ask
whether, indeed, Iraq might have been behind this.
I remember, later on,
in a conversation with Prime Minister Blair, President Bush also said that he
wondered could it have been Iran, because the attack was so sophisticated,
was this really just a network that had done this.
When we got to Camp
David _ and let me just be very clear: In the days between September 11th and
getting to Camp David, I was with the president a lot. I know what was on his
mind. What was on his mind was follow-on attacks, trying to reassure the
American people.
He virtually badgered
poor Larry Lindsey about when could we get Wall Street back up and running,
because he didn't want them to have succeeded against our financial system.
We were concerned about air security, and he worked very hard on trying to
get particularly Reagan reopened. So there was a lot on our minds.
But by the time that we
got to Camp David and began to plan for what we would do in response, what
was rolled out on the table was Afghanistan _ a map of Afghanistan.
And I will tell you,
that was a daunting enough task to figure out how to avoid some of the
pitfalls that great powers had in Afghanistan, mostly recently the Soviet
Union and, of course, the British before that.
There was a discussion
of Iraq. I think it was raised by Don Rumsfeld. It was pressed a bit by Paul
Wolfowitz. Given that this was a global war on terror, should we look not
just at Afghanistan but should we look at doing something against Iraq? There
was a discussion of that.
The president listened
to all of his advisers. I can tell you that when he went around the table and
asked his advisers what he should do, not a single one of his principal
advisers advised doing anything against Iraq. It was all to Afghanistan.
When I got back to the
White House with the president, he laid out for me what he wanted to do. And
one of the points, after a long list of things about Afghanistan, a long list
of things about protecting the homeland, the president said that he wanted
contingency plans against Iraq should Iraq act against our interests.
There was a kind of
concern that they might try and take advantage of us in that period. They
were still _ we were still flying no-fly zones. And there was also, he said,
in case we find that they were behind 9-11, we should have contingency plans.
But this was not along
the lines of what later was discussed about Iraq, which was how to deal with
Iraq on a grand scale. This was really about _ we went to planning
Afghanistan, you can look at what we did. From that time on, this was about
Afghanistan.
KEAN: So when Mr.
Clarke writes that the president pushed him to find a link between Iraq and
the attack, is that right? Was the president trying to twist the facts for an
Iraqi war, or was he just puzzled about what was behind this attack?
RICE: I don't remember
the discussion that Dick Clarke relates. Initially, he said that the
president was wandering the situation room _ this is in the book, I gather _
looking for something to do, and they had a conversation. Later on, he said
that he was pulled aside. So I don't know the context of the discussion. I
don't personally remember it.
But it's not surprising
that the president would say, What about Iraq, given our hostile relationship
with Iraq. And I'm quite certain that the president never pushed anybody to
twist the facts.
KEAN: Congressman
Hamilton?
HAMILTON: Thank you,
Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Rice, you've given
us a very strong statement, with regard to the actions taken by the administration
in this pre-9-11 period, and we appreciate that very much for the record.
I want to call to your
attention some comments and some events on the other side of that question
and give you an opportunity to respond.
You know very well that
the commission is focusing on this whole question of, what priority did the
Clinton administration and the Bush administration give to terrorism?
The president told Bob
Woodward that he did not feel that sense of urgency. I think that's a quote
from his book, or roughly a quote from Woodward's book.
The deputy director for
Central Intelligence, Mr. McLaughlin, told us that he was concerned about the
pace of policymaking in the summer of 2001, given the urgency of the threat.
The deputy secretary of
state, Mr. Armitage, was here and expressed his concerns about the speed of
the process. And if I recall, his comment is that, We weren't going fast
enough. I think that's a direct quote.
There was no response
to the Cole attack in the Clinton administration and none in the Bush
administration.
Your public statements
focused largely on China and Russia and missile defense. You did make
comments on terrorism, but they were connected _ the link between terrorism
and the rogue regimes, like North Korea and Iran and Iraq.
And by our count here,
there were some 100 meetings by the national security principals before the
first meeting was held on terrorism, September 4th. And General Shelton, who
was chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said that terrorism had been pushed farther
to the back burner.
Now, this is what we're
trying to assess. We have your statements. We have these other statements.
And I know, as I indicated in my opening comments, how difficult the role of
the policymaker is and how many things press upon you.
But I did want to give
you an opportunity to comment on some of these other matters.
RICE: Thank you very
much, Mr. Chairman.
Let me begin with the
Woodward quote, because that has gotten a lot of press. And I actually think
that the quote, put in context, gives a very different picture.
The question that the
president was asked by Mr. Woodward was,
Did you want to have
bin Laden killed before September 11th? That was the question.
The president said,
Well, I hadn't seen a plan to do that. I knew that we needed to _ I think the
appropriate word is 'bring him to justice.' And, of course, this is something
of a trick question in that notion of self-defense which is appropriate for
...
I think you can see
here a president struggling with whether he ought to be talking about
pre-9-11 attempts to kill bin Laden. And so, that is the context for this
quote.
And, quite frankly, I
remember the director sitting here and saying he didn't want to talk about
authorities on assassination. I think you can understand the discomfort of
the president.
The president goes on.
When Bob Woodward says, Well, I don't mean it as a trick question; I'm just
trying to your state of mind, the president says, Let me put it this way. I
was not _ there was a significant difference in my attitude after September
11th. I was not on point, but I knew he was a menace and I knew he was a
problem. I knew he was responsible. We felt he was responsible for bombings
that had killed Americans. And I was prepared to look at a plan that would be
a thoughtful plan that would bring him to justice and would have given the
order to do just that.
I have no hesitancy
about going after him, but I didn't feel that sense of urgency and my blood
was not nearly as boiling. Whose blood was nearly as boiling prior to
September 11th?
And I think the context
helps here.
It is also the case
that the president had been told by the director of central intelligence that
it was not going to be a silver bullet to kill bin Laden, that you had to do
much more.
And, in fact, I think
that some of us felt that the focus, so much focus, on what you did with bin
Laden, not what you did with the network, not what you did with the regional
circumstances, might, in fact, have been misplaced.
So I think the
president is responding to go a specific set of questions.
All that I can tell you
is that what the president wanted was a plan to eliminate al-Qaida so he
could stop swatting at flies. He knew that we had in place the same
crisis-management mechanism, indeed the same personnel, that the Clinton
administration, which clearly thought it a very high priority, had in place.
And so, I think that he
saw the priority as continuing the current operations and then getting a plan
in place.
Now, as to the number
of PCs. I'm sorry, there is some difference in our records here.
RICE: We show 33
Principals Committee meetings during this period of time, not 100. We show
that three of those dealt at least partially with issues of terrorism not
related to al-Qaida. And so we can check the numbers, but we have looked at
our files and we show 33, not 100.
The quotes by others
about how the process is moving, again, it's important to realize that had
parallel tracks here. We were continuing to do what the Clinton
administration had been doing under all the same authorities that were
operating. George Tenet was continuing to try to disrupt al-Qaida. We were
continuing the diplomatic efforts.
But we did want to take
the time to get in place a policy that was more strategic toward al-Qaida,
more robust. It takes some time to think about how to reorient your policy
toward Pakistan. It takes some time to think about how to have a more
effective policy toward Afghanistan. It particularly takes some time when you
don't get your people on board for several months.
So I understand that
there are those who have said they felt it wasn't moving along fast enough. I
talked to George Tenet about this at least every couple of weeks, sometimes
more often. How can we move forward on the Predator? What do you want to do
about the Northern Alliance? So I think we were putting the energy into it.
And I should just make
one other point, Mr. Hamilton, if you don't mind, which is that we also moved
forward on some of the specific ideas that Dick Clarke had put forward prior
to completing the strategy review. We increased assistance to Uzbekistan, for
instance, which had been one of the recommendations. We moved along the armed
Predator, the development of the armed Predator. We increased
counterterrorism funding.
But there were a couple
of things that we did not want to do.
I'm now convinced that,
while nothing that in this strategy would have done anything about 9-11, if
we had, in fact, moved on the things that were in the original memos that we
got from our counterterrorism people, we might have even gone off course,
because it was very Northern Alliance-focused. That was going to cause a huge
problem with Pakistan. It was not going to put us in the center of action in
Afghanistan, which is the south.
And so, we simply had
to take some time to get this right. But I think we need not confuse that
with either what we did during the threat period where we were urgently
working the operational issues every day or with the continuation of the
Clinton policy.
HAMILTON: Well, I thank
you for a careful answer.
Another question. At
the end of the day, of course, we were unable to protect our people. And you
suggest in your statement _ and I want you to elaborate on this, if you want
to _ that in hindsight it would have been _ better information about the
threats would have been the single _ the single most important thing for us
to have done, from your point of view, prior to 9-11, would have been better
intelligence, better information about the threats.
Is that right? Are
there other things that you think stand out?
RICE: Well, Mr.
Chairman, I took an oath of office on the day that I took this job to protect
and defend. And like most government officials, I take it very seriously. And
so, as you might imagine, I've asked myself a thousand times what more we
could have done.
I know that, had we
thought that there was an attack coming in Washington or New York, we would
have moved heaven and earth to try and stop it. And I know that there was no
single thing that might have prevented that attack.
In looking back, I
believe that the absence of light, so to speak, on what was going on inside
the country, the inability to connect the dots, was really structural. We
couldn't be dependent on chance that something might come together.
And the legal
impediments and the bureaucratic impediments _ but I want to emphasize the
legal impediments. To keep the FBI and the CIA from functioning really as
one, so that there was no seam between domestic and foreign intelligence, was
probably the greatest one.
The director of central
intelligence and I think Director Freeh had an excellent relationship. They
were trying hard to bridge that seam. I know that Louis Freeh had developed
legal attaches abroad to try to help bridge that.
But when it came right
down to it, this country, for reasons of history and culture and therefore
law, had an allergy to the notion of domestic intelligence, and we were
organized on that basis. And it just made it very hard to have all of the
pieces come together.
We've made good changes
since then. I think that having a Homeland Security Department that can bring
together the FAA and the INS and Customs and all of the various agencies is a
very important step.
I think that the
creation of the terrorism threat information center, which brings together
all of the intelligence from various aspects, is a very important step
forward.
Clearly, the Patriot
Act, which has allowed the kind of sharing, indeed demands the kind of
sharing between intelligence agencies, including the FBI and the CIA, is a
very big step forward.
I think one thing that
we will learn from you is whether the structural work is done.
HAMILTON: Final
question would be: One of your sentences kind of jumped out at me in your
statement, and that was on page 9, where you said, We must address the source
of the problem.
I'm very concerned
about that. I was pleased to see it in your statement. And I'm very worried
about the threat of terrorism, as I know you are, over a very long period of
time _ a generation or more.
There are a lot of
very, very fine _ 2 billion Muslims. Most of them, we know, are very fine
people. Some don't like us; they hate us. They don't like what modernization
does to their culture. They don't like the fact that economic prosperity has
passed them by. They don't like some of the policies of the United States
government. They don't like the way their own governments treat them.
And I'd like you to
elaborate a little bit, if you would, on how we get at the source of the
problem. How do we get at this discontent, this dislocation, if you would,
across a big swathe of the Islamic world?
RICE: I believe very
strongly, and the president believes very strongly, that this is really the
generational challenge. The kinds of issues that you are addressing have to
be addressed, but we're not going to see success on our watch.
We will see some small
victories on our watch. One of the most difficult problems in the Middle East
is that the United States has been associated for a long time, decades, with
a policy that looks the other way on the freedom deficit in the Middle East,
that looks the other way at the absence of individual liberties in the Middle
East.
And I think that that
has tended to alienate us from the populations of the Middle East. And when
the president, at White Hall in London, said that that was no longer going to
be the stance of the United States, we were expecting more from our friends,
we were going to try and engage those in those in those countries who wanted
to have a different kind of Middle East, I believe that he was resonating
with trends that are there in the Middle East. There are reformist trends in places
like Bahrain and Jordan. And recently there was a marvelous conference in
Alexandria in Egypt, where reform was actually was on the agenda.
So it's going to be a
slow process. We know that the building of democracy is tough. It doesn't
come easily. We have our own history. When our Founding Fathers said, We the
people, they didn't mean me. It's taken us a while to get to a multiethnic
democracy that works.
But if America is
avowedly values-centered in its foreign policy, we do better than when we do
not stand up for those values.
So I think that it's
going to be very hard. It's going to take time.
One of the things that
we've been very interested, for instance, in is issues of educational reform
in some of these countries. As you know, the madrassas are a big difficulty.
I've met, myself, personally two or three times with the Pakistani _ a
wonderful woman who's the Pakistani education minister.
We can't do it for
them. They have to have it for themselves, but we have to stand for those
values.
And over the long run,
we will change _ I believe we will change the nature of the Middle East,
particularly if there are examples that this can work in the Middle East.
And this is why Iraq is
so important. The Iraqi people are struggling to find a way to create a
multiethnic democracy that works. And it's going to be hard.
And if we stay with
them, and when they succeed, I think we will have made a big change _ they
will have made a big change in the middle of the Arab world, and we will be
on our way to addressing the source.
HAMILTON: Thank you,
Dr. Rice.
Thank you, Mr.
Chairman.
KEAN: Thank you.
Commissioner
Ben-Veniste.
BEN-VENISTE: Good
morning, Dr. Rice.
RICE: Good morning.
BEN-VENISTE: Nice to
see you again.
RICE: Nice to see you.
BEN-VENISTE: I want to
ask you some questions about the August 6, 2001, PDB. We had been advised in
writing by CIA on March 19, 2004, that the August 6th PDB was prepared and
self-generated by a CIA employee. Following Director Tenet's testimony on
March 26th before us, the CIA clarified its version of events, saying that
questions by the president prompted them to prepare the August 6th PDB.
Now, you have said to
us in our meeting together earlier in February, that the president directed
the CIA to prepare the August 6th PDB.
The extraordinary high
terrorist attack threat level in the summer of 2001 is well-documented. And
Richard Clarke's testimony about the possibility of an attack against the
United States homeland was repeatedly discussed from May to August within the
intelligence community, and that is well-documented.
You acknowledged to us
in your interview of February 7, 2004, that Richard Clarke told you that
al-Qaida cells were in the United States.
BEN-VENISTE: Did you
tell the president, at any time prior to August 6th, of the existence of
al-Qaida cells in the United States?
RICE: First, let me
just make certain ...
BEN-VENISTE: If you
could just answer that question, because I only have a very limited ...
RICE: I understand,
Commissioner, but it's important ...
BEN-VENISTE: Did you
tell the president ...
RICE: ... that I also
address ...
(APPLAUSE)
It's also important
that, Commissioner, that I address the other issues that you have raised. So
I will do it quickly, but if you'll just give me a moment.
BEN-VENISTE: Well, my
only question to you is whether you ...
RICE: I understand,
Commissioner, but I will ...
BEN-VENISTE: ... told
the president.
RICE: If you'll just
give me a moment, I will address fully the questions that you've asked.
First of all, yes, the
August 6th PDB was in response to questions of the president _ and that since
he asked that this be done. It was not a particular threat report. And there
was historical information in there about various aspects of al-Qaida's
operations.
Dick Clarke had told
me, I think in a memorandum _ I remember it as being only a line or two _
that there were al-Qaida cells in the United States.
Now, the question is,
what did we need to do about that?
And I also understood
that that was what the FBI was doing, that the FBI was pursuing these
al-Qaida cells. I believe in the August 6th memorandum it says that there
were 70 full field investigations under way of these cells. And so there was
no recommendation that we do something about this; the FBI was pursuing it.
I really don't
remember, Commissioner, whether I discussed this with the president.
BEN-VENISTE: Thank you.
RICE: I remember very
well that the president was aware that there were issues inside the United
States. He talked to people about this. But I don't remember the al-Qaida
cells as being something that we were told we needed to do something about.
BEN-VENISTE: Isn't it a
fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6th PDB warned against possible attacks in
this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB?
RICE: I believe the
title was, Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.
Now, the ...
BEN-VENISTE: Thank you.
RICE: No, Mr.
Ben-Veniste ...
BEN-VENISTE: I will get
into the ...
RICE: I would like to
finish my point here.
BEN-VENISTE: I didn't
know there was a point.
RICE: Given that _ you
asked me whether or not it warned of attacks.
BEN-VENISTE: I asked
you what the title was.
RICE: You said, did it
not warn of attacks. It did not warn of attacks inside the United States. It
was historical information based on old reporting. There was no new threat
information. And it did not, in fact, warn of any coming attacks inside the
United States.
BEN-VENISTE: Now, you
knew by August 2001 of al-Qaida involvement in the first World Trade Center
bombing, is that correct?
You knew that in 1999,
late '99, in the millennium threat period, that we had thwarted an al-Qaida
attempt to blow up Los Angeles International Airport and thwarted cells
operating in Brooklyn, New York, and Boston, Massachusetts.
As of the August 6th
briefing, you learned that al-Qaida members have resided or traveled to the
United States for years and maintained a support system in the United States.
And you learned that
FBI information since the 1998 blind sheik warning of hijackings to free the
blind sheik indicated a pattern of suspicious activity in the country up
until August 6th consistent with preparation for hijackings. Isn't that so?
RICE: Do you have other
questions that you want me to answer as a part of the sequence?
BEN-VENISTE: Well, did you
not _ you have indicated here that this was some historical document. And I
am asking you whether it is not the case that you learned in the PDB memo of
August 6th that the FBI was saying that it had information suggesting that
preparations _ not historically, but ongoing, along with these numerous full
field investigations against al-Qaida cells, that preparations were being
made consistent with hijackings within the United States?
RICE: What the August
6th PDB said, and perhaps I should read it to you...
BEN-VENISTE: We would
be happy to have it declassified in full at this time, including its title.
(APPLAUSE)
RICE: I believe, Mr.
Ben-Veniste, that you've had access to this PDB. But let me just...
BEN-VENISTE: But we
have not had it declassified so that it can be shown publicly, as you know.
RICE: I believe you've
had access to this PDB _ exceptional access. But let me address your
question.
BEN-VENISTE: Nor could
we, prior to today, reveal the title of that PDB.
RICE: May I address the
question, sir?
The fact is that this
August 6th PDB was in response to the president's questions about whether or
not something might happen or something might be planned by al-Qaida inside
the United States. He asked because all of the threat reporting or the threat
reporting that was actionable was about the threats abroad, not about the
United States.
This particular PDB had
a long section on what bin Laden had wanted to do _ speculative, much of it _
in '97, '98; that he had, in fact, liked the results of the 1993 bombing.
RICE: It had a number
of discussions of _ it had a discussion of whether or not they might use
hijacking to try and free a prisoner who was being held in the United States
_ Ressam. It reported that the FBI had full field investigations under way.
And we checked on the
issue of whether or not there was something going on with surveillance of
buildings, and we were told, I believe, that the issue was the courthouse in
which this might take place.
Commissioner, this was
not a warning. This was a historic memo -- historical memo prepared by the
agency because the president was asking questions about what we knew about
the inside.
BEN-VENISTE: Well, if
you are willing ...
RICE: Now, we had
already taken ...
BEN-VENISTE: If you are
willing to declassify that document, then others can make up their minds
about it.
Let me ask you a
general matter, beyond the fact that this memorandum provided information,
not speculative, but based on intelligence information, that bin Laden had
threatened to attack the United States and specifically Washington, D.C.
There was nothing
reassuring, was there, in that PDB?
RICE: Certainly not.
There was nothing reassuring.
But I can also tell you
that there was nothing in this memo that suggested that an attack was coming
on New York or Washington, D.C. There was nothing in this memo as to time,
place, how or where. This was not a threat report to the president or a
threat report to me.
BEN-VENISTE: We agree
that there were no specifics. Let me move on, if I may.
RICE: There were no
specifics, and, in fact, the country had already taken steps through the FAA
to warn of potential hijackings. The country had already taken steps through
the FBI to task their 56 field offices to increase their activity. The
country had taken the steps that it could given that there was no threat
reporting about what might happen inside the United States.
BEN-VENISTE: We have
explored that and we will continue to with respect to the muscularity and the
specifics of those efforts.
The president was in
Crawford, Texas, at the time he received the PDB, you were not with him,
correct?
RICE: That is correct.
BEN-VENISTE: Now, was
the president, in words or substance, alarmed or in any way motivated to take
any action, such as meeting with the director of the FBI, meeting with the
attorney general, as a result of receiving the information contained in the
PDB?
RICE: I want to repeat
that when this document was presented, it was presented as, yes, there were
some frightening things _ and by the way, I was not at Crawford, but the
president and I were in contact and I might have even been, though I can't
remember, with him by video link during that time.
The president was told
this is historical information. I'm told he was told this is historical
information and there was nothing actionable in this. The president knew that
the FBI was pursuing this issue. The president knew that the director of
central intelligence was pursuing this issue. And there was no new threat
information in this document to pursue.
BEN-VENISTE: Final
question, because my time has almost expired.
Do you believe that,
had the president taken action to issue a directive to the director of CIA to
ensure that the FBI had pulsed the agency, to make sure that any information
which we know now had been collected was transmitted to the director, that
the president might have been able to receive information from CIA with
respect to the fact that two al-Qaida operatives who took part in the 9-11
catastrophe were in the United States _ Alhazmi and Almidhar; and that
Moussaoui, who Dick Clarke was never even made aware of, who had jihadist
connections, who the FBI had arrested, and who had been in a flight school in
Minnesota trying to learn the avionics of a commercial jetliner despite the
fact that he had no training previously, had no explanation for the funds in
his bank account, and no explanation for why he was in the United States _
would that have possibly, in your view, in hindsight, made a difference in
the ability to collect this information, shake the trees, as Richard Clarke
had said, and possibly, possibly interrupt the plotters?
RICE: My view,
Commissioner Ben-Veniste, as I said to Chairman Kean, is that, first of all,
the director of central intelligence and the director of the FBI, given the
level of threat, were doing what they thought they could do
to deal with the threat that we faced.
There was no threat
reporting of any substance about an attack coming in the United States.
RICE: And the director of
the FBI and the director of the CIA, had they received information, I am
quite certain _ given that the director of the CIA met frequently face to
face with the president of the United States _ that he would have made that
available to the president or to me.
I do not believe that
it is a good analysis to go back and assume that somehow maybe we would have
gotten lucky by, quote, shaking the trees. Dick Clarke was shaking the trees,
director of central intelligence was shaking the trees, director of the FBI
was shaking the trees. We had a structural problem in the United States.
BEN-VENISTE: Did the
president meet with the director of the FBI?
RICE: We had a
structural problem in the United States, and that structural problem was that
we did not share domestic and foreign intelligence in a way to make a product
for policymakers, for good reasons _ for legal reasons, for cultural reasons
_ a product that people could depend upon.
BEN-VENISTE: Did the
president meet with the director of ...
KEAN: Commissioner, we
got to move on ...
BEN-VENISTE: ... the
FBI between August 6th and September 11th?
KEAN: ... to
Commissioner Fielding.
RICE: I will have to
get back to you on that. I am not certain.
KEAN: Commissioner
Fielding?
FIELDING: Thank you,
Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Rice, good morning.
RICE: Good morning.
FIELDING: Thank you for
being here, and thank you for all your service presently and in the past to
your country.
RICE: Thank you.
FIELDING: As you know,
our task is to assemble facts in order to inform ourselves and then
ultimately to inform the American public of the cause of this horrible event,
and also to make recommendations to mitigate against the possibility that
there will ever be another terrorist triumph on our homeland or against our
people.
And as we do this with
the aid of testimony of people like yourself, of course there will be some
discrepancies, as there always will, and we will have to try as best we can
to resolve those discrepancies. And obviously that's an important thing for
us to do.
But as important as
that ultimately might be, it also is our responsibility to really come up
with ways, and valid ways, to prevent another intelligence failure like we
suffered. And I don't think anybody will kid ourselves that we didn't suffer
one.
So we must try to look
at the systems and the policies that were in place and to evaluate them and
to see _ getting a view of the landscape, and I know it's difficult to do it
through a pre-9-11 lens, but we must try to do that, so that we can do better
the next time.
And I'd like to follow
up with a couple of areas with that sort of specificity, and one is the one
that you were just discussing with Commissioner Ben-Veniste.
We've all heard over
the years the problem between the CIA, the FBI, coordination, et cetera. And
you made reference to an introduction you'd done to a book, but you also, in
October 2000, while you were a part of the campaign team for candidate Bush,
you told a radio station, WJR, which is in Detroit, you're talking about the
threat and how to deal with al-Qaida.
And if I may quote, you
said, Osama bin Laden, the first is you really have to get intelligence
agencies better organized to deal with the terrorist threat to the United
States itself. One of the problems that we have is kind of a split
responsibility, of course, between the CIA and foreign intelligence and the
FBI and domestic intelligence. There needs to be better cooperation, because
we don't want to wake up one day and find that Osama bin Laden has been
successful on our territory, end of your quote.
Well, in fact, sadly,
we did wake up and that did happen.
And obviously, there is
a systemic problem.
And what I'd really
like you to address right now is what steps were taken by you and the
administration, to your knowledge, in the first several months of the
administration to assess and address this problem?
RICE: Well, thank you.
We did have a
structural problem, and structural problems take some time to address.
We did have a national
security policy directive asking the CIA, through the foreign intelligence
board, headed by Brent Scowcroft, to review its intelligence activities, the
way that it gathered intelligence. And that was a study that was to be
completed.
The vice president was,
a little later in, I think, in May, tasked by the president to put together a
group to look at all of the recommendations that had been made about domestic
preparedness and all of the questions associated with that; to take the
Gilmore report and the Hart-Rudman report and so forth and to try to make
recommendations about what might have been done.
We were in office 233
days. And the kinds of structural changes that have been needed by this
country for some time did not get made in that period of time.
I'm told that after the
millennium plot was discovered, that there was an after-action report done
and that some steps were taken. To my recollection, that was not briefed to
us during the transition period or during the threat spike.
But clearly, what
needed to be done was that we needed systems in place that would bring all of
this together. It is not enough to leave this to chance.
If you look at this
period, I think you see that everybody _ the director of the CIA _ Louis
Freeh had left, but the key counterterrorism person was a part of Dick
Clarke's group.
And with meeting with
him and, I'm sure, shaking the trees and doing all of the things that you
would want people to do, we were being given reports all the time that they
were doing everything they could. But there was a systemic problem in getting
that kind of shared intelligence.
One of the first things
that Bob Mueller did post-9-11 was to recognize that the issue of prevention
meant that you had to break down some of the walls between criminal and
counterterrorism, between criminal and intelligence.
RICE: The way that we
went about this was to have individual cases where you were trying to build a
criminal case, individual offices with responsibility for those cases. Much
was not coming to the FBI in a way that it could then engage the
policymakers.
So these were big
structural reforms. We did some things to try and get the CIA reforming. We
did some things to try and get a better sense of how to put all of this
together.
But structural reform
is hard, and in seven months we didn't have time to make the changes that
were necessary. We made them almost immediately after September 11th.
FIELDING: Well, would
you consider the problem as solved today?
RICE: I would not
consider the problem solved. I believe that we have made some very important
structural changes.
The creation of a
Department of Homeland Security is an absolutely critical issue, because the
Department of Homeland Security brings together INS and the Customs
Department and the border people and all of the people who were scattered _
Customs and Treasury and INS and Justice and so forth _ brings them together
in a way that a single secretary is looking after the homeland every day.
He's looking at what
infrastructure needs to be protected. He's looking at what state and local
governments need to do their work. That is an extremely important innovation.
I hope that he will
have the freedom to manage that organization in a way that will make it fully
effective, because there are a lot of issues for Congress in how that's
managed.
We have created a
threat terrorism information center, the TTIC, which does bring together all
of the sources of information from all of the intelligence agencies _ the FBI
and the Department of Homeland Security and the INS and the CIA and the DIA _
so that there's one place where all of this is coming together.
And of course the
Patriot Act, which permits the kind of sharing that we need between the CIA
and the FBI, is also an important innovation.
But I would be the
first to tell you _ I'm a student of institutional change. I know that you
get few chances to make really transformative institutional change.
And I think that when
we've heard from this commission and others who are working on other pieces
of the problem, like, for instance, the issues of intelligence and weapons of
mass destruction, that this president will be open to new ideas.
I really don't believe
that all of our work is done, despite the tremendous progress that we've made
thus far.
FIELDING: Well, I
promise you that we're going to respond to that, because that is really a
problem that's bothering us, is that it doesn't appear to us, even with the
changes up until now, that it's solved the institutional versus institutional
issues, which _ maybe it has, but, you know, it's of grave concern to us.
I would also ask _ I
don't want to take the time today, but I would ask that you provide our
commission, if you would with your analysis on the MI-5 issue. As you know,
it's something we're going to have to deal with, and we're taking all
information aboard that we may. So we'd appreciate that if you could supply
that to us.
RICE: I appreciate
that.
I want to be very
clear. I think that we've made very important changes. I think that they are
helping us tremendously.
Every day now in the
Oval Office in the morning, the FBI director and the CIA director sit with
the president, sharing information in ways that they would have been
prohibited to share that information before.
So very important
changes have taken place. We need to see them mature. We need to know how
it's working. But we also have to be open to see what more needs to be done.
FIELDING: It may be
solved at the top. We've got to make sure it's solved at the bottom.
RICE: I agree
completely.
FIELDING: And kind of
related to that, we've heard testimony, a great deal of it, about the
coordination that took place during the millennium threat in 1999 where there
were a series of principals meetings and a lot of activity, as we are told,
which stopped and prevented incidents. It was a success. It was an
intelligence success. And there had to be domestic coordination with foreign
intelligence, but it seemed to work.
The time ended, the
threat ended, and apparently the guard was let down a little, too, as the
threat diminished.
Now, we've also heard
testimony about what we would call the summer threat, the spike threat,
whatever it is in 2001. A lot of chatter _ you shared some of it with us
directly _ a lot of traffic, and a lot of threats.
And during that period
_ actually you put in context, I guess it was the first draft of the NSPD was
circulated to deputies. But right then, when that was happening, the threats
were coming in, and it's been described as a crescendo and hair on fire and
all these different things.
At that time the CSG
handled the alert, if you will. And we've heard testimony about Clarke
warning you and the NSC that State and CIA and the Pentagon had concerns and
were convinced there was going to be a major terrorist attack.
On July 5th, I believe
it was, domestic agencies, including the FBI and the FAA, were briefed by the
White House. Alerts were issued. The next day, the CIA told the CSG
participants, and I think they said they believed the upcoming attack would
be spectacular, something quantitatively different from anything that had
been done to date.
So everybody was
worried about it. Everybody was concentrating on it. And then later the
crescendo ended, and again it abated.
But of course, that
time the end of the story wasn't pleasant.
FIELDING: Now, during
this period of time, what _ and I'd like you to just respond to several
points _ what involvement did you have in this alert? And how did it come
about that the CSG was handling this thing as opposed to the principals?
Because candidly it's
been suggested that the difference between the 1999 handling and this one was
that you didn't have the principals dealing with it; therefore, it wasn't
given the priority; therefore, the people weren't forced to do what they
would otherwise have done, et cetera. You've heard the same things I've
heard.
And would it have made
a real difference in enhancing the exchange of intelligence, for instance, if
it had been the principals?
I would like your
comments, both on your involvement and your comments to that question. Thank
you.
RICE: Of course. Let me
start by talking about what we were doing and the structure we used. I've
mentioned this.
The CSG, yes, was the
counterterrorism group, was the nerve center, if you will. And that's been
true through all crises. I think it was, in fact, a nerve center as well
during the millennium, that they were the counterterrorism experts, they were
able to get together. They got together frequently. They came up with
taskings that needed to be done.
I would say that if you
look at the list of taskings that they came up with, it reflected the fact
that the threat information was from abroad. It was that the agencies like
the Department of State needed to make clear to Americans traveling abroad
that there was a danger, that embassies needed to be on alert, that our force
protection needed to be strong for our military forces.
The Central
Intelligence Agency was asked to do some things. It was very foreign policy
or foreign threat-based as well. And of course, the warning to the FBI to go
out and task their field agents.
RICE: The CSG was made
up of not junior people, but the top level of counterterrorism experts. Now,
they were in contact with their principals.
Dick Clarke was in
contact with me quite frequently during this period of time. When the CSG
would meet, he would come back usually through e-mail, sometimes personally,
and say, here's what we've done. I would talk everyday, several times a day,
with George Tenet about what the threat spike looked like.
In fact, George Tenet
was meeting with the president during this period of time so the president
was hearing directly about what was being done about the threats to _ the
only really specific threats we had _ to Genoa, to the Persian Gulf, there
was one to Israel. So the president was hearing what was being done.
The CSG was the nerve
center. But I just don't believe that bringing the principals over to the
White House every day and having their counterterrorism people have to come
with them and be pulled away from what they were doing to disrupt was a good
way to go about this. It wasn't an efficient way to go about it.
I talked to Powell, I
talked to Rumsfeld about what was happening with the threats and with the
alerts. I talked to George. I asked that the attorney general be briefed,
because even though there were no domestic threats, I didn't want him to be
without that briefing.
It's also the case that
I think if you actually look back at the millennium period, it's questionable
to me whether the argument that has been made that somehow shaking the trees
is what broke up the millennium period is actually accurate _ and I was not
there, clearly.
But I will tell you
this. I will say this. That the millennium, of course, was a period of high
threat by its very nature. We all knew that the millennium was a period of
high threat.
And after September
11th, Dick Clarke sent us the after-action report that had been done after
the millennium plot and their assessment was that Ressam had been caught by
chance _ Ressam being the person who was entering the United States over the
Canadian border with bomb-making materials in store.
I think it actually
wasn't by chance, which was Washington's view of it. It was because a very
alert customs agent named Diana Dean and her colleagues sniffed something
about Ressam. They saw that something was wrong. They tried to apprehend him.
He tried to run. They then apprehended him, found that there was bomb-making
material and a map of Los Angeles.
Now, at that point, you
have pretty clear indication that you've got a problem inside the United
States.
I don't think it was
shaking the trees that produced the breakthrough in the millennium plot. It
was that you got a _ Dick Clarke would say a lucky break _ I would say you
got an alert customs agent who got it right.
And the interesting
thing is that I've checked with Customs and according to their records, they
weren't actually on alert at that point.
So I just don't buy the
argument that we weren't shaking the trees enough and that something was
going to fall out that gave us somehow that little piece of information that
would have led to connecting all of those dots.
In any case, you cannot
be dependent on the chance that something might come together. That's why the
structural reforms are important.
And the president of
the United States had us at battle station during this period of time. He
expected his secretary of state to be locking down embassies. He expected his
secretary of defense to be providing force protection.
RICE: He expected his
FBI director to be tasking his agents and getting people out there. He
expected his director of central intelligence to be out and doing what needed
to be done in terms of disruption, and he expected his national security
adviser to be looking to see that _ or talking to people to see that that was
done.
But I think we've
created a kind of false impression _ or a not quite correct impression _ of
how one does this in the threat period. I might just add that during the
China period, the 11 days of the China crisis, I also didn't have a
principals meeting.
FIELDING: Thank you,
Dr. Rice.
Thank you, Mr.
Chairman.
KEAN: Thank you,
Commissioner Fielding.
Commissioner Gorelick?
GORELICK: Dr. Rice,
thank you for being here today.
I'd like to pick up
where Fred Fielding and you left off, which is this issue of the extent to
which raising the level to the Cabinet level and bringing people together
makes a difference.
And let me just give
you some facts as I see them and let you comment on them.
First of all, while it
may be that Dick Clarke was informing you, many of the other people at the
CSG-level, and the people who were brought to the table from the domestic
agencies, were not telling their principals.
Secretary Mineta, the
secretary of transportation, had no idea of the threat. The administrator of
the FAA, responsible for security on our airlines, had no idea. Yes, the
attorney general was briefed, but there was no evidence of any activity by
him about this.
You indicate in your
statement that the FBI tasked its field offices to find out what was going on
out there. We have no record of that.
The Washington field
office international terrorism people say they never heard about the threat,
they never heard about the warnings, they were not asked to come to the table
and shake those trees.
SACs, special agents in
charge, around the country _ Miami in particular _ no knowledge of this.
And so, I really come
back to you _ and let me add one other thing. Have you actually looked at the
_ analyzed the messages that the FBI put out?
RICE: Yes.
GORELICK: To me, and
you're free to comment on them, they are feckless. They don't tell anybody
anything. They don't bring anyone to battle stations.
And I personally
believe, having heard Coleen Rowley's testimony about her frustrations in the
Moussaoui incident, that if someone had really gone out to the agents who
were working these issues on the ground and said, We are at battle stations.
We need to know what's happening out there. Come to us, she would have broken
through barriers to have that happen, because she was knocking on doors and
they weren't opening.
(APPLAUSE)
So I just ask you this
question as a student of government myself, because I don't believe it's
functionally equivalent to have people three, four, five levels down in an
agency working an issue even if there's a specialist. And you get a greater
degree of intensity when it comes from the top. And I would like to give you
the opportunity to comment on this, because it bothers me.
RICE: Of course.
First of all, it was
coming from the top because the president was meeting with his director of
central intelligence. And one of the changes that this president made was to
meet face to face with his director of central intelligence almost every day.
I can assure you,
knowing government, that that was well understood at the Central Intelligence
Agency, that now their director, the DCI had direct access to the president.
Yes, the president met
with the director of the FBI _ I'll have to see when and how many times _ but
of course he did, and with the attorney general and with others.
But in a threat period
_ and I don't think it's a proper characterization of the CSG to say that it
was four or five levels down, these were people who had been together in numerous
crises before and it was their responsibility to develop plans for how to
respond to a threat.
Now, I would be
speculating, but if you would like, I will go ahead and speculate to say that
one of the problems here was there really was nothing that looked like it was
going to happen inside the United States.
The threat reporting
was _ the specific threat reporting was about external threats: about the
Persian Gulf, about Israel, about perhaps the Genoa event.
It is just not the case
that the August 6th memorandum did anything but put together what the CIA
decided that they wanted to put together about historical knowledge about
what was going on and a few things about what the FBI might be doing.
And so, the light was
shining abroad. And if you look at what was going _ I was in constant contact
to make sure that those things were getting done with the relevant agencies _
with State, with Defense and so forth.
GORELICK: Now ...
RICE: We just have a
different view of this.
GORELICK: Yes, I
understand that. But I think it's one thing to talk to George Tenet, but he
can't tell domestic agencies what to do.
Let me finish.
RICE: Yes.
GORELICK: And it is
clear that you were worried about the domestic problem, because, after all,
your testimony is you asked Dick Clarke to summons the domestic agencies.
Now, you say that _ and
I think quite rightly _ that the big problem was systemic, that the FBI could
not function as it should, and it didn't have the right methods of
communicating with the CIA and vice versa.
At the outset of the
administration, a commission that was chartered by Bill Clinton and Newt
Gingrich, two very different people covering pretty much the political
spectrum, put together a terrific panel to study the issue of terrorism and
report to the new administration as it began. And you took that briefing, I
know.
That commission said we
are going to get hit in the domestic, the United States, and we are going to
get hit big; that's number one. And number two, we have big systemic problems.
The FBI doesn't work the way it should, and it doesn't communicate with the
intelligence community. rice1629-----
r wbx
BC-Sept. 11
Commission-Text, 16th Add,0870
UNDATED: intelligence
community.
04-08-2004 11:08
ewolfe
GORELICK: Now, you have
said to us that your policy review was meant to be comprehensive. You took
your time because you wanted to get at the hard issues and have a
hard-hitting, comprehensive policy. And yet there is nothing in it about the
vast domestic landscape that we were all warned needed so much attention.
Can you give me the
answer to the question why?
RICE: I would ask the
following. We were there for 233 days. There had been recognition for a
number of years before _ after the '93 bombing, and certainly after the
millennium _ that there were challenges, if I could say it that way, inside
the United States, and that there were challenges concerning our domestic
agencies and the challenges concerning the FBI and the CIA.
We were in office 233
days. It's absolutely the case that we did not begin structural reform of the
FBI.
Now, the vice president
was asked by the president, and that was tasked in May, to put all of this
together and to see if he could put together, from all of the
recommendations, a program for protection of the homeland against WMD, what
else needed to be done. And in fact, he had hired Admiral Steve Abbot to do
that work. And it was on that basis that we were able to put together the
Homeland Security Council, which Tom Ridge came to head very, very quickly.
But I think the
question is, why, over all of these years, did we not address the structural
problems that were there, with the FBI, with the CIA, the homeland
departments being scattered among many different departments?
RICE: And why, given
all of the opportunities that we'd had to do it, had we not done it?
And I think that the
unfortunate _ and I really do think it's extremely tragic _ fact is that
sometimes until there is a catastrophic event that forces people to think
differently, that forces people to overcome all customs and old culture and
old fears about domestic intelligence and the relationship, that you don't
get that kind of change.
And I want to say just
one more thing, if you don't mind, about the issue of high-level attention.
The reason that I asked
Andy Card to come with me to that meeting with Dick Clarke was that I wanted
him to know _ wanted Dick Clarke to know _ that he had the weight not just of
the national security advisor, but the weight of the chief of staff if he
needed it. I didn't manage the domestic agencies. No national security
advisor does.
And not once during
this period of time did my very experienced crisis manager say to me, You
know, I don't think this is getting done in the agencies. I'd really like you
to call them together or make a phone call.
In fact, after the fact,
on September 15th, what Dick Clarke sent me _ and he was my crisis manager _
what he sent me was a memorandum, or an e-mail that said, After national
unity begins to break down _ again, I'm paraphrasing _ people will ask, did
we do all that we needed to do to arm the domestic agencies, to warn the
domestic agencies and to respond to the possibility of domestic threat?
That, I think, was his
view at the time. And I have to tell you, I think given the circumstances and
given the context and given the structures that we had, we did.
GORELICK: Well, I have
lots of other questions on this issue. But I am trying to get out what will
probably be my third and last question to you. So if we could move through
this reasonably quickly.
I was struck by your
characterization of the NSPD, the policy that you arrived at at the end of
the administration, as having the goal of the elimination of Al Qaida.
Because as I look at it
_ and I thank you for declassifying this this morning, although I would have
liked to have known it a little earlier, but I think people will find this
interesting reading _ it doesn't call for the elimination of Al Qaida.
And it may be a
semantic difference, but I don't think so. It calls for the elimination of
the Al Qaida threat. And that's a very big difference, because, to me, the
elimination of Al Qaida means you're going to go into Afghanistan and you're
going to get them.
And as I read it, and
as I've heard your public statements recently, there was not, I take it, a
decision taken in this document to put U.S. troops on the ground in
Afghanistan to get Al Qaida. Is that correct?
RICE: That is correct.
GORELICK: Now, you have
pointed out that in this document there is a tasking to the Defense
Department for contingency planning as part of this exercise _ contingency
planning, and you've listed the goals of the contingency plans.
And you have suggested
that this takes the policy, with regard to terrorism for our country, to a
new level, a more aggressive level.
Were you briefed on
Operation Infinite Resolve that was put in place in '98 and updated in the
year 2000?
Because as I read
Infinite Resolve, and as our staff reads Infinite Resolve, it was a plan that
had been tasked by the Clinton administration to the Defense Department to
develop precisely analogous plans. And it was extant at the time.
GORELICK: And so I ask
you _ and there are many, many places where you indicate there are
differences between the Clinton program and yours. This one jumps out at me.
Was there a material
difference between your view of the military assignment and the Clinton
administration's extant plan? And if so, what was it?
RICE: Yes, I think that
there were significant differences.
First of all, Secretary
Rumsfeld, I think, has testified that he was briefed on Infinite Resolve. It
would have been highly unusual for me to me to be briefed on military plans
were we not, in fact, planning to use them for employment. And so I'm not
surprised...
GORELICK: Well, except
that you were tasking them _ pardon me for interrupting _ you were tasking
the military to do something as part of this seven-and-a-half-month process.
So it would strike me as likely that you would have wanted to know what the
predicate was.
RICE: We were tasking
the secretary of defense, who in fact had been briefed on Infinite Resolve,
to develop within the context of a broader strategy military plans that were
now linked to certain political purposes.
I worked in the
Pentagon. I worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. There are plans and plans
and plans. And the problem is that unless those plans are engaged by the
civilian leadership on behalf of the president, unless those plans have an
adequate political basis and political purpose in mind, those plans simply
sit and they in fact rarely get used.
Now, the whole tortured
history of trying to use military power in support of counterterrorism
objectives has been, I think, very admirably and adequately discussed by your
staff in the military paper. RICE: And what is quite clear from that paper is
that, from the time of Presidential Directive 62, which keeps the Defense
Department focused on force protection and rendition of terrorists and so
forth, all the way up through the period when we take office, this issue of
military plans and how to use military power with counterterrorism objectives
just doesn't get addressed.
What we were doing was
to put together a policy that brought all of the elements together. It tasked
the secretary of defense within the context of a plan that really focused not
just on Al Qaida and bin Laden, but also on what we might be able to do
against the Taliban. And that gave the kind of regional context that might
make it possible to use military force more robustly, to work plans in that
context.
I think without that context,
you're just going to have military plans that never get used.
I read Sandy Berger _
or saw Sandy Berger's testimony. He talked about the fact whenever they
started to look at the use of military plans, the issue of whether you would
get regional cooperation always arose. That was precisely what I was saying,
when I said that we had to get the regional context right.
I am not going to tell
thaw we were looking to invade Afghanistan during that seven months. We were
not.
But we were looking in
the context of a plan that gave you a better regional context that looked to
eliminate the Al Qaida threat or Al Qaida that looked to eliminate Taliban
support for them _ how to use military power within that context.
KEAN: Last follow-up.
GORELICK: In order to
keep us to our schedule, I'll just make this comment, and we'll, I think,
profitably follow up with you in a private session.
PDD 62, which was the
presidential directive in the Clinton administration, was not the only way in
which the Defense Department was tasked. I mean, Infinite Resolve went well
beyond what you describe PDD 62 as doing. That's number one.
And number two, however
good it might have been to change the text in which the military planning was
ongoing, neither I, nor, I think, our staff, can find any functional
difference between the two sets of plans. I'll leave it to my colleagues.
RICE: Well, thank you
very much. But I continue to believe that unless you can tell the military in
the context what it is they're going after and for what purpose, you're going
to have military plans that, every time you ask for the briefing, turn out to
be unusable.
GORELICK: I'm sure that
this debate will continue.
RICE: Yes.
KEAN: Senator Gorton?
GORTON: Before 9/11,
did any adviser to you, or to your knowledge to this administration or to its
predecessor, counsel the kind of all-out war against the Taliban and Al Qaida
in Afghanistan that the United States actually conducted after 9/11?
RICE: No, sir. No one
counseled an all-out war against Afghanistan of the kind that we did after
9/11.
RICE: There was a good
deal of talk about the inadequacy of military options to go after Al Qaida.
Dick Clarke was quite clear in his view that the very things that had been
tasked were inadequate to the task.
And so, people were
looking for other kinds of military options. But no, an all-out invasion of
Afghanistan, it was not recommended.
GORTON: Was it possible
to conduct that kind of war in Afghanistan without the cooperation of
Pakistan?
RICE: It was absolutely
not possible.
And this goes also to
the point that I was making to Commissioner Gorelick. You can have lots of
plans but unless _ since the United States sits protected by oceans, or no
longer protected _ the United States sits across oceans _ unless you find a
way to get regional cooperation from Pakistan, from the Central Asian
countries, you're going to be left with essentially stand-off options,
meaning bombers and cruise missiles, because you're not going to have the
full range of military options.
GORTON: Now, your
written and oral statement spoke of a frustrating and unproductive meeting
with the president of Pakistan in June. Let me go beyond that.
How much progress had
the United States made toward the kind of necessary cooperation from Pakistan
by say the 10th of September, 2001?
RICE: The United States
had a comprehensive plan that the deputies had approved that would have been
coming to the principals shortly _ and I think approved easily, because the
deputies are, of course, very senior people who have the consonance of their
principals _ that was going to try to unravel this overlapping set of
sanctions that were on Pakistan. Some because of the way Musharraf had come
to power, some because of nuclear issues. We were looking to do that.
Rich Armitage tells me
that when he approached the Pakistanis after September 11th, he did presage
that we would try and do this also with a positive side, but the plans were
not in place. Changing Pakistan's strategic direction was going to take some
time.
GORTON: Would the
program recommended on September 4th have prevented 9/11 had it been adopted
in, say, February or March of 2001?
RICE: Commissioner, it
would not have prevented September 11th if it had been approved the day after
we came to office.
GORTON: Now, in
retrospect, and given the knowledge that you had, you and the administration
simply believed that you had more time to meet this challenge of Al Qaida
than was in fact the case. Is that not true?
RICE: It is true that
we understood that to meet this challenge it was going to take time. It was a
multiyear program to try and meet the challenge of Al Qaida.
That doesn't mean that
when you get immediate threat reporting that you don't do everything that you
can to disrupt at that particular point in time.
But in terms of the
strategy of trying to improve the prospects of Pakistan withdrawing support
from Taliban, with presenting the Taliban with possible defeat because you
were dealing not just with the Northern Alliance but with the southern
tribes, that, we believed, we going to take time.
GORTON: It turned out,
in retrospect, you didn't have the time to do it.
RICE: We didn't.
Although, I will say that the document that was then approved by the
president after September 11th, what happened was that the NSPD was then
forwarded to the president in a post- September 11th context, and many of the
same aspects of it were used to guide the policy that we actually did take
against Afghanistan.
And the truth of the
matter is that, as the president said on September 20th, this is going to
take time. We're still trying to unravel Al Qaida. We're still trying to deal
with worldwide terrorist threats.
So it's obvious that,
even with all of the force of the country after September 11th, this is a
long-term project.
GORTON: One subject
that certainly any administration in your place would not like to bring up
but I want to bring up in any event is, the fact is that we've now gone two
and a half years and we have not had another incident in the United States
even remotely comparable to 9/11.
GORTON: In your view _
there have been many such horrific incidents in other parts of the world,
from Al Qaida or Al Qaida lookalikes.
In your view, have the
measures that have been taken here in the United States actually reduced the
amount of terrorism, or simply displaced it and caused it to move elsewhere?
RICE: I believe that we
have really hurt the Al Qaida network. We have not destroyed it. And it is
clear that it was much more entrenched and had relationships with many more
organizations than I think people generally recognize.
I don't think it's been
displaced. But they realize that they are in an all-out war. And so you're
starting to see them try to fight back. And I think that's one reason that
you're getting the terrorist attacks that you are.
But I don't think it's
been displaced; I think it's just coming to the surface.
GORTON: Well, maybe you
don't understand what I mean by displacement. Do you not think that Al Qaida
and these terrorist entities are now engaged in terrorism where they think
it's easier than it would be in the United States? That's what I mean about
displacement.
RICE: Oh, I see. I'm
sorry. I didn't understand the question.
I think that it is
possible that they recognize the heightened security profile that we have
post-September 11th, and I believe that we have made it harder for them to
attack here.
I will tell you that I
get up every day concerned because I don't think we've made it impossible for
them.
RICE: We're safer, but
we're not safe.
And as I said, they
have to be right once; we have to be right 100 percent of the time.
But I do think some of
the security measures that we have taken, some of the systemic and systematic
security measures that we have taken, have made it a lot harder for them.
GORTON: I think, in one
sense, there are three ways in which one can deal with a threat like this,
and I would like your views on how well you think we've done in each of them
and maybe even their relative importance.
So one is hardening
targets, like kind of disruptions we have every time we try to travel on an
airplane.
The second is
prevention. And a lot has been spoken here about that, whether we're better
able to find out what their plans are and frustrate those plans.
And the third is one
that you talked about in your opening statement: preemption, going at the
cause.
How do you balance, in
a free society, those three generic methods of going after terrorism?
RICE: I sincerely hope
that one of the outcomes of this commission is that we will talk about
balance between those, because we want to prevent the next terrorist attack.
We don't want to do it at the expense of who we are as an open society.
And I think that, in
terms of hardening, we've done a lot. If you look at the airport security
now, it's considerably very much different than it was prior. And there's a
transportation security agency that's charged with that.
Tom Ridge and his
people have an actual unit that sits around and worried about critical
infrastructure protection and works with local and state governments to make
sure the critical infrastructure is protected.
I think we're making a
lot of progress in hardening. In terms of _ but we're never going to be able
to harden enough to prevent every attack.
We have, in terms of
prevention, increased the worldwide attention to this problem.
When Louis Freeh put
together the Legat System, the Legal Attache System, abroad, it was _ and I'm
sure that you, Commissioner Gorelick, as a former deputy attorney general,
will remember that _ it became a very important tool also post-9/11 to be
able to work with the law enforcement agencies abroad now married up with
foreign intelligence in a way that helps us to be able to disrupt abroad in
ways that I think we were not capable of disrupting before.
RICE: Many of our
democratic partners are having some of the same debates that we are about how
to have prevention without issues of civil liberties being exposed.
We think the Patriot
Act gets just the right balance and that it's extremely important to
prevention because it makes law enforcement _ usually in law enforcement you
wait until a crime is committed and then you act. We cannot afford in
terrorism to wait until a crime is committed.
And finally, in terms
of preemption, I have to say that the one thing I've been struck by in the
hearings is when I was listening to the former secretaries and the current
secretaries the other day, is the persistent argument, the persistent
question of whether we should have acted against Afghanistan sooner.
Given that the threats
were gathering, given that we knew Al Qaida had launched attacks against us,
why did we wait until you had a catastrophic attack to use strategic military
power _ not tit for tat, not a little tactical military strike _ but strategic
military power against this country.
And the president has
said many times that after September 11th, we have learned not to let threats
gather. And yet we continue to have a debate about whether or not you have to
go against threats before they fully materialize on your soil.
GORTON: Well, Ms. Rice,
one final comment.
I asked both the
secretary of state and secretary of defense that question about whether or
not they didn't think we had more time than we were actually granted the
luxury of having; they both ducked the question totally. You at least partly
answered it.
Thank you very much.
RICE: Thank you.
KEAN: Thank you,
Senator.
Senator Kerrey?
KERREY: Thank you very
much, Mr. Chairman.
And thank you, Dr.
Rice.
Let me say at the
beginning I'm very impressed, and indeed I'd go as far as to say moved by
your story, the story of your life and what you've accomplished. It's quite
extraordinary.
And I want to say at
the outset that, notwithstanding perhaps the tone of some of my questions,
I'm not sure had I been in your position or Sandy Berger's position or
President Bush or President Clinton's position that I would have done things
differently. I simply don't know.
But the line of
questioning will suggest that I'm trying to ascertain why things weren't done
differently.
Let me ask a question
that _ well, actually, let me say _ I can't pass this up. I know it'll take
into my 10-minute time. But as somebody who supported the war in Iraq, I'm
not going to get the national security adviser 30 feet away from me very
often over the next 90 days, and I've got to tell you, I believe a number of
things.
I believe, first of
all, that we underestimate that this war on terrorism is really a war against
radical Islam. Terrorism is a tactic. It's not a war itself.
Secondly, let me say
that I don't think we understand how the Muslim world views us, and I'm
terribly worried that the military tactics in Iraq are going to do a number
of things, and they're all bad. One is...
(APPLAUSE)
No, please don't _
please do not do that. Do not applaud.
I think we're going to
end up with civil war if we continue down the military operation strategies
that we have in place. I say that sincerely as someone that supported the war
in the first place.
Let me say, secondly,
that I don't know how it could be otherwise, given the way that we're able to
see these military operations, even the restrictions that are imposed upon
the press, that this doesn't provide an opportunity for Al Qaida to have
increasing success at recruiting people to attack the United States.
KERREY: It worries me.
And I wanted to make that declaration. You needn't comment on it, but as I
said, I'm not going to have an opportunity to talk to you this closely.
And I wanted to tell
you that I think the military operations are dangerously off track. And it's
largely a U.S. Army _ 125,000 out of 145,000 _ largely a Christian army in a
Muslim nation. So I take that on board for what it's worth.
Let me ask you, first
of all, a question that's been a concern for me from the first day I came on
the commission, and that is the relationship of our executive director to
you.
Let me just ask you
directly, and you can just give me _ keep it relatively short, but I wanted
to get it on the record.
KERREY: Since he was an
expert on terrorism, did you ask Philip Zelikow any questions about terrorism
during transition, since he was the second person carded in the national
security office and had considerable expertise?
RICE: Philip and I had
numerous conversations about the issues that we were facing. Philip, as you
know, had worked in the campaign and helped with the transition plans, so
yes.
KERREY: Yes, you did
talk to him about terrorism?
RICE: We talked _
Philip and I over a period of _ you know, we had worked closely together as
academics...
KERREY: During the
transition, did you instruct him to do anything on terrorism?
RICE: Oh, to do
anything on terrorism?
KERREY: Yes.
RICE: To help us think
about the structure of the terrorism _ Dick Clarke's operations, yes.
KERREY: You've used the
phrase a number of times, and I'm hoping with my question to disabuse you of
using it in the future.
You said the president
was tired of swatting flies.
KERREY: Can you tell me
one example where the president swatted a fly when it came to Al Qaida prior
to 9/11?
RICE: I think what the
president was speaking to was...
KERREY: No, no. What
fly had he swatted?
RICE: Well, the
disruptions abroad was what he was really focusing on...
KERREY: No, no...
RICE: ... when the CIA
would go after Abu Zubaydah...
KERREY: He hadn't
swatted...
RICE: ... or go after
this guy...
KERREY: Dr. Rice, we
didn't...
RICE: That was what was
meant.
KERREY: We only swatted
a fly once on the 20th of August 1998. We didn't swat any flies afterwards.
How the hell could he be tired?
RICE: We swatted at _ I
think he felt that what the agency was doing was going after individual
terrorists here and there, and that's what he meant by swatting flies. It was
simply a figure of speech.
KERREY: Well, I think it's
an unfortunate figure of speech because I think, especially after the attack
on the Cole on the 12th of October, 2000, it would not have been swatting a
fly. It would not have been _ we did not need to wait to get a strategic
plan.
Dick Clarke had in his
memo on the 20th of January overt military operations. He turned that memo
around in 24 hours, Dr. Clarke. There were a lot of plans in place in the
Clinton administration _ military plans in the Clinton administration.
In fact, since we're in
the mood to declassify stuff, there was _ he included in his January 25th
memo two appendices _ Appendix A:
Strategy for the
elimination of the jihadist threat of Al Qaida, Appendix B: Political
military plan for Al Qaida.
So I just _ why didn't
we respond to the Cole?
RICE: Well, we...
KERREY: Why didn't we
swat that fly?
RICE: I believe that
there's a question of whether or not you respond in a tactical sense or
whether you respond in a strategic sense; whether or not you decide that
you're going to respond to every attack with minimal use of military force
and go after every _ on a kind of tit-for-tat basis.
By the way, in that
memo, Dick Clarke talks about not doing this tit-for-tat, doing this on the
time of our choosing.
RICE: I'm aware, Mr.
Kerrey, of a speech that you gave at that time that said that perhaps the
best thing that we could do to respond to the Cole and to the memories was to
do something about the threat of Saddam Hussein.
That's a strategic
view...
(APPLAUSE)
And we took a strategic
view. We didn't take a tactical view. I mean, it was really _ quite frankly,
I was blown away when I read the speech, because it's a brilliant speech. It
talks about really...
(LAUGHTER)
... an asymmetric...
KERREY: I presume you
read it in the last few days?
RICE: Oh no, I read it
quite a bit before that. It's an asymmetric approach.
Now, you can decide
that every time Al Qaida...
KERREY: So you're
saying that you didn't have a military response against the Cole because of
my speech?
RICE: I'm saying, I'm
saying...
(LAUGHTER)
RICE: No.
KERREY: That had I not
given that speech you would have attacked them?
RICE: No, I'm just
saying that I think it was a brilliant way to think about it.
KERREY: I think it's...
RICE: It was a way of
thinking about it strategically, not tactically. But if I may answer the
question that you've asked me.
The issue of whether to
respond _ or how to respond to the Cole _ I think Don Rumsfeld has also
talked about this.
Yes, the Cole had
happened. We received, I think on January 25th, the same assessment _ or
roughly the same assessment _ of who was responsible for the Cole that Sandy
Berger talked to you about.
It was preliminary. It
was not clear. But that was not the reason that we felt that we did not want
to, quote, respond to the Cole.
We knew that the
options that had been employed by the Clinton administration had been
standoff options. The president had _ meaning missile strikes or perhaps
bombers would have been possible, long-range bombers. Although getting in
place the apparatus to use long-range bombers is even a matter of whether you
have basing in the region.
RICE: We knew that
Osama Bin Laden had been, in something that was provided to me, bragging that
he was going to withstand any response and then he was going to emerge and
come out stronger.
KERREY: But you're
figuring this out. You've got to give a very long answer.
RICE: We simply
believed that the best approach was to put in place a plan that was going to
eliminate this threat, not respond to an attack.
KERREY: Let me say, I
think you would have come in there if you said, We screwed up. We made a lot
of mistakes. You obviously don't want to use the M-word in here. And I would
say fine, it's game, set, match. I understand that.
But this strategic and
tactical, I mean, I just _ it sounds like something from a seminar. It
doesn't...
RICE: I do not believe
to this day that it would have been a good thing to respond to the Cole,
given the kinds of options that we were going to have.
And with all due
respect to Dick Clarke, if you're speaking about the Delenda plan, my
understanding is that it was, A, never adopted, and that Dick Clarke himself
has said that the military portion of this was not taken up by the Clinton
administration.
KERREY: Let me move
into another area.
RICE: So we were not
presented _ I just want to be very clear on this, because it's been a source
of controversy _ we were not presented with a plan.
KERREY: Well, that's
not true. It is not...
RICE: We were not
presented. We were presented with...
KERREY: I've heard you
say that, Dr. Clarke, that 25 January, 2001, memo was declassified, I don't
believe...
RICE: That January 25
memo has a series of actionable items having to do with Afghanistan, the
Northern Alliance.
KERREY: Let me move to
another area.
RICE: May I finish
answering your question, though, because this is an important...
KERREY: I know it's
important. Everything that's going on here is important. But I get 10
minutes.
RICE: But since we have
a point of disagreement, I'd like to have a chance to address it.
KERREY: Well, no, no,
actually, we have many points of disagreement, Dr. Clarke, but we'll have a
chance to do in closed session. Please don't filibuster me. It's not fair. It
is not fair. I have been polite. I have been courteous. It is not fair to me.
(APPLAUSE)
I understand that we
have a disagreement.
RICE: Commissioner, I
am here to answer questions. And you've asked me a question, and I'd like to
have an opportunity to answer it.
The fact is that what
we were presented on January the 25th was a set of ideas and a paper, most of
which was about what the Clinton administration had done and something called
the Delenda plan which had been considered in 1998 and never adopted. We
decided to take a different track.
RICE: We decided to put
together a strategic approach to this that would get the regional powers _
the problem wasn't that you didn't have a good counterterrorism person.
The problem was you
didn't have an approach against Al Qaida because you didn't have an approach
against Afghanistan. And you didn't have an approach against Afghanistan
because you didn't have an approach against Pakistan. And until we could get
that right, we didn't have a policy.
KERREY: Thank you for
answering my question.
RICE: You're welcome.
KERREY: Let me ask you
another question. Here's the problem that I have as I _ again, it's
hindsight. I appreciate that. But here's the problem that a lot of people are
having with this July 5th meeting.
You and Andy Card meet
with Dick Clarke in the morning. You say you have a meeting, he meets in the
afternoon. It's July 5th.
Kristen Breitweiser,
who's a part of the families group, testified at the Joint Committee. She
brings very painful testimony, I must say.
But here's what Agent
Kenneth Williams said five days later. He said that the FBI should
investigate whether Al Qaida operatives are training at U.S. flight schools.
He posited that Osama bin Laden followers might be trying to infiltrate the
civil aviation system as pilots, security guards and other personnel. He
recommended a national program to track suspicious flight schools.
Now, one of the first
things that I learned when I came into this town was the FBI and the CIA
don't talk. I mean, I don't need a catastrophic event to know that the CIA
and the FBI don't do a very good job of communicating.
And the problem we've
got with this and the Moussaoui facts, which were revealed on the 15th of
August, all it had to do was to be put on Intelink. All it had to do is go
out on Intelink, and the game's over. It ends. This conspiracy would have
been rolled up.
KERREY: And so I...
RICE: Commissioner,
with all due respect, I don't agree that we know that we had somehow a silver
bullet here that was going to work.
What we do know is that
we did have a systemic problem, a structural problem between the FBI and the
CIA. It was a long time in coming into being. It was there because there were
legal impediments, as well as bureaucratic impediments. Those needed to be
overcome.
Obviously, the
structure of the FBI that did not get information from the field offices up
to FBI Central, in a way that FBI Central could react to the whole range of
information reports, was a problem..
KERREY: But, Dr. Rice,
everybody...
RICE: But the structure
of the FBI, the restructuring of the FBI, was not going to be done in the 233
days in which we were in office...
KERREY: Dr. Rice,
everybody who does national security in this town knows the FBI and the CIA
don't talk. So if you have a meeting on the 5th of July, where you're trying
to make certain that your domestic agencies are preparing a defense against a
possible attack, you knew Al Qaida cells were in the United States, you've
got to follow up.
KERRY: And the question
is, what was your follow-up? What's the paper trail that shows that you and
Andy Card followed up from this meeting, and...
RICE: I followed...
KERREY: ... made
certain that the FBI and the CIA were talking?
RICE: I followed up
with Dick Clarke, who had in his group, and with him, the key
counterterrorism person for the FBI. You have to remember that Louis Freeh
was, by this time, gone. And so, the chief counterterrorism person was the
second _ Louis Freeh had left in late June. And so the chief counterterrorism
person for the FBI was working these issues, was working with Dick Clarke. I
talked to Dick Clarke about this all the time.
RICE: But let's be very
clear, the threat information that we were dealing with _ and when you have
something that says, something very big may happen, you have no time, you
have no place, you have no how, the ability to somehow respond to that threat
is just not there.
Now, you said...
KERREY: Dr. Clarke, in
the spirit of further declassification...
RICE: Sir, with all...
KERREY: The spirit...
RICE: I don't think I
look like Dick Clarke, but...
(LAUGHTER)
KERREY: Dr. Rice,
excuse me.
RICE: Thank you.
KEAN: This is the last
question, Senator.
KERREY: Actually it
won't be a question.
In the spirit of
further declassification, this is what the August 6th memo said to the
president: that the FBI indicates patterns of suspicious activity in the
United States consistent with preparations for hijacking.
That's the language of
the memo that was briefed to the president on the 6th of August.
RICE: And that was
checked out and steps were taken through FAA circulars to warn of hijackings.
But when you cannot
tell people where a hijacking might occur, under what circumstances _ I can
tell you that I think the best antidote to what happened in that regard would
have been many years before to think about what you could do for instance to
harden cockpits.
That would have made a
difference. We weren't going to harden cockpits in the three months that we
had a threat spike.
The really difficult
thing for all of us, and I'm sure for those who came before us as well as for
those of us who are here, is that the structural and systematic changes that
needed to be made _ not on July 5th or not on June 25th or not on January 1st
_ those structures and those changes needed to be made a long time ago so
that the country was in fact hardened against the kind of threat that we
faced on September 11th.
The problem was that
for a country that had not been attacked on its territory in a major way in
almost 200 years, there were a lot of structural impediments to those kinds
of attacks. RICE: Those changes should have been made over a long period of
time.
I fully agree with you
that, in hindsight, now looking back, there are many things structurally that
were out of kilter. And one reason that we're here is to look at what was out
of kilter structurally, to look at needed to be done, to look at what we
already have done, and to see what more we need to do.
But I think it is
really quite unfair to suggest that something that was a threat spike in June
or July gave you the kind of opportunity to make the changes in air security
that could have been _ that needed to be made.
KEAN: Secretary Lehman?
LEHMAN: Thank you.
Dr. Rice, I'd like to
ask you whether you agree with the testimony we had from Mr. Clarke that,
when asked whether if all of his recommendations during the transition or
during the period when his, quote, hair was on fire, had been followed
immediately, would it have prevented 9/11, he said no. Do you agree with
that?
RICE: I agree
completely with that.
LEHMAN: In a way, one
of the criticisms that has been made _ or one of the, perhaps, excuses for an
inefficient hand-off of power at the change, the transition, is, indeed,
something we're going to be looking into in depth.
Because of the
circumstances of the election, it was the shortest handover in memory. But in
many ways, really, it was the longest handover, certainly in my memory. Because
while the Cabinet changed, virtually all of the national and domestic
security agencies and executive action agencies remained the same _
combination of political appointees from the previous administration and
career appointees _ CIA, FBI, JCS, the CTC, the Counter-Terrorism Center, the
DIA, the NSA, the director of operations in CIA, the director of
intelligence.
LEHMAN: So you really
up almost until, with the exception of the INS head leaving and there be an
acting, and Louis Freeh leaving in June, you essentially had the same
government.
Now, that raises two
questions in my mind.
One, a whole series of
questions. What were you told by this short transition from Mr. Berger and
associates and the long transition leading up to 9/11 by those officials
about a number of key issues?
And I'd like to ask
them quickly in turn.
And the other is, I'm
struck by the continuity of the policies rather than the differences.
And both of these sets
of questions are really directed toward what I think is the real purpose of
this commission.
While it's certainly a
lot more fun to be doing the, Who struck John? and pointing fingers as which
policy was more urgent or more important, so forth, the real business of this
commission is to learn the lessons and to find the ways to fix those
dysfunctions. And that's why we have unanimity and true nonpartisanship on
this commission. So that's what's behind the rhetoric that's behind the
questioning that we have.
First, during the short
or long transition, were you told before the summer that there were
functioning Al Qaida cells in the United States?
RICE: In the memorandum
that Dick Clarke sent me on January 25th, he mentions sleeper cells. There is
no mention or recommendation of anything that needs to be done about them.
And the FBI was pursuing them.
And usually when things
come to me, it's because I'm supposed to do something about it, and there was
no indication that the FBI was not adequately pursuing the sleeper cells.
LEHMAN: Were you told
that there were numerous young Arab males in flight training, had taken
flight training, were in flight training?
RICE: I was not. And
I'm not sure that that was known at the center.
LEHMAN: Were you told
that the U.S. Marshal program had been changed to drop any U.S. marshals on
domestic flights?
RICE: I was not told
that.
LEHMAN: Were you told
that the red team in FAA _ the red teams for 10 years had reported their hard
data that the U.S. airport security system never got higher than 20 percent
effective and was usually down around 10 percent for 10 straight years?
RICE: To the best of my
recollection, I was not told that.
LEHMAN: Were you aware
that INS had been lobbying for years to get the airlines to drop the transit
without visa loophole that enabled terrorists and illegals to simply buy a
ticket through the transit-without- visa-waiver and pay the airlines extra
money and come in?
RICE: I learned about
that after September 11th.
LEHMAN: Were you aware
that the INS had quietly, internally, halved its internal security
enforcement budget?
RICE: I was not made
aware of that. I don't remember being made aware of that, no.
LEHMAN: Were you aware
that it was the U.S. government established policy not to question or oppose
the sanctuary policies of New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, San Diego
for political reasons, which policy in those cities prohibited the local
police from cooperating at all with federal immigration authorities?
RICE: I do not believe
I was aware of that.
LEHMAN: Were you aware
_ to shift a little bit to Saudi Arabia _ were you aware of the program that
was well established that allowed Saudi citizens to get visas without
interviews?
RICE: I learned of that
after 9/11.
LEHMAN: Were you aware
of the activities of the Saudi ministry of religious affairs here in the
United States during that transition?
RICE: I believe that
only after September 11th did the full extent of what was going on with the
ministry of religious affairs became evident.
LEHMAN: Were you aware
of the extensive activities of the Saudi government in supporting over 300
radical teaching schools and mosques around the country, including right here
in the United States?
RICE: I believe we've
learned a great deal more about this and addressed it with the Saudi
government since 9/11.
LEHMAN: Were you aware
at the time of the fact that Saudi Arabia had and were you told that they had
in their custody the CFO and the closest confidant of Al Qaida _ of Osama bin
Laden, and refused direct access to the United States?
RICE: I don't remember
anything of that kind.
LEHMAN: Were you aware
that they would not cooperate and give us access to the perpetrators of the
Khobar Towers attack?
RICE: I was very
involved in issues concerning Khobar Towers and our relations with several
governments concerning Khobar Towers.
LEHMAN: Thank you.
Were you aware _ and it
disturbs me a bit, and again, let me shift to the continuity issues here.
Were you aware that it
was the policy of the Justice Department _ and I'd like you to comment as to
whether these continuities are still in place _ before I go to Justice, were
you aware that it was the policy and I believe remains the policy today to
fine airlines if they have more than two young Arab males in secondary
questioning because that's discriminatory?
RICE: No, I have to say
that the kind of inside arrangements for the FAA are not really in my...
LEHMAN: Well, these are
not so inside.
Were you aware that the
FAA up until 9/11 thought it was perfectly permissible to allow four-inch
knife blades aboard?
RICE: I was not aware.
LEHMAN: OK.
Back to Justice. I was
disturbed to hear you say on the continuity line that President Bush's first
reaction to 9/11 and the question of Al Qaida's involvement was we must bring
him to justice, because we have had dozens and dozens of interviewees and
witnesses say that a fundamental problem of the dysfunction between CIA and
Justice was the criminal _ the attitude that law enforcement was what
terrorism was all about and not prevention and foreign policy.
I think that there was
at the time a very strictly enforced wall in the Justice Department between
law enforcement and intelligence and that repeatedly, there are many
statements from presidents and attorneys general and so forth that say that
the first priority is bring these people to justice, protect the evidence,
seal the evidence and so forth.
LEHMAN: Do you believe
this has changed?
RICE: I certainly
believe that that has changed, Commissioner Lehman.
Let me just go back for
one second, though, on the long list of questions that you asked.
I think another
structural problem for the United States is that we really didn't have anyone
trying to put together all of the kinds of issues that you raised, about what
we were doing with INS, what we were doing with borders, what we were doing
with visas, what we were doing with airport security. And that's the reason
that, first, the Homeland Security Council, and then Tom Ridge's initial job,
and then the Homeland Security Department is so important, because you can
then look at the whole spectrum of protecting our borders from all kinds of
threats and say, what kinds of policies make sense and what kinds of policies
don't?
And they now actually
have someone who looks at critical infrastructure protection, looks at
airport security, understands in greater detail than I think the national
security adviser could ever understand all of the practices of what is going
on in transportation security. That's why it is important that we made the
change that we did.
As to some of the
questions concerning the Saudis: I think that we have had, really, very good
cooperation with Saudi Arabia since 9/11, and since the May 12th attacks on
Riyadh even greater cooperation, because Saudi Arabia is I think fully
enlisted in the war on terrorism. And we need to understand that there were
certain things that we didn't even understand were going on inside the United
States.
RICE: It's not terribly
surprising that the Saudis didn't understand some of the things that were
going on in their country.
As to your last
question, though, I think that that's actually where we've had the biggest
change. The president doesn't think of this as law enforcement. He thinks of
this as war.
And for all of the
rhetoric of war prior to 9/11 _ people who said we're at war with the
jihadist network, people who said that they've declared war on us and we're
at war with them _ we weren't at war. We weren't on war footing. We weren't
behaving in that way.
We were still very
focused on rendition of terrorists, on law enforcement. And, yes, from time
to time we did military plans, or use the cruise missile strike here or
there, but we did not have a sustained systematic effort to destroy Al Qaida,
to deal with those who harbored Al Qaida.
One of the points that
the president made in his very first speech on the night of September 11th
was that it's not just the terrorists, it's those who harbor them, too. And
he put states on notice that they were going to be responsible if they
sponsor terrorists or if they acquiesced in terrorists being there.
And when he said, I
want to bring them to justice, again, I think there was a little bit of
nervousness about talking about exactly what that means.
But I don't think
there's anyone in America who doesn't understand that this president believes
that we're at war, it's a war we have to win, and that it is a war that
cannot be fought on the defensive. It's a war that has to be fought on the
offense.
LEHMAN: Thank you. Are
you sure that the...
KEAN: Last question,
Secretary.
LEHMAN: As a last
question, tell us what you really recommend we should address our attentions
to to fix this as the highest priority. Not just moving boxes around, but
what can you tell us in public here that we could do, since we are outside
the legislature and outside the executive branch and can bring the focus of
attention for change? Tell us what you recommend we do.
RICE: My greatest
concern is that, as September 11th recedes from memory, that we will begin to
unlearn the lessons of what we've learned.
RICE: And I think this
commission can be very important in helping us to focus on those lessons and
then to make sure that the structures of government reflect those lessons,
because those structures of government now are going to have to last us for a
very long time.
I think we've done,
under the president's leadership, we've done extremely important structural
change. We've reorganized the government in a greater way than has been done
since the 1947 National Security Act created the Department of Defense, the
CIA and the National Security Council.
I think that we need to
_ we have a major reorganization of the FBI, where Bob Mueller is trying very
hard not to just move boxes but to change incentives, to change culture.
Those are all very hard things to do.
I think there have been
very important changes made between the CIA and FBI. Yes, everybody knew that
they had trouble sharing, but in fact, we had legal restrictions to their
sharing. And George Tenet and Louis Freeh and others have worked very hard at
that. But until the Patriot Act, we couldn't do what we needed to do.
And now I hear people
who question the need for the Patriot Act, question whether or not the
Patriot Act is infringing on our civil liberties. I think that you can
address this hard question of the balance that we as an open society need to
achieve between the protection of our country and the need to remain the open
society, the welcoming society that we are. And I think you're in a better
position to address that than anyone.
And I do want you to
know that when you have addressed it, the president is not going to just be
interested in the recommendations. I think he's going to be interested in
knowing how we can press forward in ways that will make us safer.
The other thing that I
hope you will do is to take a look back again at the question that keeps
arising. I think Senator Gorton was going after this question. I've heard
Senator Kerrey talk about it, which is, you know, the country, like
democracies do, waited and waited and waited as this threat gathered.
KERRY: And the question
is, what was your follow-up? What's the paper trail that shows that you and
Andy Card followed up from this meeting, and ...
RICE: I followed ...
KERREY: ... made
certain that the FBI and the CIA were talking?
RICE: I followed up
with Dick Clarke, who had in his group, and with him, the key
counterterrorism person for the FBI. You have to remember that Louis Freeh
was, by this time, gone. And so, the chief counterterrorism person was the
second _ Louis Freeh had left in late June. And so the chief counterterrorism
person for the FBI was working these issues, was working with Dick Clarke. I
talked to Dick Clarke about this all the time.
RICE: But let's be very
clear, the threat information that we were dealing with _ and when you have
something that says, something very big may happen, you have no time, you
have no place, you have no how, the ability to somehow respond to that threat
is just not there.
Now, you said ...
KERREY: Dr. Clarke, in
the spirit of further declassification ...
RICE: Sir, with all ...
KERREY: The spirit ...
RICE: I don't think I
look like Dick Clarke, but ...
(LAUGHTER)
KERREY: Dr. Rice,
excuse me.
RICE: Thank you.
KEAN: This is the last
question, Senator.
KERREY: Actually it
won't be a question.
In the spirit of
further declassification, this is what the August 6th memo said to the
president: that the FBI indicates patterns of suspicious activity in the
United States consistent with preparations for hijacking.
That's the language of
the memo that was briefed to the president on the 6th of August.
RICE: And that was
checked out and steps were taken through FAA circulars to warn of hijackings.
But when you cannot
tell people where a hijacking might occur, under what circumstances _ I can
tell you that I think the best antidote to what happened in that regard would
have been many years before to think about what you could do for instance to
harden cockpits.
That would have made a
difference. We weren't going to harden cockpits in the three months that we
had a threat spike.
The really difficult
thing for all of us, and I'm sure for those who came before us as well as for
those of us who are here, is that the structural and systematic changes that
needed to be made _ not on July 5th or not on June 25th or not on January 1st
_ those structures and those changes needed to be made a long time ago so
that the country was in fact hardened against the kind of threat that we
faced on September 11th.
The problem was that
for a country that had not been attacked on its territory in a major way in
almost 200 years, there were a lot of structural impediments to those kinds
of attacks. Those changes should have been made over a long period of time.
I fully agree with you
that, in hindsight, now looking back, there are many things structurally that
were out of kilter. And one reason that we're here is to look at what was out
of kilter structurally, to look at needed to be done, to look at what we
already have done, and to see what more we need to do.
But I think it is
really quite unfair to suggest that something that was a threat spike in June
or July gave you the kind of opportunity to make the changes in air security
that could have been _ that needed to be made.
KEAN: Secretary Lehman?
LEHMAN: Thank you.
Dr. Rice, I'd like to
ask you whether you agree with the testimony we had from Mr. Clarke that,
when asked whether if all of his recommendations during the transition or
during the period when his, quote, hair was on fire, had been followed
immediately, would it have prevented 9-11, he said no. Do you agree with
that?
RICE: I agree
completely with that.
LEHMAN: In a way, one
of the criticisms that has been made _ or one of the, perhaps, excuses for an
inefficient hand-off of power at the change, the transition, is, indeed,
something we're going to be looking into in depth.
Because of the
circumstances of the election, it was the shortest handover in memory. But in
many ways, really, it was the longest handover, certainly in my memory. Because
while the Cabinet changed, virtually all of the national and domestic
security agencies and executive action agencies remained the same _
combination of political appointees from the previous administration and
career appointees _ CIA, FBI, JCS, the CTC, the Counter-Terrorism Center, the
DIA, the NSA, the director of operations in CIA, the director of
intelligence.
LEHMAN: So you really
up almost until, with the exception of the INS head leaving and there be an
acting, and Louis Freeh leaving in June, you essentially had the same
government.
Now, that raises two
questions in my mind.
One, a whole series of
questions. What were you told by this short transition from Mr. Berger and
associates and the long transition leading up to 9-11 by those officials
about a number of key issues?
And I'd like to ask
them quickly in turn.
And the other is, I'm
struck by the continuity of the policies rather than the differences.
And both of these sets
of questions are really directed toward what I think is the real purpose of
this commission.
While it's certainly a
lot more fun to be doing the Who-struck-John? and pointing fingers as which
policy was more urgent or more important, so forth, the real business of this
commission is to learn the lessons and to find the ways to fix those
dysfunctions. And that's why we have unanimity and true nonpartisanship on
this commission. So that's what's behind the rhetoric that's behind the
questioning that we have.
First, during the short
or long transition, were you told before the summer that there were
functioning al-Qaida cells in the United States?
RICE: And we didn't
respond by saying, We're at war with them. Now we're going to use all means
of our national assets to go against them. There are other threats that gather
against us.
And what we should have
learned from September 11th is that you have to be bold and you have to be
decisive and you have to be on the offensive, because we're never going to be
able to completely defend.
LEHMAN: Thank you very
much.
KEAN: Congressman
Roemer?
ROEMER: Thank you, Mr.
Chairman.
Welcome, Dr. Rice. And
I just want to say to you you've made it through 2 1/2 hours so far with only
Governor Thompson to go. And if you'd like a break of five minutes, I'd be
happy to yield you some of Governor Thompson's time.
(LAUGHTER)
Dr. Rice, you have said
in your statement, which I find very interesting, The terrorists were at war
with us, but we were not at war with them.
Across several
administrations of both parties, the response was insufficient. And
tragically, for all the language of war spoken before September 11th, this
country simply was not on a war footing.
You're the national
security advisor to the president of the United States. The buck may stop
with the president; the buck certainly goes directly through you as the
principal advisor to the president on these issues.
And it really seems to
me that there were failures and mistakes, structural problems, all kinds of
issues here leading up to September 11th that could have and should have been
done better.
Doesn't that beg that
there should have been more accountability? That there should have been a
resignation or two? That there should have been you or the president saying
to the rest of the administration, somehow, somewhere, that this was not done
well enough?
RICE: Mr. Roemer, by
definition, we didn't have enough information, we didn't have enough
protection, because the attack happened _ by definition. And I think we've
all asked ourselves, what more could have been done?
I will tell you if we
had known that an attack was coming against the United States, that an attack
was coming against New York and Washington, we would have moved heaven and
earth to stop it.
But you heard the
character of the threat report we were getting: something very, very big is
going to happen. How do you act on
something very, very
big is going to happen beyond trying to put people on alert? Most of the
threat reporting was abroad.
I took an oath, as I've
said, to protect...
ROEMER: I've heard it _
I've heard you say this....
RICE: And I take it
very seriously. I know that those who attacked us that day _ and attacked us,
by the way, because of who we are, no other reason, but for who we are _ that
they are the responsible party for the war that they launched against us...
ROEMER: But Dr. Rice...
RICE: ... the attacks
that they made, and that our responsibility...
ROEMER: You have said
several times...
RICE: ... that our
responsibility is to...
ROEMER: You have said
several times that your responsibility, being in office for 230 days, was to
defend and protect the United States.
RICE: Of course.
ROEMER: You had an
opportunity, I think, with Mr. Clarke, who had served a number of presidents
going back to the Reagan administration; who you'd decided to keep on in
office; who was a pile driver, a bulldozer, so to speak _ but this person who
you, in the Woodward interview _ he's the very first name out of your mouth
when you suspect that terrorists have attacked us on September the 11th. You
say, I think, immediately it was a terrorist attack; get Dick Clarke, the
terrorist guy.
ROEMER: Even before you
mentioned Tenet and Rumsfeld's names, Get Dick Clarke.
Why don't you get Dick
Clarke to brief the president before 9/11? Here is one of the consummate
experts that never has the opportunity to brief the president of the United
States on one of the most lethal, dynamic and agile threats to the United
States of America.
Why don't you use this
asset? Why doesn't the president ask to meet with Dick Clarke?
RICE: Well, the
president was meeting with his director of central intelligence. And Dick
Clarke is a very, very fine counterterrorism expert _ and that's why I kept
him on.
And what I wanted Dick
Clarke to do was to manage the crisis for us and help us develop a new
strategy. And I can guarantee you, when we had that new strategy in place,
the president _ who was asking for it and wondering what was happening to it
_ was going to be in a position to engage it fully.
The fact is that what
Dick Clarke recommended to us, as he has said, would not have prevented 9/11.
I actually would say that not only would it have not prevented 9/11, but if
we had done everything on that list, we would have actually been off in the
wrong direction about the importance that we needed to attach to a new policy
for Afghanistan and a new policy for Pakistan.
Because even though
Dick is a very fine counterterrorism expert, he was not a specialist on
Afghanistan. That's why I brought somebody in who really understood
Afghanistan. He was not a specialist on Pakistan. That's why I brought
somebody in to deal with Pakistan. He had some very good ideas. We acted on
them.
RICE: Dick Clarke _ let
me just step back for a second and say we had a very _ we had a very good
relationship.
ROEMER: Yes. I'd
appreciate it if you could be very concise here, so I can get to some more
issues.
RICE: But all that he
needed _ all that he needed to do was to say, I need time to brief the
president on something. But...
ROEMER: I think he did
say that. Dr. Rice, in a private interview to us he said he asked to brief
the president...
RICE: Well, I have to
say _ I have to say, Mr. Roemer, to my recollection...
ROEMER: You say he didn't.
RICE: ... Dick Clarke
never asked me to brief the president on counterterrorism. He did brief the
president later on cybersecurity, in July, but he, to my recollection, never
asked.
And my senior directors
have an open door to come and say, I think the president needs to do this. I
think the president needs to do that. He needs to make this phone call. He
needs to hear this briefing. It's not hard to get done.
But I just think
that...
ROEMER: Let me ask you
a question. You just said that the intelligence coming in indicated a big,
big, big threat. Something was going to happen very soon and be potentially
catastrophic.
I don't understand,
given the big threat, why the big principals don't get together. The
principals meet 33 times in seven months, on Iraq, on the Middle East, on
missile defense, China, on Russia. Not once do the principals ever sit down _
you, in your job description as the national security advisor, the secretary
of state, the secretary of defense, the president of the United States _ and
meet solely on terrorism to discuss in the spring and the summer, when these
threats are coming in, when you've known since the transition that Al Qaida
cells are in the United States, when, as the PDB said on August, bin Laden
determined to attack the United States.
Why don't the
principals at that point say, Let's all talk about this, let's get the
biggest people together in our government and discuss what this threat is and
try to get our bureaucracies responding to it ?
RICE: Once again, on
the August 6th memorandum to the president, this was not threat-reporting
about what was about to happen. This was an analytic piece that stood back
and answered questions from the president.
But as to the
principals meetings...
ROEMER: It has six or
seven things in it, Dr. Rice, including the Ressam case when he attacked the
United States in the millennium.
RICE: Yes, these are
his...
ROEMER: Has the FBI
saying that they think that there are conditions.
RICE: No, it does not
have the FBI saying that they think that there are conditions. It has the FBI
saying that they observed some suspicious activity. That was checked out with
the FBI.
ROEMER: That is equal
to what might be...
RICE: No.
ROEMER: ... conditions
for an attack.
RICE: Mr. Roemer, Mr.
Roemer, threat reporting...
ROEMER: Would you say,
Dr. Rice, that we should make that PDB a public document...
RICE: Mr. Roemer...
ROEMER: ... so we can
have this conversation?
RICE: Mr. Roemer,
threat reporting is: We believe that something is going to happen here and at
this time, under these circumstances. This was not threat reporting.
ROEMER: Well,
actionable intelligence, Dr. Rice, is when you have the place, time and date.
The threat reporting saying the United States is going to be attacked should
trigger the principals getting together to say we're going to do something
about this, I would think.
RICE: Mr. Roemer, let's
be very clear. The PDB does not say the United States is going to be
attacked. It says bin Laden would like to attack the United States. I don't
think you, frankly, had to have that report to know that bin Laden would like
to attack the United States.
ROEMER: So why aren't
you doing something about that earlier than August 6th?
(APPLAUSE)
RICE: The threat
reporting to which we could respond was in June and July about threats
abroad. What we tried to do for -- just because people said you cannot rule out
an attack on the United States, was to have the domestic agencies and the FBI
together to just pulse them and have them be on alert.
ROEMER: I agree with
that.
RICE: But there was
nothing that suggested there was going to be a threat...
ROEMER: I agree with
that.
RICE: ... to the United
States.
ROEMER: I agree with
that.
So, Dr. Rice, let's say
that the FBI is the key here. You say that the FBI was tasked with trying to
find out what the domestic threat was.
We have done thousands
of interviews here at the 9/11 Commission. We've gone through literally
millions of pieces of paper. To date, we have found nobody -- nobody at the
FBI who knows anything about a tasking of field offices.
We have talked to the
director at the time of the FBI during this threat period, Mr. Pickard. He
says he did not tell the field offices to do this.
And we have talked to
the special agents in charge. They don't have any recollection of receiving a
notice of threat.
Nothing went down the
chain to the FBI field offices on spiking of information, on knowledge of Al
Qaida in the country, and still, the FBI doesn't do anything.
Isn't that some of the
responsibility of the national security advisor?
RICE: The responsibility
for the FBI to do what it was asked was the FBI's responsibility. Now, I...
ROEMER: You don't think
there's any responsibility back to the advisor to the president...
RICE: I believe that
the responsibility -- again, the crisis management here was done by the CSG.
They tasked these things. If there was any reason to believe that I needed to
do something or that Andy Card needed to do something, I would have been
expected to be asked to do it. We were not asked to do it. In fact, as
I've...
ROEMER: But don't you
ask somebody to do it? You're not asking somebody to do it. Why wouldn't you
initiate that?
RICE: Mr. Roemer, I was
responding to the threat spike and to where the information was. The
information was about what might happen in the Persian Gulf, what might
happen in Israel, what might happen in North Africa. We responded to that,
and we responded vigorously.
Now, the structure...
ROEMER: Dr. Rice, let
me ask you...
RICE: ... of the FBI,
you will get into next week.
ROEMER: You've been
helpful to us on that -- on your recommendation.
KEAN: Last question,
Congressman.
ROEMER: Last question,
Dr. Rice, talking about responses.
Mr. Clarke writes you a
memo on September the 4th, where he lays out his frustration that the
military is not doing enough, that the CIA is not pushing as hard enough in
their agency. And he says we should not wait until the day that hundreds of
Americans lay dead in the streets due to a terrorist attack and we think
there could have been something more we could do.
ROEMER: Seven days
prior to September the 11th, he writes this to you.
What's your reaction to
that at the time, and what's your response to that at the time?
RICE: Just one final
point I didn't quite complete. I, of course, did understand that the attorney
general needed to know what was going on, and I asked that he take the
briefing and then ask that he be briefed.
Because, again, there
was nothing demonstrating or showing that something was coming in the United
States. If there had been something, we would have acted on it.
ROEMER: I think we
should make this document public, Dr. Rice. Would you support making the
August 6th PDB public?
RICE: The August 6th
PDB has been available to you. You are describing it. And the August 6th PDB
was a response to questions asked by the president, not a warning document.
ROEMER: Why wouldn't it
be made public then?
RICE: Now, as to _ I
think you know the sensitivity of presidential decision memoranda. And I
think you know the great lengths to which we have gone to make it possible
for this commission to view documents that are not generally _ I don't know
if they've ever been _ made available in quite this way.
Now, as to what Dick
Clarke said on September 4th, that was not a premonition, nor a warning. What
that memorandum was, as I was getting ready to go into the September 4th
principals meeting to review the NSPD and to approve the new NSPD, what it
was a warning to me that the bureaucracies would try to undermine it.
Dick goes into great
and emotional detail about the long history of how DOD has never been
responsive, how the CIA has never been responsive, about how the Predator has
gotten hung up because the CIA doesn't really want to fly it.
And he says, if you
don't fight through this bureaucracy _ he says, at one point, They're going
to all sign on to this NSPD because they won't want to be associated _ they
won't want to say they don't want to eliminate the threat of Al Qaida. He
says, But, in effect, you have to go in there and push them, because we'll all
wonder about the day when thousands of Americans and so forth and so on.
RICE: So that's what
this document is. It's not a warning document. It's not a _ all of us had
this fear.
I think that the
chairman mentioned that I said this in an interview, that we would hope not
to get to that day. But it would not be appropriate or correct to
characterize what Dick wrote to me on September 4th as a warning of an
impending attack. What he was doing was, I think, trying to buck me up, so
that when I went into this principals meeting, I was sufficiently on guard
against the kind of bureaucratic inertia that he had fought all of his life.
ROEMER: What is a
warning, if August 6th isn't and September 4th isn't, to you?
RICE: Well, August 6th
is most certainly an historical document that says, Here's how you might
think about Al Qaida. A warning is when you have something that suggests that
an attack is impending.
And we did not have, on
the United States, threat information that was, in any way, specific enough
to suggest that something was coming in the United States.
The September 4th memo,
as I've said to you, was a warning to me not to get dragged down by the
bureaucracy, not a warning about September 11th.
ROEMER: Thank you, Dr.
Rice.
Thank you, Mr.
Chairman.
KEAN: Thank you,
Congressman, very, very much.
Our last questioner
will be Governor Thompson.
THOMPSON: Thank you,
Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Rice, first, thank
you for your service to this nation and this president. I think you can
fairly be described by all, whether they agree with you or not, on various
issues, as devoted to the interests of the president and the country. And all
Americans, I believe, appreciate that.
Thank you also for
finally making it here. THOMPSON: I know there was a struggle over
constitutional principles. I don't think your appearance today signals any
retreat by the president from the notion that the Congress should not be
allowed to hail presidential aides down to the Capitol and question them.
We are not the
Congress. We are not a congressional committee. That's why you gave us the
PDBs.
And so, we appreciate
your appearance and we appreciate the decision of the president to allow you
to appear to not just answer our questions _ because you've done that for
five hours in private _ but to answer the questions of Americans who are
watching you today.
I'm going to go through
my questions _ some of which have been tossed out because my brothers and
sisters asked them before me _ as quickly as I can because we have to depart.
And I would appreciate it if you would go through your answers as quickly as
you could, but be fair to yourself.
I don't believe in
beating dead horses, but there's a bunch of lame ones running around here
today. Let's see if we can't finally push them out the door.
Please describe to us
your relationship with Dick Clarke, because I think that bears on the context
of this _ well, let's just take the first question.
He said he gave you a
plan. You said he didn't give you a plan. It's clear that what he did give
you was a memo that had attached to it, not only the Delenda plan _ or
whatever you want to describe Delenda as _ but a December 2000 strategy
paper.
Was this something that
you were supposed to act on, or was this a compilation of what had been
pending at the time the Clinton administration had left office but had not
been acted on, or was this something he tried to get acted on by the Clinton
administration and they didn't act on it?
THOMPSON: What was it?
How did he describe it to you? What did you understand it to be?
RICE: What I understood
it to be was a series of decisions, near-term decisions that were pending
from the Clinton administration, things like whether to arm the Uzbeks _ I'm
sorry _ whether to give further counterterrorism support to the Uzbeks,
whether to arm the Northern Alliance _ a whole set of specific issues that
needed decision. And we made those decisions prior to the strategy being
developed.
He also had attached
the Delenda plan, which is my understanding was developed in 1998, never
adopted and, in fact, had some ideas. I said, Dick, take the ideas that
you've put in this think piece, take the ideas that were there in the Delenda
plan, put it together into a strategy, not to roll back Al Qaida _ which had
been the goal of the Clinton _ of what Dick Clarke wrote to us _ but rather
to eliminate this threat. And he was to put that strategy together.
But by no means did he
ask me to act on a plan. He gave us a series of ideas. We acted on those. And
then he gave me some papers that had a number of ideas, more questions than
answers about how we might get better cooperation, for instance, from
Pakistan. We took those ideas. We gave him the opportunity to write a
comprehensive strategy.
THOMPSON: I'd like to
follow up on one of Commissioner Roemer's questions, the principals meetings.
With all due respect to
the principals, Cabinet officers of the president of the United States,
Senate confirmed, the notion that when principals gather the heavens open and
the truth pours forth is, to borrow the phrase of one of my fellow
commissioners, a little bit of hooey, I think.
Isn't it a fact that
when principals gather in principals meetings they bring their staffs with
them? Don't they line the walls? Don't they talk to each other? Doesn't the
staff speak up?
RICE: Well, actually
when you have principals meetings they really sometimes are to tell _ for the
principals to say what their staffs have said _ have told them to say.
THOMPSON: Right.
RICE: I just have to
say we may simply disagree on this with some of the commissioners. I do not
believe that there was a lack of high-level attention. The president was
paying attention to this. How much higher level can you get?
The secretary of state
and the secretary of defense and the attorney general and the line officers
are responsible for responding to the information that they were given and
they were responding.
The problem is that the
United States was effectively blind to what was about to happen to it and you
cannot depend on the chance that some principal might find out something in
order to prevent an attack. That's why the structural changes that are being
talked about here are so important.
THOMPSON: What you say
in your statement before us today on page 2 reminds me that terrorism had a
different face in the 20th century than it does today. I just want to be sure
I understand the attitude of the Bush administration, because you referenced the
Lusitania and the Nazis and all these state-sponsored terrorist activities
when we know today that the real threat is from either rogue states _ Iran,
North Korea _ or from stateless terrorist organizations _ Al Qaida,
Hezbollah, Hamas. Does the Bush administration get this difference?
RICE: We certainly
understand fully that there are groups, networks that are operating out
there. The only thing I would say is that they are much more effective when
they can count on a state either to sponsor them or to protect them or to
acquiesce in their activities. That's why the policy that we developed was so
insistent on sanctuaries being taken away from them. You do have to take away
their territory. When they can get states to cooperate with them or when they
can get states to acquiesce in their being on their territory, they're much
more effective.
THOMPSON: The Cole _
why didn't the Bush administration respond to the Cole?
RICE: I think Secretary
Rumsfeld has perhaps said it best.
We really thought that
the Cole incident was passed, that you didn't want to respond tit-for-tat. As
I've said, there is strategic response and tactical response.
And just responding to
another attack in an insufficient way we thought would actually probably
embolden the terrorists. They had been emboldened by everything else that had
been done to them. And that the best course was to look ahead to a more
aggressive strategy against them.
I still believe to this
day that the Al Qaida were prepared for a response to the Cole and that, as
some of the intelligence suggested, bin Laden was intending to show that he
yet survived another one, and that it might have been counterproductive.
THOMPSON: I've got to
say that answer bothers me a little bit because of where it logically leads,
and that is _ and I don't like
what if questions, but
this is a what if question.
What if, in March of
2001, under your administration, Al Qaida had blown up another U.S.
destroyer? What would you have done and what _ would that have been
tit-for-tat?
RICE: I don't know what
we would have done, but I do think that we were moving to a different concept
that said that you had to hold at risk what they cared about, not just try
and punish them, not just try to go after bin Laden.
I would like to think
that we might have come to an effective response. I think that in the context
of war, when you're at war with somebody, it's not an issue of every battle
or every skirmish; it's an issue of, can you do strategic damage to this
organization? And we were thinking much more along the lines of strategic
damage.
THOMPSON: Well, I'm
going to sound like my brother Kerrey, which terrifies me somewhat.
(LAUGHTER)
But blowing up our
destroyers is an act of war against us, is it not?
THOMPSON: I mean, how
long would that have to go on before we would respond with an act of war?
RICE: We'd had several
acts of war committed against us. And I think we believed that responding
kind of tit-for-tat, probably with inadequate military options because, for
all the plans that might have been looked at by the Pentagon or on the shelf,
they were not connected to a political policy that was going to change the
circumstances of Al Qaida and the Taliban and therefore the relationship to
Pakistan.
Look, it can be debated
as to whether or not one should have responded to the Cole. I think that we
really believed that an inadequate response was simply going to embolden
them. And I think you've heard that from Secretary Rumsfeld as well, and I
believe we felt very strongly that way.
THOMPSON: I'll tell you
what I find remarkable. One word that hasn't been mentioned once today _ yet
we've talked about structural changes to the FBI and the CIA and cooperation
_ Congress.
Congress has to change
the structure of the FBI. The Congress has to appropriate funds to fight
terrorism. Where was the Congress?
RICE: Well, I think
that when I made the comment that the country was not on war footing, that
didn't just mean the executive branch was not on war footing.
The fact is that many
of the big changes, quite frankly, again, we were not going to be able to
make in 233 days. Some of those big changes do require congressional action.
The Congress cooperated
after September 11th with the president to come up with the Patriot Act,
which does give to the FBI and the CIA and other intelligence agencies the
kind of ability, legal ability, to share between them that was simply not
there before.
You cannot depend on
the chance that something might fall out of a tree. You cannot depend on the
chance that a very good Customs agent, who's doing her job with her
colleagues out in the state of Washington, is going to catch somebody coming
across the border of the United States with bomb-making materials to be the
incident that leads you to be able to respond adequately.
This is hard, because,
again, we have to be right 100 percent of the time, they only have to be
right once. But the structural changes that we've made since 9/11 and the
structural changes that we may have to continue to make give us a better chance
in that fight against the terrorists.
THOMPSON: I read this
week, an interview with Newsweek, with your predecessor, Mr. Brzezinski, he
seemed to be saying that there is a danger that we can obsess about Al Qaida
and lose sight of equal dangers. For example, the rise of a nuclear state,
Iran, in the Middle East, and the apparent connection to Hezbollah and Hamas,
which may forecast even more bitter fighting, as we're now learning in Iraq.
Or the ability of Hezbollah or Hamas to attack us on our soil, within the
Untied States, in the same way Al Qaida did.
Are we keeping an eye
on that?
RICE: We are keeping an
eye and working actively with the international community on Iran and their
nuclear ambitions.
I think the one thing
that the global war on terrorism has allowed us to do is to not just focus on
Al Qaida. Because we have enlisted countries around the world, saying that
terrorism is terrorism is terrorism _ in other words, you can't fight Al
Qaida and hug Hezbollah or hug Hamas _ that we've actually started to
delegitimatize terrorism in a way that it was not before.
We don't make a
distinction between different kinds of terrorism. And we're, therefore,
united with the countries of the world to fight all kinds of terrorism.
Terrorism is never an appropriate or justified response just because of
political difficulty. So, yes, we are keeping an eye on it.
But it speaks to the
point that we, the United States administration, cannot focus just on one
thing. What the war on terrorism has done is it's given us an organizing
principle that allows us to think about terrorism, to think about weapons of
mass destruction, to think about the links between them, and to form a united
front across the world to try and win this war.
THOMPSON: Last simple
question. If we come forward with sweeping recommendations for change in how
our law enforcement and intelligence agencies operate to meet the new
challenges of our time, not the 20th century or the 19th century challenges
we faced in the past, and if the president of the United States agrees with
them, can you assure us that he will fight with all the vigor he has to get
them enacted?
RICE: I can assure you
that if the president agrees with the recommendations, and I think we'll want
to take a hard look at the recommendations, we're going to fight.
Because the real lesson
of September 11th is that the country was not properly structured to deal
with the threats that had been gathering for a long period of time. I think
we're better structured today than we ever have been. We've made a lot of
progress. But we want to hear what further progress we can make.
And because this
president considers his highest calling to protect and defend the people of
the United States of America, he'll fight for any changes that he feels
necessary.
THOMPSON: Thank you,
Dr. Rice.
RICE: Thank you.
(APPLAUSE)
KEAN: Thank you.
I might announce,
before I thank Dr. Rice, that there's a lot of discussion today about the
PDB, the presidential daily briefing, of August 6th.
KEAN: This is not to do
with Dr. Rice. But we have requested from the White House that that be
declassified because we feel it's important that the American people get a
chance to see it. We're awaiting an answer on our request, and hope by next
week's hearing that we might have it.
Dr. Rice, thank you.
You have advanced our understanding of key events. We thank you for all the
time you've given us.
We have a few remaining
classified matter that at some point we'd like to discuss with you in closed
session, if we could...
RICE: Of course.
KEAN: ... and I thank
you for that.
We appreciate very much
your service to the nation.
This concludes our
hearing. The commission will hold its next hearing on April 13th and 14th on
law enforcement and the intelligence community.
Thank you very much.
RICE: Thank you.
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