Rice says 9-11 attacks weren't preventable

National security adviser says use of airplanes as weapons was never briefed

By Ron Hutcheson, KRT Campus

WASHINGTON–National security adviser Condoleezza Rice acknowledged under intense questioning Thursday that President Bush was told a month before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that al-Qaida terrorists seemed to be plotting to hijack airplanes.

But Rice insisted in three hours of testimony before the Sept. 11 commission that the government couldn’t have predicted or prevented the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

“ The problem is that the United States was effectively blind to what was about to happen,” she told the 10-member panel. She refused to concede any mistakes by the Bush administration, standing her ground in the face of combative questioning from the commission and recent criticism from former White House counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke.

Rice’s appearance in the cavernous wood-and-marble hearing room was a moment of high drama, but her sworn testimony failed to resolve questions about Bush’s approach to terrorism before Sept. 11. Clarke told the panel last month that the president and his advisers had failed to confront the threat and all but ignored repeated warnings of a possible attack.

In the end, it will be up to the commission, and the American public, to judge Bush’s efforts before Sept. 11 to deal with Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida terrorist network. The panel faces a July 26 deadline for its final report.

“ There was no silver bullet that could have prevented the 9-11 attacks,” Rice said.

But previously classified documents and other evidence compiled by the bipartisan commission show that the attacks didn’t come as a complete surprise. In a series of tense exchanges, commissioners put Rice on the defensive on some key issues.

She backed away from her previous assertion that no one could have predicted that terrorists would use an airplane as a missile. In fact, various intelligence agencies had produced 12 reports over a seven-year time span suggesting that possibility.

“ This kind of analysis about the use of airplanes as weapons actually was never briefed to us,” Rice said. “I cannot tell you that there might not have been a report here or a report there that reached somebody in our midst.”

Democrats on the panel grilled Rice about a special CIA briefing for Bush at his Texas ranch on Aug. 6, 2001, focusing on the possibility of an al-Qaida attack.

Rice had first disclosed the top-secret briefing in a meeting with reporters on May 17, 2002, but downplayed its relevance. She also stressed then that the primary concern at the time of Bush’s briefing was a possible terrorist attack overseas, not on U.S. soil.

Although the actual document, known as the President’s Daily Briefing, or PDB, remains classified, commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste pressed Rice to disclose its title: “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.”

Another commissioner, former Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, revealed that the briefing included FBI reports of “suspicious activity in the United States consistent with preparations for a hijacking.”

Rice said she and Bush didn’t take additional action as a result of the briefing because the FBI was already investigating possible hijacking operations.

“ There was nothing in this memo that suggested that an attack was coming on New York or Washington, D.C. There was nothing in this memo as to time, place, how or where,” she said. “This was not a threat report to the president or a threat report to me.”

At the hearing’s conclusion, commission Chairman Tom Kean, a former New Jersey governor and a Republican, said the panel would press the White House to declassify the Aug. 6 briefing paper for public review.

Other commissioners challenged Rice’s assertion that FBI agents around the country were put on high alert in the spring and summer before the Sept. 11 attacks because of a dramatic increase in intelligence pointing to a devastating terrorist assault.

Rice said intercepted conversations included talk of a “big event” that would cause a “very, very, very, very big uproar,” but no specifics.

“ To date, we have found nobody–nobody–at the FBI who knows anything about a tasking of field offices” to escalate anti-terror efforts, former Democratic Rep. Tim Roemer of Indiana told Rice. “Nothing went down the chain to the FBI field offices on spiking of information, on knowledge of al-Qaida in the country.”

Commissioner Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, echoed Clarke’s complaint that Rice downplayed the terrorist threat by assigning a group of senior aides to deal with it, instead of convening a Cabinet-level meeting. The first Cabinet-level meeting on al-Qaida occurred Sept. 4, a week before the Sept. 11 attacks and after 33 top-level national-security meetings on other issues.

“ The secretary of transportation had no idea of the threat. The administrator of the FAA, responsible for security on our airlines, had no idea,” Gorelick told Rice. “The attorney general was briefed, but there is no evidence of any activity by him on this.”

Rice blamed Clarke, who served as her crisis manager on terrorism, for any breakdown in communication within various government agencies.

“ I didn’t manage the domestic agencies; no national security adviser does,” she said. “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.’’’

The closest Rice came to acknowledgement that the administration could have done more was her admission that Bush failed to deal before Sept. 11 with longstanding concerns about the lack of cooperation between the CIA and the FBI.

“ I fully agree with you that in hindsight, now looking back, there are many things structurally that were out of kilter,” she told Kerrey. But Rice insisted Bush couldn’t possibly have fixed the problem in the first eight months of his administration. She said changes since the attacks have greatly improved cooperation between the two agencies.

Bush watched Rice on television at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, and called to congratulate her as administration officials declared her testimony a success.

But some relatives of Sept. 11 victims left the hearing room dissatisfied. Many of the more than one dozen relatives who crowded into the session applauded when commissioners peppered Rice with hostile questions.

“ It has been very difficult to get the administration to admit that there was a failure on their watch,” said Stephen Push, whose wife died in the attacks. “They want to say that everything was perfect before 9-11. Yet 9-11 happened. ... The first step toward correcting the problem is admitting what the problems were.”

After Rice had finished, the commission interviewed former President Bill Clinton in closed session.

One of the most sobering moments in Rice’s testimony came when she was asked to assess the nation’s vulnerability to another terrorist attack.

“ I will tell you that I get up every day concerned because I don’t think we’ve made it impossible for them. We’re safer, but we’re not safe,” she said. “They have to be right once; we have to be right 100 percent of the time.”