Testimony (under oath) of Dr. Condolezza Rice on April 8, 2004
before the 9-11 Commission:
RICE: I thank the
commission for arranging this special session. Thank you for helping to find a
way to meet the nation's need to learn all we can about the September 11
attacks, while preserving important constitutional
principles.
This
commission, and those who appear before it, have a vital charge. We owe it to
those we lost, and to their loved ones, and to our country, to learn all we can
about that tragic day, and the events that led to it. Many families of the
victims are here today, and I thank them for their contributions to the
Commission's work.
The terrorist
threat to our nation did not emerge on
The
terrorists were at war with us, but we were not yet at war with them. For more
than 20 years, the terrorist threat gathered, and
Despite the
sinking of the
The
Since then,
After
President Bush was elected, we were briefed by the
This briefing
lasted about one hour, and it reviewed the
Because of
these briefings and because we had watched the rise of al Qaeda over the years, we understood that the network posed a
serious threat to the
On an
operational level, we decided immediately to continue pursuing the
I knew Dick
to be an expert in his field, as well as an experienced crisis manager. Our goal
was to ensure continuity of operations while we developed new and more
aggressive policies.
At the
beginning of the administration, President Bush revived the practice of meeting
with the director of central intelligence almost every day in the Oval Office --
meetings which I attended, along with the vice president and the chief of staff.
At these meetings, the president received up-to-date intelligence and asked
questions of his most senior intelligence officials.
From January
20 through September 10, the president received at these daily meetings more
than 40 briefing items on al Qaeda, and 13 of these
were in response to questions he or his top advisers had posed. In addition to
seeing DCI Tenet almost every morning, I generally spoke by telephone every
morning at
Of course, we
also had other responsibilities. President Bush had set a broad foreign policy
agenda. We were determined to confront the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction. We were improving
We had to
change an
We also moved
to develop a new and comprehensive strategy to eliminate the al Qaeda terrorist network. President Bush understood the
threat, and he understood its importance. He made clear to us that he did not
want to respond to al Qaeda one attack at a time. He
told me he was "tired of swatting flies."
This new
strategy was developed over the Spring and Summer of 2001, and was approved by
the president's senior national security officials on September 4. It was the
very first major national security policy directive of the Bush administration
-- not
Although this
National Security Presidential Directive was originally a highly classified
document, we arranged for portions to be declassified to help the Commission in
its work, and I will describe some of those today. The strategy set as its goal
the elimination of the al Qaeda network.
It ordered
the leadership of relevant
For instance:
It directed the secretary of state to work with other countries to end all
sanctuaries given to al Qaeda. It directed the
secretaries of the treasury and state to work with foreign governments to seize
or freeze assets and holdings of al Qaeda and its
benefactors.
It directed
the director of central intelligence to prepare an aggressive program of covert
activities to disrupt al Qaeda and provide assistance
to anti-Taliban groups operating against al Qaeda in
It tasked the
director of OMB with ensuring that sufficient funds were available in the
budgets over the next five years to meet the goals laid out in the strategy.
And it
directed the secretary of defense to -- and I quote -- "ensure that the
contingency planning process include plans: against al Qaeda and associated terrorist facilities in Afghanistan,
including leadership, command-control-communications, training, and logistics
facilities; against Taliban targets in Afghanistan, including leadership,
command-control, air and air defense, ground forces, and logistics; to eliminate
weapons of mass destruction which al Qaeda and
associated terrorist groups may acquire or manufacture, including those stored
in underground bunkers."
This was a
change from the prior strategy -- Presidential Decision Directive 62, signed in
1998 -- which ordered the secretary of defense to provide transportation to
bring individual terrorists to the
More
importantly, we recognized that no counterterrorism strategy could succeed in
isolation. As you know from the
Integrating
our counterterrorism and regional strategies was the most difficult and the most
important aspect of the new strategy to get right. Al Qaeda was both client of and patron to the Taliban, which in
turn was supported by
Not that we
hadn't tried. Within a month of taking office, President Bush sent a strong,
private message to President Musharraf urging him to
use his influence with the Taliban to bring Bin Laden to justice and to close
down al Qaeda training camps. Secretary Powell
actively urged the Pakistanis, including Musharraf
himself, to abandon support for the Taliban.
I met with
To address
these problems, I made sure to involve key regional experts. I brought in Zalmay Khalilzad, an expert on
I also
ensured the participation of the NSC experts on
Our new
approach to
While we were
developing this new strategy to deal with al Qaeda, we
also made decisions on a number of specific anti-al Qaeda initiatives that had been proposed by Dick Clarke.
Many of these ideas had been deferred by the last administration, and some had
been on the table since 1998.
We increased
counterterror assistance to
When threat
reporting increased during the Spring and Summer of 2001, we moved the U.S.
Government at all levels to a high state of alert and activity. Let me clear up
any confusion about the relationship between the development of our new strategy
and the many actions we took to respond to threats that summer. Policy
development and crisis management require different approaches. Throughout this
period, we did both simultaneously.
For the
essential crisis management task, we depended on the Counterterrorism Security
Group chaired by Dick Clarke to be the interagency nerve center. The CSG
consisted of senior counterterrorism experts from CIA, the FBI, the Department
of Justice, the Defense Department (including the Joint Chiefs of Staff), the
State Department, and the Secret Service.
The CSG had
met regularly for many years, and its members had worked through numerous
periods of heightened threat activity. As threat information increased, the CSG
met more frequently, sometimes daily, to review and analyze the threat reporting
and to coordinate actions in response. CSG members also had ready access to
their Cabinet Secretaries and could raise any concerns they had at the highest
levels.
The threat
reporting that we received in the spring and summer of 2001 was not specific as
to time, nor place, nor manner of attack. Almost all of the reports focused on
al Qaeda activities outside the
In fact, the
information that was specific enough to be actionable referred to terrorist
operations overseas. More often, it was frustratingly vague. Let me read you
some of the actual chatter that we picked up that spring and summer:
"Unbelievable news coming in weeks," "Big event ... there will be a very, very,
very, very big uproar," "There will be attacks in the near
future."
Troubling,
yes. But they don't tell us when; they don't tell us where; they don't tell us
who; and they don't tell us how.
In this
context, I want to address in some detail one of the briefing items we received,
since its content has frequently been mischaracterized.
On
The briefing
item reviewed past intelligence reporting, mostly dating from the 1990s,
regarding possible al Qaeda plans to attack inside the
Despite the
fact that the vast majority of the threat information we received was focused
overseas, I was concerned about possible threats inside the
Later that
same day, Clarke convened a special meeting of his CSG, as well as
representatives from the FAA, the INS, Customs, and the Coast Guard. At that
meeting, these agencies were asked to take additional measures to increase
security and surveillance.
Throughout
this period of heightened threat information, we worked hard on multiple fronts
to detect, protect against, and disrupt any terrorist plans or operations that
might lead to an attack. For instance, the Department of Defense issued at least
five urgent warnings to
The State
Department issued at least four urgent security advisories and public worldwide
cautions on terrorist threats, enhanced security measures at certain embassies,
and warned the Taliban that they would be held responsible for any al Qaeda attack on
The FBI
issued at least three nationwide warnings to Federal, State, and local law
enforcement agencies, and specifically stated that, although the vast majority
of the information indicated overseas targets, attacks against the homeland
could not be ruled out.
The FBI also
tasked all 56 of its
The FAA
issued at least five Civil Aviation Security Information Circulars to all
The CIA
worked round the clock to disrupt threats worldwide. Agency officials launched a
wide-ranging disruption effort against al Qaeda in
more than 20 countries.
During this
period, the vice president, DCI Tenet, and the NSC's
counterterrorism staff called senior foreign officials requesting that they
increase their intelligence assistance and report to us any relevant threat
information.
This is a
brief sample of our intense activity over the Summer of
2001.
Yet, as your
hearings have shown, there was no silver bullet that could have prevented the
9/11 attacks. In hindsight, if anything might have helped stop 9/11, it would
have been better information about threats inside the
So the
attacks came. A band of vicious terrorists tried to decapitate our government,
destroy our financial system, and break the spirit of
Now, we have
an opportunity and an obligation to move forward together. Bold and
comprehensive changes are sometimes only possible in the wake of catastrophic
events -- events which create a new consensus that allows us to transcend old
ways of thinking and acting.
Just as World
War II led to a fundamental reorganization of our national defense structure and
to the creation of the National Security Council, so has September 11 made
possible sweeping changes in the ways we protect our
homeland.
President
Bush is leading the country during this time of crisis and change. He has
unified and streamlined our efforts to secure the American homeland by creating
the Department of Homeland Security, established a new center to integrate and
analyze terrorist threat information, directed the transformation of the FBI
into an agency dedicated to fighting terror, broken down the bureaucratic walls
and legal barriers that prevented the sharing of vital threat information
between our domestic law enforcement and our foreign intelligence agencies, and,
working with the Congress, given officials new tools, such as the Patriot Act,
to find and stop terrorists. And he has done all of this in a way that is
consistent with protecting America's cherished civil liberties and with
preserving our character as a free and open society.
But the
president recognizes that our work is far from complete. More structural reform
will likely be necessary. Our intelligence gathering and analysis have improved
dramatically in the last two years, but they must be stronger still. The
president and all of us in his administration welcome new ideas and fresh
thinking. We are eager to do whatever is necessary to protect the American
people. And we look forward to receiving the recommendations of this
commission.
We are at war
and our security as a nation depends on winning that war. We must and we will do
everything we can to harden terrorist targets within the
That is why
we must address the source of the problem. We must stay on offense, to find and
defeat the terrorists wherever they live, hide, and plot around the world. If we
learned anything on
After the
September 11 attacks, our Nation faced hard choices. We could fight a narrow war
against al Qaeda and the Taliban or we could fight a
broad war against a global menace. We could seek a narrow victory or we could
work for a lasting peace and a better world. President Bush chose the bolder
course.
He recognizes
that the war on terror is a broad war. Under his leadership, the
We are
confronting the nexus between terror and weapons of mass destruction. We are
working to stop the spread of deadly weapons and prevent then from getting into
the hands of terrorists, seizing dangerous materials in transit, where
necessary. Because we acted in
And as we
attack the threat at its sources, we are also addressing its roots. Thanks to
the bravery and skill of our men and women in uniform, we removed from power two
of the world's most brutal regimes -- sources of violence, and fear, and
instability in the region.
Today, along
with many allies, we are helping the people of
This work is
hard and dangerous, yet it is worthy of our effort and our sacrifice. The defeat
of terror and the success of freedom in those nations will serve the interests
of our Nation and inspire hope and encourage reform throughout the greater
In the
aftermath of September 11, those were the right choices for
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 Qaeda. There had been almost no congressional action or
hearings about al Qaeda, very little bit in the
newspapers.
And yet, you
walk in and Dick Clarke is talking about al Qaeda
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 Qaeda. There had been, I think, documentaries about
Osama bin Laden.
I, myself,
had written for an introduction to a volume on bioterrorism done at
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
I have to say
that of course there were other priorities. And indeed, in the briefings with
the
RICE: One doesn't have the
luxury of dealing only with one issue if you are the
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
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 Qaeda
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 Qaeda, 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 6 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
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 6 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
We know that
at the
We also know
that, even after those
So can you
help us understand where, in those early days after 9/11, the administration
placed
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
RICE: 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
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
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
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
RICE: 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
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
KEAN: So when Mr. Clarke
writes that the president pushed him to find a link between
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
KEAN: Congressman
Hamilton?
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
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
Your public
statements focused largely on
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 11?" 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.
RICE: 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 11.
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 11?"
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 Qaeda 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
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 Qaeda. 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
But we did
want to take the time to get in place a policy that was more strategic toward al
Qaeda, more robust. It takes some time to think about
how to reorient your policy toward
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
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
RICE: 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
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
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
RICE: 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.
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
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
RICE: 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
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
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
And this is
why
RICE: 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.
Thank you,
Mr. Chairman.
KEAN: Thank
you.
Commissioner
Ben-Veniste.
RICHARD
BEN-VENISTE, COMMISSION MEMBER: 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
Now, you have
said to us in our meeting together earlier in February, that the president
directed the CIA to prepare the August 6 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
You
acknowledged to us in your interview of
BEN-VENISTE: Did you tell the
president, at any time prior to August 6, of the existence of al Qaeda cells in the
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...
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 6 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 Qaeda'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 Qaeda cells in the
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 Qaeda cells. I believe in the August 6 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
BEN-VENISTE: Isn't it a fact, Dr.
Rice, that the August 6 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
BEN-VENISTE: Now, you knew by
August 2001 of al Qaeda involvement in the first
As of the
August 6 briefing, you learned that al Qaeda 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 sheikh warning of hijackings
to free the blind sheikh indicated a pattern of suspicious activity in the
country up until August 6 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 6 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 Qaeda cells, that preparations were being
made consistent with hijackings within the United States?
RICE: What the August 6 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.
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 6 PDB was in response to the president's questions about
whether or not something might happen or something might be planned by al Qaeda inside the
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
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
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
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
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
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 Qaeda
operatives who took part in the 9/11 catastrophe were in the United States --
Alhazmi and Mihdhar; 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
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
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
BEN-VENISTE: Did the president
meet with the director of the FBI? RICE: We had a structural problem in the
BEN-VENISTE: Did the president
meet with the director of...
KEAN: Commissioner, we got
to move on...
BEN-VENISTE: ... the FBI between
August 6 and September 11?
KEAN: ... to Commissioner
Fielding.
RICE: I will have to get
back to you on that. I am not certain.
KEAN: Commissioner
Fielding?
FRED F.
FIELDING, COMMISSION MEMBER: 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.
FIELDING: 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
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
Well, in
fact, sadly, we did wake up and that did happen.
FIELDING: 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
11.
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.
FIELDING: 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 11, 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
RICE: I think it actually
wasn't by chance, which was
Now, at that
point, you have pretty clear indication that you've got a problem inside the
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
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 advisor 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
FIELDING: Thank you, Dr.
Rice.
Thank you,
Mr. Chairman.
KEAN: Thank you,
Commissioner Fielding.
Commissioner
Gorelick?
JAMIE S.
GORELICK, COMMISSION MEMBER: 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
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.
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.
RICE: 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
The threat
reporting was -- the specific threat reporting was about external threats: about
the
It is just
not the case that the August 6 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.
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
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
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
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 15, 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 Qaeda.
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 Qaeda.
And it may be
a semantic difference, but I don't think so. It calls for the elimination of the
al Qaeda threat. And that's a very big difference,
because, to me, the elimination of al Qaeda means
you're going to go into
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
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
Was there a
material difference between your view of the military assignment and the
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 Qaeda 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
But we were
looking in the context of a plan that gave you a better regional context that
looked to eliminate the al Qaeda threat or al Qaeda 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
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?
SLADE
GORTON, COMMISSION MEMBER: 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 Qaeda in
RICE: No, sir. No one
counseled an all-out war against
RICE: There was a good deal
of talk about the inadequacy of military options to go after al Qaeda. 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
GORTON: Was it possible to
conduct that kind of war in
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
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 11, he did presage that we would try and do this also with a
positive side, but the plans were not in place. Changing
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 11 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 Qaeda 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 Qaeda.
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 11, what happened was that the NSPD was then forwarded to the
president in a post- September 11 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 Qaeda.
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 11, 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
GORTON: In your view -- there
have been many such horrific incidents in other parts of the world, from al
Qaeda or al Qaeda 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 Qaeda 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 Qaeda and these terrorist entities are now engaged in
terrorism where they think it's easier than it would be in the
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 11, 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.
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 Qaeda 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 11, 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?
BOB
KERREY, COMMISSION MEMBER: 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
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
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 Qaeda 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.
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 Qaeda 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
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
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
In fact,
since we're in the mood to declassify stuff, there was -- he included in his
January 25 memo two appendices -- Appendix A: "Strategy for the elimination of
the jihadist threat of al Qaeda," Appendix B: "Political military plan for al Qaeda."
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.
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...
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...
... 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 Qaeda...
KERREY: So you're saying
that you didn't have a military response against the Cole because of my
speech?
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 25, 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
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
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
RICE: That January 25 memo
has a series of actionable items having to do with
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.
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
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 Qaeda
because you didn't have an approach against
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 Qaeda operatives are training
at
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 Qaeda cells were in the United States,
you've got to follow up.
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...
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 6 memo said to the
president: that the FBI indicates patterns of suspicious activity in the
That's the
language of the memo that was briefed to the president on the 6 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 11.
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?
JOHN F.
LEHMAN, COMMISSION MEMBER: 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 Qaeda cells in the
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
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
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 11.
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
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
RICE: I believe that only
after September 11 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
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
RICE: I was very involved
in issues concerning
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 Qaeda'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
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 Qaeda, to deal with those who harbored al Qaeda.
One of the
points that the president made in his very first speech on the night of
September 11 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
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 11 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.
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 11 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?
TIMOTHY J.
ROEMER, COMMISSION MEMBER: 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.
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 11, 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 11 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 11. 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 Qaeda 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 6 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 6?
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 Qaeda 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 11, 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 6 PDB
public?
RICE: The August 6 PDB has
been available to you. You are describing it. And the August 6 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 Qaeda." 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 6 isn't and September 4th isn't, to you?
RICE: Well, August 6 is
most certainly an historical document that says, "Here's how you might think
about al Qaeda." 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 11.
ROEMER: Thank you, Dr.
Rice.
Thank you,
Mr. Chairman.
KEAN: Thank you,
Congressman, very, very much.
Our last
questioner will be Governor Thompson.
JAMES R.
THOMPSON, COMMISSION MEMBER: 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 Qaeda" -- 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.
THOMPSON: 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 Qaeda, 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 Qaeda 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 Qaeda 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. 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 Qaeda 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 11 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.
RICE: 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 Qaeda 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 Qaeda 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 Qaeda. Because we have enlisted countries
around the world, saying that terrorism is terrorism is terrorism -- in other
words, you can't fight al Qaeda and hug Hezbollah or
hug Hamas -- that we've actually started to delegitimatize terrorism in a way that it was not
before.
RICE: 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 11 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.
KEAN: 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 6.
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: We appreciate very
much your service to the nation.
This
concludes our hearing. The commission will hold its next hearing on April 13 and
14 on law enforcement and the intelligence community.
This document is unclassified and in the public
domain.
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