Full text of Rice's testimony Q&A
Newly Released August 6th, Memo
Bio for Condoleezza Rice
Condi Gets A Reality Check
April 8, 2004, 2:28 PM EDT
A text of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's testimony as
delivered before the Sept. 11 commission on Thursday, as transcribed by
eMediaMillWorks Inc.:
RICE: Thank you very much. And now I'm happy to take your questions.
KEAN: Thank you very much, Dr. Rice. I appreciate your statement, your
attendance and your service.
I have a couple of questions. As we understand it, when you first came
into office, you just been through a very difficult campaign. In that
campaign, neither the president nor the opponent, to the best of my
knowledge, ever mentioned al-Qaida. There had been almost no
congressional action or hearings about al-Qaida, very little bit in the
newspapers.
And yet, you walk in and Dick Clarke is talking about al-Qaida should
be our number-one priority. Sandy Berger tells you you'll be spending
more time on that than anything else.
What did you think, and what did you tell the president, as you get
that kind of, I suppose, new information for you?
RICE: Well, in fact, Mr. Chairman, it was not new information. I think
we all knew about the 1998 bombings. We knew that there was speculation
that the 2000 Cole attack was al-Qaida. There had been, I think,
documentaries about Osama bin Laden.
I, myself, had written for an introduction to a volume on bioterrorism
done at Sanford that I thought that we wanted not to wake up one day
and find that Osama bin Laden had succeeded on our soil.
It was on the radar screen of any person who studied or worked in the
international security field.
But there is no doubt that I think the briefing by Dick Clarke, the
earlier briefing during the transition by Director Tenet, and of course
what we talked with about Sandy Berger, it gave you a heightened sense
of the problem and a sense that this was something that the United
States had to deal with.
I have to say that of course there were other priorities. And indeed,
in the briefings with the Clinton administration, they emphasized other
priorities: North Korea, the Middle East, the Balkans.
One doesn't have the luxury of dealing only with one issue if you are
the United States of America. There are many urgent and important
issues.
But we all had a strong sense that this was a very crucial issue. The
question was, what do you then do about it?
And the decision that we made was to, first of all, have no drop- off
in what the Clinton administration was doing, because clearly they had
done a lot of work to deal with this very important priority.
And so we kept the counterterrorism team on board. We knew that George
Tenet was there. We had the comfort of knowing that Louis Freeh was
there.
And then we set out _ I talked to Dick Clarke almost immediately after
his _ or, I should say, shortly after his memo to me saying that
al-Qaida was a major threat, we set out to try and craft a better
strategy.
But we were quite cognizant of this group, of the fact that something
had to be done.
I do think, early on in these discussions, we asked a lot of questions
about whether Osama bin Laden himself ought to be so much the target of
interest, or whether what was that going to do to the organization if,
in fact, he was put out of commission. And I remember very well the
director saying to President Bush, Well, it would help, but it would
not stop attacks by al-Qaida, nor destroy the network.
KEAN: I've got a question now I'd like to ask you. It was given to me
by a number of members of the families.
Did you ever see or hear from the FBI, from the CIA, from any other
intelligence agency, any memos or discussions or anything else between
the time you got into office and 9-11 that talked about using planes as
bombs?
RICE: Let me address this question because it has been on the table.
I think that concern about what I might have known or we might have known was
provoked by some statements that I made in a press conference. I was in a press
conference to try and describe the August 6th memo, which
I've talked about here in my opening remarks and which I talked about with you
in the private session.
And I said, at one point, that this was a historical memo, that it was
_ it was not based on new threat information. And I said, No one could
have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon _ I'm
paraphrasing now _ into the World Trade Center, using planes as a
missile.
As I said to you in the private session, I probably should have said, I
could not have imagined, because within two days, people started to
come to me and say, Oh, but there were these reports in 1998 and 1999.
The intelligence community did look at information about this.
To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Chairman, this kind of analysis about
the use of airplanes as weapons actually was never briefed to us.
I cannot tell you that there might not have been a report here or a
report there that reached somebody in our midst.
Part of the problem is _ and I think Sandy Berger made this point when
he was asked the same question _ that you have thousands of pieces of
information -- car bombs and this method and that method _ and you have
to depend to a certain degree on the intelligence agencies to sort to
tell you what is actually relevant, what is actually based on sound
sources, what is speculative.
RICE: And I can only assume or believe that perhaps the intelligence
agencies thought that the sourcing was speculative.
All that I can tell you is that it was not in the August 6th memo,
using planes as a weapon. And I do not remember any reports to us, a
kind of strategic warning, that planes might be used as weapons. In
fact, there were some reports done in '98 and '99. I was certainly not
aware of them at the time that I spoke.
KEAN: You didn't see any memos to you or any documents to you?
RICE: No, I did not.
KEAN: Some Americans have wondered whether you or the president worried
too much about Iraq in the days after the 9-11 attack and perhaps not
enough about the fight ahead against al-Qaida.
We know that at the Camp David meeting on the weekend of September 15th
and 16th, the president rejected the idea of immediate action against
Iraq. Others have told that the president decided Afghanistan had to
come first.
We also know that, even after those Camp David meetings, the
administration was still readying plans for possible action against
Iraq.
So can you help us understand where, in those early days after 9-11,
the administration placed Iraq in the strategy for responding to the
attack?
RICE: Certainly. Let me start with the period in which you're trying to
figure out who did this to you.
And I think, given our exceedingly hostile relationship with Iraq at
the time _ this is, after all, a place that tried to assassinate an
American president, was still shooting at our planes in the no-fly zone
_ it was a reasonable question to ask whether, indeed, Iraq might have
been behind this.
I remember, later on, in a conversation with Prime Minister Blair,
President Bush also said that he wondered could it have been Iran,
because the attack was so sophisticated, was this really just a network
that had done this.
When we got to Camp David _ and let me just be very clear: In the days
between September 11th and getting to Camp David, I was with the
president a lot. I know what was on his mind. What was on his mind was
follow-on attacks, trying to reassure the American people.
He virtually badgered poor Larry Lindsey about when could we get Wall
Street back up and running, because he didn't want them to have
succeeded against our financial system. We were concerned about air
security, and he worked very hard on trying to get particularly Reagan
reopened. So there was a lot on our minds.
But by the time that we got to Camp David and began to plan for what we
would do in response, what was rolled out on the table was Afghanistan
_ a map of Afghanistan.
And I will tell you, that was a daunting enough task to figure out how
to avoid some of the pitfalls that great powers had in Afghanistan,
mostly recently the Soviet Union and, of course, the British before
that.
There was a discussion of Iraq. I think it was raised by Don Rumsfeld.
It was pressed a bit by Paul Wolfowitz. Given that this was a global
war on terror, should we look not just at Afghanistan but should we
look at doing something against Iraq? There was a discussion of that.
The president listened to all of his advisers. I can tell you that when
he went around the table and asked his advisers what he should do, not
a single one of his principal advisers advised doing anything against
Iraq. It was all to Afghanistan.
When I got back to the White House with the president, he laid out for
me what he wanted to do. And one of the points, after a long list of
things about Afghanistan, a long list of things about protecting the
homeland, the president said that he wanted contingency plans against
Iraq should Iraq act against our interests.
There was a kind of concern that they might try and take advantage of
us in that period. They were still _ we were still flying no-fly zones.
And there was also, he said, in case we find that they were behind
9-11, we should have contingency plans.
But this was not along the lines of what later was discussed about
Iraq, which was how to deal with Iraq on a grand scale. This was really
about _ we went to planning Afghanistan, you can look at what we did.
From that time on, this was about Afghanistan.
KEAN: So when Mr. Clarke writes that the president pushed him to find a
link between Iraq and the attack, is that right? Was the president
trying to twist the facts for an Iraqi war, or was he just puzzled
about what was behind this attack?
RICE: I don't remember the discussion that Dick Clarke relates.
Initially, he said that the president was wandering the situation room
_ this is in the book, I gather _ looking for something to do, and they
had a conversation. Later on, he said that he was pulled aside. So I
don't know the context of the discussion. I don't personally remember
it.
But it's not surprising that the president would say, What about Iraq,
given our hostile relationship with Iraq. And I'm quite certain that
the president never pushed anybody to twist the facts.
KEAN: Congressman Hamilton?
HAMILTON: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Rice, you've given us a very strong statement, with regard to the
actions taken by the administration in this pre-9-11 period, and we
appreciate that very much for the record.
I want to call to your attention some comments and some events on the
other side of that question and give you an opportunity to respond.
You know very well that the commission is focusing on this whole
question of, what priority did the Clinton administration and the Bush
administration give to terrorism?
The president told Bob Woodward that he did not feel that sense of
urgency. I think that's a quote from his book, or roughly a quote from
Woodward's book.
The deputy director for Central Intelligence, Mr. McLaughlin, told us
that he was concerned about the pace of policymaking in the summer of
2001, given the urgency of the threat.
The deputy secretary of state, Mr. Armitage, was here and expressed his
concerns about the speed of the process. And if I recall, his comment
is that, We weren't going fast enough. I think that's a direct quote.
There was no response to the Cole attack in the Clinton administration
and none in the Bush administration.
Your public statements focused largely on China and Russia and missile
defense. You did make comments on terrorism, but they were connected _
the link between terrorism and the rogue regimes, like North Korea and
Iran and Iraq.
And by our count here, there were some 100 meetings by the national
security principals before the first meeting was held on terrorism,
September 4th. And General Shelton, who was chairman of the Joint
Chiefs, said that terrorism had been pushed farther to the back burner.
Now, this is what we're trying to assess. We have your statements. We
have these other statements. And I know, as I indicated in my opening
comments, how difficult the role of the policymaker is and how many
things press upon you.
But I did want to give you an opportunity to comment on some of these
other matters.
RICE: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Let me begin with the Woodward quote, because that has gotten a lot of
press. And I actually think that the quote, put in context, gives a
very different picture.
The question that the president was asked by Mr. Woodward was,
Did you want to have bin Laden killed before September 11th? That was
the question.
The president said, Well, I hadn't seen a plan to do that. I knew that
we needed to _ I think the appropriate word is 'bring him to justice.'
And, of course, this is something of a trick question in that notion of
self-defense which is appropriate for ...
I think you can see here a president struggling with whether he ought
to be talking about pre-9-11 attempts to kill bin Laden. And so, that
is the context for this quote.
And, quite frankly, I remember the director sitting here and saying he
didn't want to talk about authorities on assassination. I think you can
understand the discomfort of the president.
The president goes on. When Bob Woodward says, Well, I don't mean it as
a trick question; I'm just trying to your state of mind, the president
says, Let me put it this way. I was not _ there was a significant
difference in my attitude after September 11th. I was not on point, but
I knew he was a menace and I knew he was a problem. I knew he was
responsible. We felt he was responsible for bombings that had killed
Americans. And I was prepared to look at a plan that would be a
thoughtful plan that would bring him to justice and would have given
the order to do just that.
I have no hesitancy about going after him, but I didn't feel that sense
of urgency and my blood was not nearly as boiling. Whose blood was
nearly as boiling prior to September 11th?
And I think the context helps here.
It is also the case that the president had been told by the director of
central intelligence that it was not going to be a silver bullet to
kill bin Laden, that you had to do much more.
And, in fact, I think that some of us felt that the focus, so much
focus, on what you did with bin Laden, not what you did with the
network, not what you did with the regional circumstances, might, in
fact, have been misplaced.
So I think the president is responding to go a specific set of
questions.
All that I can tell you is that what the president wanted was a plan to
eliminate al-Qaida so he could stop swatting at flies. He knew that we
had in place the same crisis-management mechanism, indeed the same
personnel, that the Clinton administration, which clearly thought it a
very high priority, had in place.
And so, I think that he saw the priority as continuing the current
operations and then getting a plan in place.
Now, as to the number of PCs. I'm sorry, there is some difference in
our records here.
RICE: We show 33 Principals Committee meetings during this period of
time, not 100. We show that three of those dealt at least partially
with issues of terrorism not related to al-Qaida. And so we can check
the numbers, but we have looked at our files and we show 33, not 100.
The quotes by others about how the process is moving, again, it's
important to realize that had parallel tracks here. We were continuing
to do what the Clinton administration had been doing under all the same
authorities that were operating. George Tenet was continuing to try to
disrupt al-Qaida. We were continuing the diplomatic efforts.
But we did want to take the time to get in place a policy that was more
strategic toward al-Qaida, more robust. It takes some time to think
about how to reorient your policy toward Pakistan. It takes some time
to think about how to have a more effective policy toward Afghanistan.
It particularly takes some time when you don't get your people on board
for several months.
So I understand that there are those who have said they felt it wasn't
moving along fast enough. I talked to George Tenet about this at least
every couple of weeks, sometimes more often. How can we move forward on
the Predator? What do you want to do about the Northern Alliance? So I
think we were putting the energy into it.
And I should just make one other point, Mr. Hamilton, if you don't
mind, which is that we also moved forward on some of the specific ideas
that Dick Clarke had put forward prior to completing the strategy
review. We increased assistance to Uzbekistan, for instance, which had
been one of the recommendations. We moved along the armed Predator, the
development of the armed Predator. We increased counterterrorism
funding.
But there were a couple of things that we did not want to do.
I'm now convinced that, while nothing that in this strategy would have
done anything about 9-11, if we had, in fact, moved on the things that
were in the original memos that we got from our counterterrorism
people, we might have even gone off course, because it was very
Northern Alliance-focused. That was going to cause a huge problem with
Pakistan. It was not going to put us in the center of action in
Afghanistan, which is the south.
And so, we simply had to take some time to get this right. But I think
we need not confuse that with either what we did during the threat
period where we were urgently working the operational issues every day
or with the continuation of the Clinton policy.
HAMILTON: Well, I thank you for a careful answer.
Another question. At the end of the day, of course, we were unable to
protect our people. And you suggest in your statement _ and I want you
to elaborate on this, if you want to _ that in hindsight it would have
been _ better information about the threats would have been the single
_ the single most important thing for us to have done, from your point
of view, prior to 9-11, would have been better intelligence, better
information about the threats.
Is that right? Are there other things that you think stand out?
RICE: Well, Mr. Chairman, I took an oath of office on the day that I
took this job to protect and defend. And like most government
officials, I take it very seriously. And so, as you might imagine, I've
asked myself a thousand times what more we could have done.
I know that, had we thought that there was an attack coming in
Washington or New York, we would have moved heaven and earth to try and
stop it. And I know that there was no single thing that might have
prevented that attack.
In looking back, I believe that the absence of light, so to speak, on
what was going on inside the country, the inability to connect the
dots, was really structural. We couldn't be dependent on chance that
something might come together.
And the legal impediments and the bureaucratic impediments _ but I want
to emphasize the legal impediments. To keep the FBI and the CIA from
functioning really as one, so that there was no seam between domestic
and foreign intelligence, was probably the greatest one.
The director of central intelligence and I think Director Freeh had an
excellent relationship. They were trying hard to bridge that seam. I
know that Louis Freeh had developed legal attaches abroad to try to
help bridge that.
But when it came right down to it, this country, for reasons of history
and culture and therefore law, had an allergy to the notion of domestic
intelligence, and we were organized on that basis. And it just made it
very hard to have all of the pieces come together.
We've made good changes since then. I think that having a Homeland
Security Department that can bring together the FAA and the INS and
Customs and all of the various agencies is a very important step.
I think that the creation of the terrorism threat information center,
which brings together all of the intelligence from various aspects, is
a very important step forward.
Clearly, the Patriot Act, which has allowed the kind of sharing, indeed
demands the kind of sharing between intelligence agencies, including
the FBI and the CIA, is a very big step forward.
I think one thing that we will learn from you is whether the structural
work is done.
HAMILTON: Final question would be: One of your sentences kind of jumped
out at me in your statement, and that was on page 9, where you said, We
must address the source of the problem.
I'm very concerned about that. I was pleased to see it in your
statement. And I'm very worried about the threat of terrorism, as I
know you are, over a very long period of time _ a generation or more.
There are a lot of very, very fine _ 2 billion Muslims. Most of them,
we know, are very fine people. Some don't like us; they hate us. They
don't like what modernization does to their culture. They don't like
the fact that economic prosperity has passed them by. They don't like
some of the policies of the United States government. They don't like
the way their own governments treat them.
And I'd like you to elaborate a little bit, if you would, on how we get
at the source of the problem. How do we get at this discontent, this
dislocation, if you would, across a big swathe of the Islamic world?
RICE: I believe very strongly, and the president believes very
strongly, that this is really the generational challenge. The kinds of
issues that you are addressing have to be addressed, but we're not
going to see success on our watch.
We will see some small victories on our watch. One of the most
difficult problems in the Middle East is that the United States has
been associated for a long time, decades, with a policy that looks the
other way on the freedom deficit in the Middle East, that looks the
other way at the absence of individual liberties in the Middle East.
And I think that that has tended to alienate us from the populations of
the Middle East. And when the president, at White Hall in London, said
that that was no longer going to be the stance of the United States, we
were expecting more from our friends, we were going to try and engage
those in those in those countries who wanted to have a different kind
of Middle East, I believe that he was resonating with trends that are
there in the Middle East. There are reformist trends in places like
Bahrain and Jordan. And recently there was a marvelous conference in
Alexandria in Egypt, where reform was actually was on the agenda.
So it's going to be a slow process. We know that the building of
democracy is tough. It doesn't come easily. We have our own history.
When our Founding Fathers said, We the people, they didn't mean me.
It's taken us a while to get to a multiethnic democracy that works.
But if America is avowedly values-centered in its foreign policy, we do
better than when we do not stand up for those values.
So I think that it's going to be very hard. It's going to take time.
One of the things that we've been very interested, for instance, in is
issues of educational reform in some of these countries. As you know,
the madrassas are a big difficulty. I've met, myself, personally two or
three times with the Pakistani _ a wonderful woman who's the Pakistani
education minister.
We can't do it for them. They have to have it for themselves, but we
have to stand for those values.
And over the long run, we will change _ I believe we will change the
nature of the Middle East, particularly if there are examples that this
can work in the Middle East.
And this is why Iraq is so important. The Iraqi people are struggling
to find a way to create a multiethnic democracy that works. And it's
going to be hard.
And if we stay with them, and when they succeed, I think we will have
made a big change _ they will have made a big change in the middle of
the Arab world, and we will be on our way to addressing the source.
HAMILTON: Thank you, Dr. Rice.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
KEAN: Thank you.
Commissioner Ben-Veniste.
BEN-VENISTE: Good morning, Dr. Rice.
RICE: Good morning.
BEN-VENISTE: Nice to see you again.
RICE: Nice to see you.
BEN-VENISTE: I want to ask you some questions about the August 6, 2001,
PDB. We had been advised in writing by CIA on March 19, 2004, that the
August 6th PDB was prepared and self-generated by a CIA employee.
Following Director Tenet's testimony on March 26th before us, the CIA
clarified its version of events, saying that questions by the president
prompted them to prepare the August 6th PDB.
Now, you have said to us in our meeting together earlier in February,
that the president directed the CIA to prepare the August 6th PDB.
The extraordinary high terrorist attack threat level in the summer of
2001 is well-documented. And Richard Clarke's testimony about the
possibility of an attack against the United States homeland was
repeatedly discussed from May to August within the intelligence
community, and that is well-documented.
You acknowledged to us in your interview of February 7, 2004, that
Richard Clarke told you that al-Qaida cells were in the United States.
BEN-VENISTE: Did you tell the president, at any time prior to August
6th, of the existence of al-Qaida cells in the United States?
RICE: First, let me just make certain ...
BEN-VENISTE: If you could just answer that question, because I only
have a very limited ...
RICE: I understand, Commissioner, but it's important ...
BEN-VENISTE: Did you tell the president ...
RICE: ... that I also address ...
(APPLAUSE)
It's also important that, Commissioner, that I address the other issues
that you have raised. So I will do it quickly, but if you'll just give
me a moment.
BEN-VENISTE: Well, my only question to you is whether you ...
RICE: I understand, Commissioner, but I will ...
BEN-VENISTE: ... told the president.
RICE: If you'll just give me a moment, I will address fully the
questions that you've asked.
First of all, yes, the August 6th PDB was in response to questions of
the president _ and that since he asked that this be done. It was not a
particular threat report. And there was historical information in there
about various aspects of al-Qaida's operations.
Dick Clarke had told me, I think in a memorandum _ I remember it as
being only a line or two _ that there were al-Qaida cells in the United
States.
Now, the question is, what did we need to do about that?
And I also understood that that was what the FBI was doing, that the
FBI was pursuing these al-Qaida cells. I believe in the August 6th
memorandum it says that there were 70 full field investigations under
way of these cells. And so there was no recommendation that we do
something about this; the FBI was pursuing it.
I really don't remember, Commissioner, whether I discussed this with
the president.
BEN-VENISTE: Thank you.
RICE: I remember very well that the president was aware that there were
issues inside the United States. He talked to people about this. But I
don't remember the al-Qaida cells as being something that we were told
we needed to do something about.
BEN-VENISTE: Isn't it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6th PDB warned
against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you
recall the title of that PDB?
RICE: I believe the title was, Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside
the United States.
Now, the ...
BEN-VENISTE: Thank you.
RICE: No, Mr. Ben-Veniste ...
BEN-VENISTE: I will get into the ...
RICE: I would like to finish my point here.
BEN-VENISTE: I didn't know there was a point.
RICE: Given that _ you asked me whether or not it warned of attacks.
BEN-VENISTE: I asked you what the title was.
RICE: You said, did it not warn of attacks. It did not warn of attacks
inside the United States. It was historical information based on old
reporting. There was no new threat information. And it did not, in
fact, warn of any coming attacks inside the United States.
BEN-VENISTE: Now, you knew by August 2001 of al-Qaida involvement in
the first World Trade Center bombing, is that correct?
You knew that in 1999, late '99, in the millennium threat period, that
we had thwarted an al-Qaida attempt to blow up Los Angeles
International Airport and thwarted cells operating in Brooklyn, New
York, and Boston, Massachusetts.
As of the August 6th briefing, you learned that al-Qaida members have
resided or traveled to the United States for years and maintained a
support system in the United States.
And you learned that FBI information since the 1998 blind sheik warning
of hijackings to free the blind sheik indicated a pattern of suspicious
activity in the country up until August 6th consistent with preparation
for hijackings. Isn't that so?
RICE: Do you have other questions that you want me to answer as a part
of the sequence?
BEN-VENISTE: Well, did you not _ you have indicated here that this was
some historical document. And I am asking you whether it is not the
case that you learned in the PDB memo of August 6th that the FBI was
saying that it had information suggesting that preparations _ not
historically, but ongoing, along with these numerous full field
investigations against al-Qaida cells, that preparations were being
made consistent with hijackings within the United States?
RICE: What the August 6th PDB said, and perhaps I should read it to
you...
BEN-VENISTE: We would be happy to have it declassified in full at this
time, including its title.
(APPLAUSE)
RICE: I believe, Mr. Ben-Veniste, that you've had access to this PDB.
But let me just...
BEN-VENISTE: But we have not had it declassified so that it can be
shown publicly, as you know.
RICE: I believe you've had access to this PDB _ exceptional access. But
let me address your question.
BEN-VENISTE: Nor could we, prior to today, reveal the title of that PDB.
RICE: May I address the question, sir?
The fact is that this August 6th PDB was in response to the president's
questions about whether or not something might happen or something
might be planned by al-Qaida inside the United States. He asked because
all of the threat reporting or the threat reporting that was actionable
was about the threats abroad, not about the United States.
This particular PDB had a long section on what bin Laden had wanted to
do _ speculative, much of it _ in '97, '98; that he had, in fact, liked
the results of the 1993 bombing.
RICE: It had a number of discussions of _ it had a discussion of
whether or not they might use hijacking to try and free a prisoner who
was being held in the United States _ Ressam. It reported that the FBI
had full field investigations under way.
And we checked on the issue of whether or not there was something going
on with surveillance of buildings, and we were told, I believe, that
the issue was the courthouse in which this might take place.
Commissioner, this was not a warning. This was a historic memo --
historical memo prepared by the agency because the president was asking
questions about what we knew about the inside.
BEN-VENISTE: Well, if you are willing ...
RICE: Now, we had already taken ...
BEN-VENISTE: If you are willing to declassify that document, then
others can make up their minds about it.
Let me ask you a general matter, beyond the fact that this memorandum
provided information, not speculative, but based on intelligence
information, that bin Laden had threatened to attack the United States
and specifically Washington, D.C.
There was nothing reassuring, was there, in that PDB?
RICE: Certainly not. There was nothing reassuring.
But I can also tell you that there was nothing in this memo that
suggested that an attack was coming on New York or Washington, D.C.
There was nothing in this memo as to time, place, how or where. This
was not a threat report to the president or a threat report to me.
BEN-VENISTE: We agree that there were no specifics. Let me move on, if
I may.
RICE: There were no specifics, and, in fact, the country had already
taken steps through the FAA to warn of potential hijackings. The
country had already taken steps through the FBI to task their 56 field
offices to increase their activity. The country had taken the steps
that it could given that there was no threat reporting about what might
happen inside the United States.
BEN-VENISTE: We have explored that and we will continue to with respect
to the muscularity and the specifics of those efforts.
The president was in Crawford, Texas, at the time he received the PDB,
you were not with him, correct?
RICE: That is correct.
BEN-VENISTE: Now, was the president, in words or substance, alarmed or
in any way motivated to take any action, such as meeting with the
director of the FBI, meeting with the attorney general, as a result of
receiving the information contained in the PDB?
RICE: I want to repeat that when this document was presented, it was
presented as, yes, there were some frightening things _ and by the way,
I was not at Crawford, but the president and I were in contact and I
might have even been, though I can't remember, with him by video link
during that time.
The president was told this is historical information. I'm told he was
told this is historical information and there was nothing actionable in
this. The president knew that the FBI was pursuing this issue. The
president knew that the director of central intelligence was pursuing
this issue. And there was no new threat information in this document to
pursue.
BEN-VENISTE: Final question, because my time has almost expired.
Do you believe that, had the president taken action to issue a
directive to the director of CIA to ensure that the FBI had pulsed the
agency, to make sure that any information which we know now had been
collected was transmitted to the director, that the president might
have been able to receive information from CIA with respect to the fact
that two al-Qaida operatives who took part in the 9-11 catastrophe were
in the United States _ Alhazmi and Almidhar; and that Moussaoui, who
Dick Clarke was never even made aware of, who had jihadist connections,
who the FBI had arrested, and who had been in a flight school in
Minnesota trying to learn the avionics of a commercial jetliner despite
the fact that he had no training previously, had no explanation for the
funds in his bank account, and no explanation for why he was in the
United States _ would that have possibly, in your view, in hindsight,
made a difference in the ability to collect this information, shake the
trees, as Richard Clarke had said, and possibly, possibly interrupt the
plotters?
RICE: My view, Commissioner Ben-Veniste, as I said to Chairman Kean, is
that, first of all, the director of central intelligence and the
director of the FBI, given the level of threat, were doing what they
thought they could do to deal with the threat that we faced.
There was no threat reporting of any substance about an attack coming
in the United States.
RICE: And the director of the FBI and the director of the CIA, had they
received information, I am quite certain _ given that the director of
the CIA met frequently face to face with the president of the United
States _ that he would have made that available to the president or to
me.
I do not believe that it is a good analysis to go back and assume that
somehow maybe we would have gotten lucky by, quote, shaking the trees.
Dick Clarke was shaking the trees, director of central intelligence was
shaking the trees, director of the FBI was shaking the trees. We had a
structural problem in the United States.
BEN-VENISTE: Did the president meet with the director of the FBI?
RICE: We had a structural problem in the United States, and that
structural problem was that we did not share domestic and foreign
intelligence in a way to make a product for policymakers, for good
reasons _ for legal reasons, for cultural reasons _ a product that
people could depend upon.
BEN-VENISTE: Did the president meet with the director of ...
KEAN: Commissioner, we got to move on ...
BEN-VENISTE: ... the FBI between August 6th and September 11th?
KEAN: ... to Commissioner Fielding.
RICE: I will have to get back to you on that. I am not certain.
KEAN: Commissioner Fielding?
FIELDING: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Rice, good morning.
RICE: Good morning.
FIELDING: Thank you for being here, and thank you for all your service
presently and in the past to your country.
RICE: Thank you.
FIELDING: As you know, our task is to assemble facts in order to inform
ourselves and then ultimately to inform the American public of the
cause of this horrible event, and also to make recommendations to
mitigate against the possibility that there will ever be another
terrorist triumph on our homeland or against our people.
And as we do this with the aid of testimony of people like yourself, of
course there will be some discrepancies, as there always will, and we
will have to try as best we can to resolve those discrepancies. And
obviously that's an important thing for us to do.
But as important as that ultimately might be, it also is our
responsibility to really come up with ways, and valid ways, to prevent
another intelligence failure like we suffered. And I don't think
anybody will kid ourselves that we didn't suffer one.
So we must try to look at the systems and the policies that were in
place and to evaluate them and to see _ getting a view of the
landscape, and I know it's difficult to do it through a pre-9-11 lens,
but we must try to do that, so that we can do better the next time.
And I'd like to follow up with a couple of areas with that sort of
specificity, and one is the one that you were just discussing with
Commissioner Ben-Veniste.
We've all heard over the years the problem between the CIA, the FBI,
coordination, et cetera. And you made reference to an introduction
you'd done to a book, but you also, in October 2000, while you were a
part of the campaign team for candidate Bush, you told a radio station,
WJR, which is in Detroit, you're talking about the threat and how to
deal with al-Qaida.
And if I may quote, you said, Osama bin Laden, the first is you really
have to get intelligence agencies better organized to deal with the
terrorist threat to the United States itself. One of the problems that
we have is kind of a split responsibility, of course, between the CIA
and foreign intelligence and the FBI and domestic intelligence. There
needs to be better cooperation, because we don't want to wake up one
day and find that Osama bin Laden has been successful on our territory,
end of your quote.
Well, in fact, sadly, we did wake up and that did happen.
And obviously, there is a systemic problem.
And what I'd really like you to address right now is what steps were
taken by you and the administration, to your knowledge, in the first
several months of the administration to assess and address this problem?
RICE: Well, thank you.
We did have a structural problem, and structural problems take some
time to address.
We did have a national security policy directive asking the CIA,
through the foreign intelligence board, headed by Brent Scowcroft, to
review its intelligence activities, the way that it gathered
intelligence. And that was a study that was to be completed.
The vice president was, a little later in, I think, in May, tasked by
the president to put together a group to look at all of the
recommendations that had been made about domestic preparedness and all
of the questions associated with that; to take the Gilmore report and
the Hart-Rudman report and so forth and to try to make recommendations
about what might have been done.
We were in office 233 days. And the kinds of structural changes that
have been needed by this country for some time did not get made in that
period of time.
I'm told that after the millennium plot was discovered, that there was
an after-action report done and that some steps were taken. To my
recollection, that was not briefed to us during the transition period
or during the threat spike.
But clearly, what needed to be done was that we needed systems in place
that would bring all of this together. It is not enough to leave this
to chance.
If you look at this period, I think you see that everybody _ the
director of the CIA _ Louis Freeh had left, but the key
counterterrorism person was a part of Dick Clarke's group.
And with meeting with him and, I'm sure, shaking the trees and doing
all of the things that you would want people to do, we were being given
reports all the time that they were doing everything they could. But
there was a systemic problem in getting that kind of shared
intelligence.
One of the first things that Bob Mueller did post-9-11 was to recognize
that the issue of prevention meant that you had to break down some of
the walls between criminal and counterterrorism, between criminal and
intelligence.
RICE: The way that we went about this was to have individual cases
where you were trying to build a criminal case, individual offices with
responsibility for those cases. Much was not coming to the FBI in a way
that it could then engage the policymakers.
So these were big structural reforms. We did some things to try and get
the CIA reforming. We did some things to try and get a better sense of
how to put all of this together.
But structural reform is hard, and in seven months we didn't have time
to make the changes that were necessary. We made them almost
immediately after September 11th.
FIELDING: Well, would you consider the problem as solved today?
RICE: I would not consider the problem solved. I believe that we have
made some very important structural changes.
The creation of a Department of Homeland Security is an absolutely
critical issue, because the Department of Homeland Security brings
together INS and the Customs Department and the border people and all
of the people who were scattered _ Customs and Treasury and INS and
Justice and so forth _ brings them together in a way that a single
secretary is looking after the homeland every day.
He's looking at what infrastructure needs to be protected. He's looking
at what state and local governments need to do their work. That is an
extremely important innovation.
I hope that he will have the freedom to manage that organization in a
way that will make it fully effective, because there are a lot of
issues for Congress in how that's managed.
We have created a threat terrorism information center, the TTIC, which
does bring together all of the sources of information from all of the
intelligence agencies _ the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security
and the INS and the CIA and the DIA _ so that there's one place where
all of this is coming together.
And of course the Patriot Act, which permits the kind of sharing that
we need between the CIA and the FBI, is also an important innovation.
But I would be the first to tell you _ I'm a student of institutional
change. I know that you get few chances to make really transformative
institutional change.
And I think that when we've heard from this commission and others who
are working on other pieces of the problem, like, for instance, the
issues of intelligence and weapons of mass destruction, that this
president will be open to new ideas.
I really don't believe that all of our work is done, despite the
tremendous progress that we've made thus far.
FIELDING: Well, I promise you that we're going to respond to that,
because that is really a problem that's bothering us, is that it
doesn't appear to us, even with the changes up until now, that it's
solved the institutional versus institutional issues, which _ maybe it
has, but, you know, it's of grave concern to us.
I would also ask _ I don't want to take the time today, but I would ask
that you provide our commission, if you would with your analysis on the
MI-5 issue. As you know, it's something we're going to have to deal
with, and we're taking all information aboard that we may. So we'd
appreciate that if you could supply that to us.
RICE: I appreciate that.
I want to be very clear. I think that we've made very important
changes. I think that they are helping us tremendously.
Every day now in the Oval Office in the morning, the FBI director and
the CIA director sit with the president, sharing information in ways
that they would have been prohibited to share that information before.
So very important changes have taken place. We need to see them mature.
We need to know how it's working. But we also have to be open to see
what more needs to be done.
FIELDING: It may be solved at the top. We've got to make sure it's
solved at the bottom.
RICE: I agree completely.
FIELDING: And kind of related to that, we've heard testimony, a great
deal of it, about the coordination that took place during the
millennium threat in 1999 where there were a series of principals
meetings and a lot of activity, as we are told, which stopped and
prevented incidents. It was a success. It was an intelligence success.
And there had to be domestic coordination with foreign intelligence,
but it seemed to work.
The time ended, the threat ended, and apparently the guard was let down
a little, too, as the threat diminished.
Now, we've also heard testimony about what we would call the summer
threat, the spike threat, whatever it is in 2001. A lot of chatter _
you shared some of it with us directly _ a lot of traffic, and a lot of
threats.
And during that period _ actually you put in context, I guess it was
the first draft of the NSPD was circulated to deputies. But right then,
when that was happening, the threats were coming in, and it's been
described as a crescendo and hair on fire and all these different
things.
At that time the CSG handled the alert, if you will. And we've heard
testimony about Clarke warning you and the NSC that State and CIA and
the Pentagon had concerns and were convinced there was going to be a
major terrorist attack.
On July 5th, I believe it was, domestic agencies, including the FBI and
the FAA, were briefed by the White House. Alerts were issued. The next
day, the CIA told the CSG participants, and I think they said they
believed the upcoming attack would be spectacular, something
quantitatively different from anything that had been done to date.
So everybody was worried about it. Everybody was concentrating on it.
And then later the crescendo ended, and again it abated.
But of course, that time the end of the story wasn't pleasant.
FIELDING: Now, during this period of time, what _ and I'd like you to
just respond to several points _ what involvement did you have in this
alert? And how did it come about that the CSG was handling this thing
as opposed to the principals?
Because candidly it's been suggested that the difference between the
1999 handling and this one was that you didn't have the principals
dealing with it; therefore, it wasn't given the priority; therefore,
the people weren't forced to do what they would otherwise have done, et
cetera. You've heard the same things I've heard.
And would it have made a real difference in enhancing the exchange of
intelligence, for instance, if it had been the principals?
I would like your comments, both on your involvement and your comments
to that question. Thank you.
RICE: Of course. Let me start by talking about what we were doing and
the structure we used. I've mentioned this.
The CSG, yes, was the counterterrorism group, was the nerve center, if
you will. And that's been true through all crises. I think it was, in
fact, a nerve center as well during the millennium, that they were the
counterterrorism experts, they were able to get together. They got
together frequently. They came up with taskings that needed to be done.
I would say that if you look at the list of taskings that they came up
with, it reflected the fact that the threat information was from
abroad. It was that the agencies like the Department of State needed to
make clear to Americans traveling abroad that there was a danger, that
embassies needed to be on alert, that our force protection needed to be
strong for our military forces.
The Central Intelligence Agency was asked to do some things. It was
very foreign policy or foreign threat-based as well. And of course, the
warning to the FBI to go out and task their field agents.
RICE: The CSG was made up of not junior people, but the top level of
counterterrorism experts. Now, they were in contact with their
principals.
Dick Clarke was in contact with me quite frequently during this period
of time. When the CSG would meet, he would come back usually through
e-mail, sometimes personally, and say, here's what we've done. I would
talk everyday, several times a day, with George Tenet about what the
threat spike looked like.
In fact, George Tenet was meeting with the president during this period
of time so the president was hearing directly about what was being done
about the threats to _ the only really specific threats we had _ to
Genoa, to the Persian Gulf, there was one to Israel. So the president
was hearing what was being done.
The CSG was the nerve center. But I just don't believe that bringing
the principals over to the White House every day and having their
counterterrorism people have to come with them and be pulled away from
what they were doing to disrupt was a good way to go about this. It
wasn't an efficient way to go about it.
I talked to Powell, I talked to Rumsfeld about what was happening with
the threats and with the alerts. I talked to George. I asked that the
attorney general be briefed, because even though there were no domestic
threats, I didn't want him to be without that briefing.
It's also the case that I think if you actually look back at the
millennium period, it's questionable to me whether the argument that
has been made that somehow shaking the trees is what broke up the
millennium period is actually accurate _ and I was not there, clearly.
But I will tell you this. I will say this. That the millennium, of
course, was a period of high threat by its very nature. We all knew
that the millennium was a period of high threat.
And after September 11th, Dick Clarke sent us the after-action report
that had been done after the millennium plot and their assessment was
that Ressam had been caught by chance _ Ressam being the person who was
entering the United States over the Canadian border with bomb-making
materials in store.
I think it actually wasn't by chance, which was Washington's view of
it. It was because a very alert customs agent named Diana Dean and her
colleagues sniffed something about Ressam. They saw that something was
wrong. They tried to apprehend him. He tried to run. They then
apprehended him, found that there was bomb-making material and a map of
Los Angeles.
Now, at that point, you have pretty clear indication that you've got a
problem inside the United States.
I don't think it was shaking the trees that produced the breakthrough
in the millennium plot. It was that you got a _ Dick Clarke would say a
lucky break _ I would say you got an alert customs agent who got it
right.
And the interesting thing is that I've checked with Customs and
according to their records, they weren't actually on alert at that
point.
So I just don't buy the argument that we weren't shaking the trees
enough and that something was going to fall out that gave us somehow
that little piece of information that would have led to connecting all
of those dots.
In any case, you cannot be dependent on the chance that something might
come together. That's why the structural reforms are important.
And the president of the United States had us at battle station during
this period of time. He expected his secretary of state to be locking
down embassies. He expected his secretary of defense to be providing
force protection.
RICE: He expected his FBI director to be tasking his agents and getting
people out there. He expected his director of central intelligence to
be out and doing what needed to be done in terms of disruption, and he
expected his national security adviser to be looking to see that _ or
talking to people to see that that was done.
But I think we've created a kind of false impression _ or a not quite
correct impression _ of how one does this in the threat period. I might
just add that during the China period, the 11 days of the China crisis,
I also didn't have a principals meeting.
FIELDING: Thank you, Dr. Rice.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
KEAN: Thank you, Commissioner Fielding.
Commissioner Gorelick?
GORELICK: Dr. Rice, thank you for being here today.
I'd like to pick up where Fred Fielding and you left off, which is this
issue of the extent to which raising the level to the Cabinet level and
bringing people together makes a difference.
And let me just give you some facts as I see them and let you comment
on them.
First of all, while it may be that Dick Clarke was informing you, many
of the other people at the CSG-level, and the people who were brought
to the table from the domestic agencies, were not telling their
principals.
Secretary Mineta, the secretary of transportation, had no idea of the
threat. The administrator of the FAA, responsible for security on our
airlines, had no idea. Yes, the attorney general was briefed, but there
was no evidence of any activity by him about this.
You indicate in your statement that the FBI tasked its field offices to
find out what was going on out there. We have no record of that.
The Washington field office international terrorism people say they
never heard about the threat, they never heard about the warnings, they
were not asked to come to the table and shake those trees.
SACs, special agents in charge, around the country _ Miami in
particular _ no knowledge of this.
And so, I really come back to you _ and let me add one other thing.
Have you actually looked at the _ analyzed the messages that the FBI
put out?
RICE: Yes.
GORELICK: To me, and you're free to comment on them, they are feckless.
They don't tell anybody anything. They don't bring anyone to battle
stations.
And I personally believe, having heard Coleen Rowley's testimony about
her frustrations in the Moussaoui incident, that if someone had really
gone out to the agents who were working these issues on the ground and
said, We are at battle stations. We need to know what's happening out
there. Come to us, she would have broken through barriers to have that
happen, because she was knocking on doors and they weren't opening.
(APPLAUSE)
So I just ask you this question as a student of government myself,
because I don't believe it's functionally equivalent to have people
three, four, five levels down in an agency working an issue even if
there's a specialist. And you get a greater degree of intensity when it
comes from the top. And I would like to give you the opportunity to
comment on this, because it bothers me.
RICE: Of course.
First of all, it was coming from the top because the president was
meeting with his director of central intelligence. And one of the
changes that this president made was to meet face to face with his
director of central intelligence almost every day.
I can assure you, knowing government, that that was well understood at
the Central Intelligence Agency, that now their director, the DCI had
direct access to the president.
Yes, the president met with the director of the FBI _ I'll have to see
when and how many times _ but of course he did, and with the attorney
general and with others.
But in a threat period _ and I don't think it's a proper
characterization of the CSG to say that it was four or five levels
down, these were people who had been together in numerous crises before
and it was their responsibility to develop plans for how to respond to
a threat.
Now, I would be speculating, but if you would like, I will go ahead and
speculate to say that one of the problems here was there really was
nothing that looked like it was going to happen inside the United
States.
The threat reporting was _ the specific threat reporting was about
external threats: about the Persian Gulf, about Israel, about perhaps
the Genoa event.
It is just not the case that the August 6th memorandum did anything but
put together what the CIA decided that they wanted to put together
about historical knowledge about what was going on and a few things
about what the FBI might be doing.
And so, the light was shining abroad. And if you look at what was going
_ I was in constant contact to make sure that those things were getting
done with the relevant agencies _ with State, with Defense and so forth.
GORELICK: Now ...
RICE: We just have a different view of this.
GORELICK: Yes, I understand that. But I think it's one thing to talk to
George Tenet, but he can't tell domestic agencies what to do.
Let me finish.
RICE: Yes.
GORELICK: And it is clear that you were worried about the domestic
problem, because, after all, your testimony is you asked Dick Clarke to
summons the domestic agencies.
Now, you say that _ and I think quite rightly _ that the big problem
was systemic, that the FBI could not function as it should, and it
didn't have the right methods of communicating with the CIA and vice
versa.
At the outset of the administration, a commission that was chartered by
Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, two very different people covering
pretty much the political spectrum, put together a terrific panel to
study the issue of terrorism and report to the new administration as it
began. And you took that briefing, I know.
That commission said we are going to get hit in the domestic, the
United States, and we are going to get hit big; that's number one. And
number two, we have big systemic problems. The FBI doesn't work the way
it should, and it doesn't communicate with the intelligence community.
rice1629-----
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04-08-2004 11:08
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GORELICK: Now, you have said to us that your policy review was meant to
be comprehensive. You took your time because you wanted to get at the
hard issues and have a hard-hitting, comprehensive policy. And yet
there is nothing in it about the vast domestic landscape that we were
all warned needed so much attention.
Can you give me the answer to the question why?
RICE: I would ask the following. We were there for 233 days. There had
been recognition for a number of years before _ after the '93 bombing,
and certainly after the millennium _ that there were challenges, if I
could say it that way, inside the United States, and that there were
challenges concerning our domestic agencies and the challenges
concerning the FBI and the CIA.
We were in office 233 days. It's absolutely the case that we did not
begin structural reform of the FBI.
Now, the vice president was asked by the president, and that was tasked
in May, to put all of this together and to see if he could put
together, from all of the recommendations, a program for protection of
the homeland against WMD, what else needed to be done. And in fact, he
had hired Admiral Steve Abbot to do that work. And it was on that basis
that we were able to put together the Homeland Security Council, which
Tom Ridge came to head very, very quickly.
But I think the question is, why, over all of these years, did we not
address the structural problems that were there, with the FBI, with the
CIA, the homeland departments being scattered among many different
departments?
RICE: And why, given all of the opportunities that we'd had to do it,
had we not done it?
And I think that the unfortunate _ and I really do think it's extremely
tragic _ fact is that sometimes until there is a catastrophic event
that forces people to think differently, that forces people to overcome
all customs and old culture and old fears about domestic intelligence
and the relationship, that you don't get that kind of change.
And I want to say just one more thing, if you don't mind, about the
issue of high-level attention.
The reason that I asked Andy Card to come with me to that meeting with
Dick Clarke was that I wanted him to know _ wanted Dick Clarke to know
_ that he had the weight not just of the national security advisor, but
the weight of the chief of staff if he needed it. I didn't manage the
domestic agencies. No national security advisor does.
And not once during this period of time did my very experienced crisis
manager say to me, You know, I don't think this is getting done in the
agencies. I'd really like you to call them together or make a phone
call.
In fact, after the fact, on September 15th, what Dick Clarke sent me _
and he was my crisis manager _ what he sent me was a memorandum, or an
e-mail that said, After national unity begins to break down _ again,
I'm paraphrasing _ people will ask, did we do all that we needed to do
to arm the domestic agencies, to warn the domestic agencies and to
respond to the possibility of domestic threat?
That, I think, was his view at the time. And I have to tell you, I
think given the circumstances and given the context and given the
structures that we had, we did.
GORELICK: Well, I have lots of other questions on this issue. But I am
trying to get out what will probably be my third and last question to
you. So if we could move through this reasonably quickly.
I was struck by your characterization of the NSPD, the policy that you
arrived at at the end of the administration, as having the goal of the
elimination of Al Qaida.
Because as I look at it _ and I thank you for declassifying this this
morning, although I would have liked to have known it a little earlier,
but I think people will find this interesting reading _ it doesn't call
for the elimination of Al Qaida.
And it may be a semantic difference, but I don't think so. It calls for
the elimination of the Al Qaida threat. And that's a very big
difference, because, to me, the elimination of Al Qaida means you're
going to go into Afghanistan and you're going to get them.
And as I read it, and as I've heard your public statements recently,
there was not, I take it, a decision taken in this document to put U.S.
troops on the ground in Afghanistan to get Al Qaida. Is that correct?
RICE: That is correct.
GORELICK: Now, you have pointed out that in this document there is a
tasking to the Defense Department for contingency planning as part of
this exercise _ contingency planning, and you've listed the goals of
the contingency plans.
And you have suggested that this takes the policy, with regard to
terrorism for our country, to a new level, a more aggressive level.
Were you briefed on Operation Infinite Resolve that was put in place in
'98 and updated in the year 2000?
Because as I read Infinite Resolve, and as our staff reads Infinite
Resolve, it was a plan that had been tasked by the Clinton
administration to the Defense Department to develop precisely analogous
plans. And it was extant at the time.
GORELICK: And so I ask you _ and there are many, many places where you
indicate there are differences between the Clinton program and yours.
This one jumps out at me.
Was there a material difference between your view of the military
assignment and the Clinton administration's extant plan? And if so,
what was it?
RICE: Yes, I think that there were significant differences.
First of all, Secretary Rumsfeld, I think, has testified that he was
briefed on Infinite Resolve. It would have been highly unusual for me
to me to be briefed on military plans were we not, in fact, planning to
use them for employment. And so I'm not surprised...
GORELICK: Well, except that you were tasking them _ pardon me for
interrupting _ you were tasking the military to do something as part of
this seven-and-a-half-month process. So it would strike me as likely
that you would have wanted to know what the predicate was.
RICE: We were tasking the secretary of defense, who in fact had been
briefed on Infinite Resolve, to develop within the context of a broader
strategy military plans that were now linked to certain political
purposes.
I worked in the Pentagon. I worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. There
are plans and plans and plans. And the problem is that unless those
plans are engaged by the civilian leadership on behalf of the
president, unless those plans have an adequate political basis and
political purpose in mind, those plans simply sit and they in fact
rarely get used.
Now, the whole tortured history of trying to use military power in
support of counterterrorism objectives has been, I think, very
admirably and adequately discussed by your staff in the military paper.
RICE: And what is quite clear from that paper is that, from the time of
Presidential Directive 62, which keeps the Defense Department focused
on force protection and rendition of terrorists and so forth, all the
way up through the period when we take office, this issue of military
plans and how to use military power with counterterrorism objectives
just doesn't get addressed.
What we were doing was to put together a policy that brought all of the
elements together. It tasked the secretary of defense within the
context of a plan that really focused not just on Al Qaida and bin
Laden, but also on what we might be able to do against the Taliban. And
that gave the kind of regional context that might make it possible to
use military force more robustly, to work plans in that context.
I think without that context, you're just going to have military plans
that never get used.
I read Sandy Berger _ or saw Sandy Berger's testimony. He talked about
the fact whenever they started to look at the use of military plans,
the issue of whether you would get regional cooperation always arose.
That was precisely what I was saying, when I said that we had to get
the regional context right.
I am not going to tell thaw we were looking to invade Afghanistan
during that seven months. We were not.
But we were looking in the context of a plan that gave you a better
regional context that looked to eliminate the Al Qaida threat or Al
Qaida that looked to eliminate Taliban support for them _ how to use
military power within that context.
KEAN: Last follow-up.
GORELICK: In order to keep us to our schedule, I'll just make this
comment, and we'll, I think, profitably follow up with you in a private
session.
PDD 62, which was the presidential directive in the Clinton
administration, was not the only way in which the Defense Department
was tasked. I mean, Infinite Resolve went well beyond what you describe
PDD 62 as doing. That's number one.
And number two, however good it might have been to change the text in
which the military planning was ongoing, neither I, nor, I think, our
staff, can find any functional difference between the two sets of
plans. I'll leave it to my colleagues.
RICE: Well, thank you very much. But I continue to believe that unless
you can tell the military in the context what it is they're going after
and for what purpose, you're going to have military plans that, every
time you ask for the briefing, turn out to be unusable.
GORELICK: I'm sure that this debate will continue.
RICE: Yes.
KEAN: Senator Gorton?
GORTON: Before 9/11, did any adviser to you, or to your knowledge to
this administration or to its predecessor, counsel the kind of all-out
war against the Taliban and Al Qaida in Afghanistan that the United
States actually conducted after 9/11?
RICE: No, sir. No one counseled an all-out war against Afghanistan of
the kind that we did after 9/11.
RICE: There was a good deal of talk about the inadequacy of military
options to go after Al Qaida. Dick Clarke was quite clear in his view
that the very things that had been tasked were inadequate to the task.
And so, people were looking for other kinds of military options. But
no, an all-out invasion of Afghanistan, it was not recommended.
GORTON: Was it possible to conduct that kind of war in Afghanistan
without the cooperation of Pakistan?
RICE: It was absolutely not possible.
And this goes also to the point that I was making to Commissioner
Gorelick. You can have lots of plans but unless _ since the United
States sits protected by oceans, or no longer protected _ the United
States sits across oceans _ unless you find a way to get regional
cooperation from Pakistan, from the Central Asian countries, you're
going to be left with essentially stand-off options, meaning bombers
and cruise missiles, because you're not going to have the full range of
military options.
GORTON: Now, your written and oral statement spoke of a frustrating and
unproductive meeting with the president of Pakistan in June. Let me go
beyond that.
How much progress had the United States made toward the kind of
necessary cooperation from Pakistan by say the 10th of September, 2001?
RICE: The United States had a comprehensive plan that the deputies had
approved that would have been coming to the principals shortly _ and I
think approved easily, because the deputies are, of course, very senior
people who have the consonance of their principals _ that was going to
try to unravel this overlapping set of sanctions that were on Pakistan.
Some because of the way Musharraf had come to power, some because of
nuclear issues. We were looking to do that.
Rich Armitage tells me that when he approached the Pakistanis after
September 11th, he did presage that we would try and do this also with
a positive side, but the plans were not in place. Changing Pakistan's
strategic direction was going to take some time.
GORTON: Would the program recommended on September 4th have prevented
9/11 had it been adopted in, say, February or March of 2001?
RICE: Commissioner, it would not have prevented September 11th if it
had been approved the day after we came to office.
GORTON: Now, in retrospect, and given the knowledge that you had, you
and the administration simply believed that you had more time to meet
this challenge of Al Qaida than was in fact the case. Is that not true?
RICE: It is true that we understood that to meet this challenge it was
going to take time. It was a multiyear program to try and meet the
challenge of Al Qaida.
That doesn't mean that when you get immediate threat reporting that you
don't do everything that you can to disrupt at that particular point in
time.
But in terms of the strategy of trying to improve the prospects of
Pakistan withdrawing support from Taliban, with presenting the Taliban
with possible defeat because you were dealing not just with the
Northern Alliance but with the southern tribes, that, we believed, we
going to take time.
GORTON: It turned out, in retrospect, you didn't have the time to do it.
RICE: We didn't. Although, I will say that the document that was then
approved by the president after September 11th, what happened was that
the NSPD was then forwarded to the president in a post- September 11th
context, and many of the same aspects of it were used to guide the
policy that we actually did take against Afghanistan.
And the truth of the matter is that, as the president said on September
20th, this is going to take time. We're still trying to unravel Al
Qaida. We're still trying to deal with worldwide terrorist threats.
So it's obvious that, even with all of the force of the country after
September 11th, this is a long-term project.
GORTON: One subject that certainly any administration in your place
would not like to bring up but I want to bring up in any event is, the
fact is that we've now gone two and a half years and we have not had
another incident in the United States even remotely comparable to 9/11.
GORTON: In your view _ there have been many such horrific incidents in
other parts of the world, from Al Qaida or Al Qaida lookalikes.
In your view, have the measures that have been taken here in the United
States actually reduced the amount of terrorism, or simply displaced it
and caused it to move elsewhere?
RICE: I believe that we have really hurt the Al Qaida network. We have
not destroyed it. And it is clear that it was much more entrenched and
had relationships with many more organizations than I think people
generally recognize.
I don't think it's been displaced. But they realize that they are in an
all-out war. And so you're starting to see them try to fight back. And
I think that's one reason that you're getting the terrorist attacks
that you are.
But I don't think it's been displaced; I think it's just coming to the
surface.
GORTON: Well, maybe you don't understand what I mean by displacement.
Do you not think that Al Qaida and these terrorist entities are now
engaged in terrorism where they think it's easier than it would be in
the United States? That's what I mean about displacement.
RICE: Oh, I see. I'm sorry. I didn't understand the question.
I think that it is possible that they recognize the heightened security
profile that we have post-September 11th, and I believe that we have
made it harder for them to attack here.
I will tell you that I get up every day concerned because I don't think
we've made it impossible for them.
RICE: We're safer, but we're not safe.
And as I said, they have to be right once; we have to be right 100
percent of the time.
But I do think some of the security measures that we have taken, some
of the systemic and systematic security measures that we have taken,
have made it a lot harder for them.
GORTON: I think, in one sense, there are three ways in which one can
deal with a threat like this, and I would like your views on how well
you think we've done in each of them and maybe even their relative
importance.
So one is hardening targets, like kind of disruptions we have every
time we try to travel on an airplane.
The second is prevention. And a lot has been spoken here about that,
whether we're better able to find out what their plans are and
frustrate those plans.
And the third is one that you talked about in your opening statement:
preemption, going at the cause.
How do you balance, in a free society, those three generic methods of
going after terrorism?
RICE: I sincerely hope that one of the outcomes of this commission is
that we will talk about balance between those, because we want to
prevent the next terrorist attack. We don't want to do it at the
expense of who we are as an open society.
And I think that, in terms of hardening, we've done a lot. If you look
at the airport security now, it's considerably very much different than
it was prior. And there's a transportation security agency that's
charged with that.
Tom Ridge and his people have an actual unit that sits around and
worried about critical infrastructure protection and works with local
and state governments to make sure the critical infrastructure is
protected.
I think we're making a lot of progress in hardening. In terms of _ but
we're never going to be able to harden enough to prevent every attack.
We have, in terms of prevention, increased the worldwide attention to
this problem.
When Louis Freeh put together the Legat System, the Legal Attache
System, abroad, it was _ and I'm sure that you, Commissioner Gorelick,
as a former deputy attorney general, will remember that _ it became a
very important tool also post-9/11 to be able to work with the law
enforcement agencies abroad now married up with foreign intelligence in
a way that helps us to be able to disrupt abroad in ways that I think
we were not capable of disrupting before.
RICE: Many of our democratic partners are having some of the same
debates that we are about how to have prevention without issues of
civil liberties being exposed.
We think the Patriot Act gets just the right balance and that it's
extremely important to prevention because it makes law enforcement _
usually in law enforcement you wait until a crime is committed and then
you act. We cannot afford in terrorism to wait until a crime is
committed.
And finally, in terms of preemption, I have to say that the one thing
I've been struck by in the hearings is when I was listening to the
former secretaries and the current secretaries the other day, is the
persistent argument, the persistent question of whether we should have
acted against Afghanistan sooner.
Given that the threats were gathering, given that we knew Al Qaida had
launched attacks against us, why did we wait until you had a
catastrophic attack to use strategic military power _ not tit for tat,
not a little tactical military strike _ but strategic military power
against this country.
And the president has said many times that after September 11th, we
have learned not to let threats gather. And yet we continue to have a
debate about whether or not you have to go against threats before they
fully materialize on your soil.
GORTON: Well, Ms. Rice, one final comment.
I asked both the secretary of state and secretary of defense that
question about whether or not they didn't think we had more time than
we were actually granted the luxury of having; they both ducked the
question totally. You at least partly answered it.
Thank you very much.
RICE: Thank you.
KEAN: Thank you, Senator.
Senator Kerrey?
KERREY: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
And thank you, Dr. Rice.
Let me say at the beginning I'm very impressed, and indeed I'd go as
far as to say moved by your story, the story of your life and what
you've accomplished. It's quite extraordinary.
And I want to say at the outset that, notwithstanding perhaps the tone
of some of my questions, I'm not sure had I been in your position or
Sandy Berger's position or President Bush or President Clinton's
position that I would have done things differently. I simply don't know.
But the line of questioning will suggest that I'm trying to ascertain
why things weren't done differently.
Let me ask a question that _ well, actually, let me say _ I can't pass
this up. I know it'll take into my 10-minute time. But as somebody who
supported the war in Iraq, I'm not going to get the national security
adviser 30 feet away from me very often over the next 90 days, and I've
got to tell you, I believe a number of things.
I believe, first of all, that we underestimate that this war on
terrorism is really a war against radical Islam. Terrorism is a tactic.
It's not a war itself.
Secondly, let me say that I don't think we understand how the Muslim
world views us, and I'm terribly worried that the military tactics in
Iraq are going to do a number of things, and they're all bad. One is...
(APPLAUSE)
No, please don't _ please do not do that. Do not applaud.
I think we're going to end up with civil war if we continue down the
military operation strategies that we have in place. I say that
sincerely as someone that supported the war in the first place.
Let me say, secondly, that I don't know how it could be otherwise,
given the way that we're able to see these military operations, even
the restrictions that are imposed upon the press, that this doesn't
provide an opportunity for Al Qaida to have increasing success at
recruiting people to attack the United States.
KERREY: It worries me. And I wanted to make that declaration. You
needn't comment on it, but as I said, I'm not going to have an
opportunity to talk to you this closely.
And I wanted to tell you that I think the military operations are
dangerously off track. And it's largely a U.S. Army _ 125,000 out of
145,000 _ largely a Christian army in a Muslim nation. So I take that
on board for what it's worth.
Let me ask you, first of all, a question that's been a concern for me
from the first day I came on the commission, and that is the
relationship of our executive director to you.
Let me just ask you directly, and you can just give me _ keep it
relatively short, but I wanted to get it on the record.
KERREY: Since he was an expert on terrorism, did you ask Philip Zelikow
any questions about terrorism during transition, since he was the
second person carded in the national security office and had
considerable expertise?
RICE: Philip and I had numerous conversations about the issues that we
were facing. Philip, as you know, had worked in the campaign and helped
with the transition plans, so yes.
KERREY: Yes, you did talk to him about terrorism?
RICE: We talked _ Philip and I over a period of _ you know, we had
worked closely together as academics...
KERREY: During the transition, did you instruct him to do anything on
terrorism?
RICE: Oh, to do anything on terrorism?
KERREY: Yes.
RICE: To help us think about the structure of the terrorism _ Dick
Clarke's operations, yes.
KERREY: You've used the phrase a number of times, and I'm hoping with
my question to disabuse you of using it in the future.
You said the president was tired of swatting flies.
KERREY: Can you tell me one example where the president swatted a fly
when it came to Al Qaida prior to 9/11?
RICE: I think what the president was speaking to was...
KERREY: No, no. What fly had he swatted?
RICE: Well, the disruptions abroad was what he was really focusing on...
KERREY: No, no...
RICE: ... when the CIA would go after Abu Zubaydah...
KERREY: He hadn't swatted...
RICE: ... or go after this guy...
KERREY: Dr. Rice, we didn't...
RICE: That was what was meant.
KERREY: We only swatted a fly once on the 20th of August 1998. We
didn't swat any flies afterwards. How the hell could he be tired?
RICE: We swatted at _ I think he felt that what the agency was doing
was going after individual terrorists here and there, and that's what
he meant by swatting flies. It was simply a figure of speech.
KERREY: Well, I think it's an unfortunate figure of speech because I
think, especially after the attack on the Cole on the 12th of October,
2000, it would not have been swatting a fly. It would not have been _
we did not need to wait to get a strategic plan.
Dick Clarke had in his memo on the 20th of January overt military
operations. He turned that memo around in 24 hours, Dr. Clarke. There
were a lot of plans in place in the Clinton administration _ military
plans in the Clinton administration.
In fact, since we're in the mood to declassify stuff, there was _ he
included in his January 25th memo two appendices _ Appendix A:
Strategy for the elimination of the jihadist threat of Al Qaida,
Appendix B: Political military plan for Al Qaida.
So I just _ why didn't we respond to the Cole?
RICE: Well, we...
KERREY: Why didn't we swat that fly?
RICE: I believe that there's a question of whether or not you respond
in a tactical sense or whether you respond in a strategic sense;
whether or not you decide that you're going to respond to every attack
with minimal use of military force and go after every _ on a kind of
tit-for-tat basis.
By the way, in that memo, Dick Clarke talks about not doing this
tit-for-tat, doing this on the time of our choosing.
RICE: I'm aware, Mr. Kerrey, of a speech that you gave at that time
that said that perhaps the best thing that we could do to respond to
the Cole and to the memories was to do something about the threat of
Saddam Hussein.
That's a strategic view...
(APPLAUSE)
And we took a strategic view. We didn't take a tactical view. I mean,
it was really _ quite frankly, I was blown away when I read the speech,
because it's a brilliant speech. It talks about really...
(LAUGHTER)
... an asymmetric...
KERREY: I presume you read it in the last few days?
RICE: Oh no, I read it quite a bit before that. It's an asymmetric
approach.
Now, you can decide that every time Al Qaida...
KERREY: So you're saying that you didn't have a military response
against the Cole because of my speech?
RICE: I'm saying, I'm saying...
(LAUGHTER)
RICE: No.
KERREY: That had I not given that speech you would have attacked them?
RICE: No, I'm just saying that I think it was a brilliant way to think
about it.
KERREY: I think it's...
RICE: It was a way of thinking about it strategically, not tactically.
But if I may answer the question that you've asked me.
The issue of whether to respond _ or how to respond to the Cole _ I
think Don Rumsfeld has also talked about this.
Yes, the Cole had happened. We received, I think on January 25th, the
same assessment _ or roughly the same assessment _ of who was
responsible for the Cole that Sandy Berger talked to you about.
It was preliminary. It was not clear. But that was not the reason that
we felt that we did not want to, quote, respond to the Cole.
We knew that the options that had been employed by the Clinton
administration had been standoff options. The president had _ meaning
missile strikes or perhaps bombers would have been possible, long-range
bombers. Although getting in place the apparatus to use long-range
bombers is even a matter of whether you have basing in the region.
RICE: We knew that Osama Bin Laden had been, in something that was
provided to me, bragging that he was going to withstand any response
and then he was going to emerge and come out stronger.
KERREY: But you're figuring this out. You've got to give a very long
answer.
RICE: We simply believed that the best approach was to put in place a
plan that was going to eliminate this threat, not respond to an attack.
KERREY: Let me say, I think you would have come in there if you said,
We screwed up. We made a lot of mistakes. You obviously don't want to
use the M-word in here. And I would say fine, it's game, set, match. I
understand that.
But this strategic and tactical, I mean, I just _ it sounds like
something from a seminar. It doesn't...
RICE: I do not believe to this day that it would have been a good thing
to respond to the Cole, given the kinds of options that we were going
to have.
And with all due respect to Dick Clarke, if you're speaking about the
Delenda plan, my understanding is that it was, A, never adopted, and
that Dick Clarke himself has said that the military portion of this was
not taken up by the Clinton administration.
KERREY: Let me move into another area.
RICE: So we were not presented _ I just want to be very clear on this,
because it's been a source of controversy _ we were not presented with
a plan.
KERREY: Well, that's not true. It is not...
RICE: We were not presented. We were presented with...
KERREY: I've heard you say that, Dr. Clarke, that 25 January, 2001,
memo was declassified, I don't believe...
RICE: That January 25 memo has a series of actionable items having to
do with Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance.
KERREY: Let me move to another area.
RICE: May I finish answering your question, though, because this is an
important...
KERREY: I know it's important. Everything that's going on here is
important. But I get 10 minutes.
RICE: But since we have a point of disagreement, I'd like to have a
chance to address it.
KERREY: Well, no, no, actually, we have many points of disagreement,
Dr. Clarke, but we'll have a chance to do in closed session. Please
don't filibuster me. It's not fair. It is not fair. I have been polite.
I have been courteous. It is not fair to me.
(APPLAUSE)
I understand that we have a disagreement.
RICE: Commissioner, I am here to answer questions. And you've asked me
a question, and I'd like to have an opportunity to answer it.
The fact is that what we were presented on January the 25th was a set
of ideas and a paper, most of which was about what the Clinton
administration had done and something called the Delenda plan which had
been considered in 1998 and never adopted. We decided to take a
different track.
RICE: We decided to put together a strategic approach to this that
would get the regional powers _ the problem wasn't that you didn't have
a good counterterrorism person.
The problem was you didn't have an approach against Al Qaida because
you didn't have an approach against Afghanistan. And you didn't have an
approach against Afghanistan because you didn't have an approach
against Pakistan. And until we could get that right, we didn't have a
policy.
KERREY: Thank you for answering my question.
RICE: You're welcome.
KERREY: Let me ask you another question. Here's the problem that I have
as I _ again, it's hindsight. I appreciate that. But here's the problem
that a lot of people are having with this July 5th meeting.
You and Andy Card meet with Dick Clarke in the morning. You say you
have a meeting, he meets in the afternoon. It's July 5th.
Kristen Breitweiser, who's a part of the families group, testified at
the Joint Committee. She brings very painful testimony, I must say.
But here's what Agent Kenneth Williams said five days later. He said
that the FBI should investigate whether Al Qaida operatives are
training at U.S. flight schools. He posited that Osama bin Laden
followers might be trying to infiltrate the civil aviation system as
pilots, security guards and other personnel. He recommended a national
program to track suspicious flight schools.
Now, one of the first things that I learned when I came into this town
was the FBI and the CIA don't talk. I mean, I don't need a catastrophic
event to know that the CIA and the FBI don't do a very good job of
communicating.
And the problem we've got with this and the Moussaoui facts, which were
revealed on the 15th of August, all it had to do was to be put on
Intelink. All it had to do is go out on Intelink, and the game's over.
It ends. This conspiracy would have been rolled up.
KERREY: And so I...
RICE: Commissioner, with all due respect, I don't agree that we know
that we had somehow a silver bullet here that was going to work.
What we do know is that we did have a systemic problem, a structural
problem between the FBI and the CIA. It was a long time in coming into
being. It was there because there were legal impediments, as well as
bureaucratic impediments. Those needed to be overcome.
Obviously, the structure of the FBI that did not get information from
the field offices up to FBI Central, in a way that FBI Central could
react to the whole range of information reports, was a problem..
KERREY: But, Dr. Rice, everybody...
RICE: But the structure of the FBI, the restructuring of the FBI, was
not going to be done in the 233 days in which we were in office...
KERREY: Dr. Rice, everybody who does national security in this town
knows the FBI and the CIA don't talk. So if you have a meeting on the
5th of July, where you're trying to make certain that your domestic
agencies are preparing a defense against a possible attack, you knew Al
Qaida cells were in the United States, you've got to follow up.
KERRY: And the question is, what was your follow-up? What's the paper
trail that shows that you and Andy Card followed up from this meeting,
and...
RICE: I followed...
KERREY: ... made certain that the FBI and the CIA were talking?
RICE: I followed up with Dick Clarke, who had in his group, and with
him, the key counterterrorism person for the FBI. You have to remember
that Louis Freeh was, by this time, gone. And so, the chief
counterterrorism person was the second _ Louis Freeh had left in late
June. And so the chief counterterrorism person for the FBI was working
these issues, was working with Dick Clarke. I talked to Dick Clarke
about this all the time.
RICE: But let's be very clear, the threat information that we were
dealing with _ and when you have something that says, something very
big may happen, you have no time, you have no place, you have no how,
the ability to somehow respond to that threat is just not there.
Now, you said...
KERREY: Dr. Clarke, in the spirit of further declassification...
RICE: Sir, with all...
KERREY: The spirit...
RICE: I don't think I look like Dick Clarke, but...
(LAUGHTER)
KERREY: Dr. Rice, excuse me.
RICE: Thank you.
KEAN: This is the last question, Senator.
KERREY: Actually it won't be a question.
In the spirit of further declassification, this is what the August 6th
memo said to the president: that the FBI indicates patterns of
suspicious activity in the United States consistent with preparations
for hijacking.
That's the language of the memo that was briefed to the president on
the 6th of August.
RICE: And that was checked out and steps were taken through FAA
circulars to warn of hijackings.
But when you cannot tell people where a hijacking might occur, under
what circumstances _ I can tell you that I think the best antidote to
what happened in that regard would have been many years before to think
about what you could do for instance to harden cockpits.
That would have made a difference. We weren't going to harden cockpits
in the three months that we had a threat spike.
The really difficult thing for all of us, and I'm sure for those who
came before us as well as for those of us who are here, is that the
structural and systematic changes that needed to be made _ not on July
5th or not on June 25th or not on January 1st _ those structures and
those changes needed to be made a long time ago so that the country was
in fact hardened against the kind of threat that we faced on September
11th.
The problem was that for a country that had not been attacked on its
territory in a major way in almost 200 years, there were a lot of
structural impediments to those kinds of attacks. RICE: Those changes
should have been made over a long period of time.
I fully agree with you that, in hindsight, now looking back, there are
many things structurally that were out of kilter. And one reason that
we're here is to look at what was out of kilter structurally, to look
at needed to be done, to look at what we already have done, and to see
what more we need to do.
But I think it is really quite unfair to suggest that something that
was a threat spike in June or July gave you the kind of opportunity to
make the changes in air security that could have been _ that needed to
be made.
KEAN: Secretary Lehman?
LEHMAN: Thank you.
Dr. Rice, I'd like to ask you whether you agree with the testimony we
had from Mr. Clarke that, when asked whether if all of his
recommendations during the transition or during the period when his,
quote, hair was on fire, had been followed immediately, would it have
prevented 9/11, he said no. Do you agree with that?
RICE: I agree completely with that.
LEHMAN: In a way, one of the criticisms that has been made _ or one of
the, perhaps, excuses for an inefficient hand-off of power at the
change, the transition, is, indeed, something we're going to be looking
into in depth.
Because of the circumstances of the election, it was the shortest
handover in memory. But in many ways, really, it was the longest
handover, certainly in my memory. Because while the Cabinet changed,
virtually all of the national and domestic security agencies and
executive action agencies remained the same _ combination of political
appointees from the previous administration and career appointees _
CIA, FBI, JCS, the CTC, the Counter-Terrorism Center, the DIA, the NSA,
the director of operations in CIA, the director of intelligence.
LEHMAN: So you really up almost until, with the exception of the INS
head leaving and there be an acting, and Louis Freeh leaving in June,
you essentially had the same government.
Now, that raises two questions in my mind.
One, a whole series of questions. What were you told by this short
transition from Mr. Berger and associates and the long transition
leading up to 9/11 by those officials about a number of key issues?
And I'd like to ask them quickly in turn.
And the other is, I'm struck by the continuity of the policies rather
than the differences.
And both of these sets of questions are really directed toward what I
think is the real purpose of this commission.
While it's certainly a lot more fun to be doing the, Who struck John?
and pointing fingers as which policy was more urgent or more important,
so forth, the real business of this commission is to learn the lessons
and to find the ways to fix those dysfunctions. And that's why we have
unanimity and true nonpartisanship on this commission. So that's what's
behind the rhetoric that's behind the questioning that we have.
First, during the short or long transition, were you told before the
summer that there were functioning Al Qaida cells in the United States?
RICE: In the memorandum that Dick Clarke sent me on January 25th, he
mentions sleeper cells. There is no mention or recommendation of
anything that needs to be done about them. And the FBI was pursuing
them.
And usually when things come to me, it's because I'm supposed to do
something about it, and there was no indication that the FBI was not
adequately pursuing the sleeper cells.
LEHMAN: Were you told that there were numerous young Arab males in
flight training, had taken flight training, were in flight training?
RICE: I was not. And I'm not sure that that was known at the center.
LEHMAN: Were you told that the U.S. Marshal program had been changed to
drop any U.S. marshals on domestic flights?
RICE: I was not told that.
LEHMAN: Were you told that the red team in FAA _ the red teams for 10
years had reported their hard data that the U.S. airport security
system never got higher than 20 percent effective and was usually down
around 10 percent for 10 straight years?
RICE: To the best of my recollection, I was not told that.
LEHMAN: Were you aware that INS had been lobbying for years to get the
airlines to drop the transit without visa loophole that enabled
terrorists and illegals to simply buy a ticket through the
transit-without- visa-waiver and pay the airlines extra money and come
in?
RICE: I learned about that after September 11th.
LEHMAN: Were you aware that the INS had quietly, internally, halved its
internal security enforcement budget?
RICE: I was not made aware of that. I don't remember being made aware
of that, no.
LEHMAN: Were you aware that it was the U.S. government established
policy not to question or oppose the sanctuary policies of New York,
Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, San Diego for political reasons, which
policy in those cities prohibited the local police from cooperating at
all with federal immigration authorities?
RICE: I do not believe I was aware of that.
LEHMAN: Were you aware _ to shift a little bit to Saudi Arabia _ were
you aware of the program that was well established that allowed Saudi
citizens to get visas without interviews?
RICE: I learned of that after 9/11.
LEHMAN: Were you aware of the activities of the Saudi ministry of
religious affairs here in the United States during that transition?
RICE: I believe that only after September 11th did the full extent of
what was going on with the ministry of religious affairs became evident.
LEHMAN: Were you aware of the extensive activities of the Saudi
government in supporting over 300 radical teaching schools and mosques
around the country, including right here in the United States?
RICE: I believe we've learned a great deal more about this and
addressed it with the Saudi government since 9/11.
LEHMAN: Were you aware at the time of the fact that Saudi Arabia had
and were you told that they had in their custody the CFO and the
closest confidant of Al Qaida _ of Osama bin Laden, and refused direct
access to the United States?
RICE: I don't remember anything of that kind.
LEHMAN: Were you aware that they would not cooperate and give us access
to the perpetrators of the Khobar Towers attack?
RICE: I was very involved in issues concerning Khobar Towers and our
relations with several governments concerning Khobar Towers.
LEHMAN: Thank you.
Were you aware _ and it disturbs me a bit, and again, let me shift to
the continuity issues here.
Were you aware that it was the policy of the Justice Department _ and
I'd like you to comment as to whether these continuities are still in
place _ before I go to Justice, were you aware that it was the policy
and I believe remains the policy today to fine airlines if they have
more than two young Arab males in secondary questioning because that's
discriminatory?
RICE: No, I have to say that the kind of inside arrangements for the
FAA are not really in my...
LEHMAN: Well, these are not so inside.
Were you aware that the FAA up until 9/11 thought it was perfectly
permissible to allow four-inch knife blades aboard?
RICE: I was not aware.
LEHMAN: OK.
Back to Justice. I was disturbed to hear you say on the continuity line
that President Bush's first reaction to 9/11 and the question of Al
Qaida's involvement was we must bring him to justice, because we have
had dozens and dozens of interviewees and witnesses say that a
fundamental problem of the dysfunction between CIA and Justice was the
criminal _ the attitude that law enforcement was what terrorism was all
about and not prevention and foreign policy.
I think that there was at the time a very strictly enforced wall in the
Justice Department between law enforcement and intelligence and that
repeatedly, there are many statements from presidents and attorneys
general and so forth that say that the first priority is bring these
people to justice, protect the evidence, seal the evidence and so forth.
LEHMAN: Do you believe this has changed?
RICE: I certainly believe that that has changed, Commissioner Lehman.
Let me just go back for one second, though, on the long list of
questions that you asked.
I think another structural problem for the United States is that we
really didn't have anyone trying to put together all of the kinds of
issues that you raised, about what we were doing with INS, what we were
doing with borders, what we were doing with visas, what we were doing
with airport security. And that's the reason that, first, the Homeland
Security Council, and then Tom Ridge's initial job, and then the
Homeland Security Department is so important, because you can then look
at the whole spectrum of protecting our borders from all kinds of
threats and say, what kinds of policies make sense and what kinds of
policies don't?
And they now actually have someone who looks at critical infrastructure
protection, looks at airport security, understands in greater detail
than I think the national security adviser could ever understand all of
the practices of what is going on in transportation security. That's
why it is important that we made the change that we did.
As to some of the questions concerning the Saudis: I think that we have
had, really, very good cooperation with Saudi Arabia since 9/11, and
since the May 12th attacks on Riyadh even greater cooperation, because
Saudi Arabia is I think fully enlisted in the war on terrorism. And we
need to understand that there were certain things that we didn't even
understand were going on inside the United States.
RICE: It's not terribly surprising that the Saudis didn't understand
some of the things that were going on in their country.
As to your last question, though, I think that that's actually where
we've had the biggest change. The president doesn't think of this as
law enforcement. He thinks of this as war.
And for all of the rhetoric of war prior to 9/11 _ people who said
we're at war with the jihadist network, people who said that they've
declared war on us and we're at war with them _ we weren't at war. We
weren't on war footing. We weren't behaving in that way.
We were still very focused on rendition of terrorists, on law
enforcement. And, yes, from time to time we did military plans, or use
the cruise missile strike here or there, but we did not have a
sustained systematic effort to destroy Al Qaida, to deal with those who
harbored Al Qaida.
One of the points that the president made in his very first speech on
the night of September 11th was that it's not just the terrorists, it's
those who harbor them, too. And he put states on notice that they were
going to be responsible if they sponsor terrorists or if they
acquiesced in terrorists being there.
And when he said, I want to bring them to justice, again, I think there
was a little bit of nervousness about talking about exactly what that
means.
But I don't think there's anyone in America who doesn't understand that
this president believes that we're at war, it's a war we have to win,
and that it is a war that cannot be fought on the defensive. It's a war
that has to be fought on the offense.
LEHMAN: Thank you. Are you sure that the...
KEAN: Last question, Secretary.
LEHMAN: As a last question, tell us what you really recommend we should
address our attentions to to fix this as the highest priority. Not just
moving boxes around, but what can you tell us in public here that we
could do, since we are outside the legislature and outside the
executive branch and can bring the focus of attention for change? Tell
us what you recommend we do.
RICE: My greatest concern is that, as September 11th recedes from
memory, that we will begin to unlearn the lessons of what we've learned.
RICE: And I think this commission can be very important in helping us
to focus on those lessons and then to make sure that the structures of
government reflect those lessons, because those structures of
government now are going to have to last us for a very long time.
I think we've done, under the president's leadership, we've done
extremely important structural change. We've reorganized the government
in a greater way than has been done since the 1947 National Security
Act created the Department of Defense, the CIA and the National
Security Council.
I think that we need to _ we have a major reorganization of the FBI,
where Bob Mueller is trying very hard not to just move boxes but to
change incentives, to change culture. Those are all very hard things to
do.
I think there have been very important changes made between the CIA and
FBI. Yes, everybody knew that they had trouble sharing, but in fact, we
had legal restrictions to their sharing. And George Tenet and Louis
Freeh and others have worked very hard at that. But until the Patriot
Act, we couldn't do what we needed to do.
And now I hear people who question the need for the Patriot Act,
question whether or not the Patriot Act is infringing on our civil
liberties. I think that you can address this hard question of the
balance that we as an open society need to achieve between the
protection of our country and the need to remain the open society, the
welcoming society that we are. And I think you're in a better position
to address that than anyone.
And I do want you to know that when you have addressed it, the
president is not going to just be interested in the recommendations. I
think he's going to be interested in knowing how we can press forward
in ways that will make us safer.
The other thing that I hope you will do is to take a look back again at
the question that keeps arising. I think Senator Gorton was going after
this question. I've heard Senator Kerrey talk about it, which is, you
know, the country, like democracies do, waited and waited and waited as
this threat gathered.
KERRY: And the question is, what was your follow-up? What's the paper
trail that shows that you and Andy Card followed up from this meeting,
and ...
RICE: I followed ...
KERREY: ... made certain that the FBI and the CIA were talking?
RICE: I followed up with Dick Clarke, who had in his group, and with
him, the key counterterrorism person for the FBI. You have to remember
that Louis Freeh was, by this time, gone. And so, the chief
counterterrorism person was the second _ Louis Freeh had left in late
June. And so the chief counterterrorism person for the FBI was working
these issues, was working with Dick Clarke. I talked to Dick Clarke
about this all the time.
RICE: But let's be very clear, the threat information that we were
dealing with _ and when you have something that says, something very
big may happen, you have no time, you have no place, you have no how,
the ability to somehow respond to that threat is just not there.
Now, you said ...
KERREY: Dr. Clarke, in the spirit of further declassification ...
RICE: Sir, with all ...
KERREY: The spirit ...
RICE: I don't think I look like Dick Clarke, but ...
(LAUGHTER)
KERREY: Dr. Rice, excuse me.
RICE: Thank you.
KEAN: This is the last question, Senator.
KERREY: Actually it won't be a question.
In the spirit of further declassification, this is what the August 6th
memo said to the president: that the FBI indicates patterns of
suspicious activity in the United States consistent with preparations
for hijacking.
That's the language of the memo that was briefed to the president on
the 6th of August.
RICE: And that was checked out and steps were taken through FAA
circulars to warn of hijackings.
But when you cannot tell people where a hijacking might occur, under
what circumstances _ I can tell you that I think the best antidote to
what happened in that regard would have been many years before to think
about what you could do for instance to harden cockpits.
That would have made a difference. We weren't going to harden cockpits
in the three months that we had a threat spike.
The really difficult thing for all of us, and I'm sure for those who
came before us as well as for those of us who are here, is that the
structural and systematic changes that needed to be made _ not on July
5th or not on June 25th or not on January 1st _ those structures and
those changes needed to be made a long time ago so that the country was
in fact hardened against the kind of threat that we faced on September
11th.
The problem was that for a country that had not been attacked on its
territory in a major way in almost 200 years, there were a lot of
structural impediments to those kinds of attacks. Those changes should
have been made over a long period of time.
I fully agree with you that, in hindsight, now looking back, there are
many things structurally that were out of kilter. And one reason that
we're here is to look at what was out of kilter structurally, to look
at needed to be done, to look at what we already have done, and to see
what more we need to do.
But I think it is really quite unfair to suggest that something that
was a threat spike in June or July gave you the kind of opportunity to
make the changes in air security that could have been _ that needed to
be made.
KEAN: Secretary Lehman?
LEHMAN: Thank you.
Dr. Rice, I'd like to ask you whether you agree with the testimony we
had from Mr. Clarke that, when asked whether if all of his
recommendations during the transition or during the period when his,
quote, hair was on fire, had been followed immediately, would it have
prevented 9-11, he said no. Do you agree with that?
RICE: I agree completely with that.
LEHMAN: In a way, one of the criticisms that has been made _ or one of
the, perhaps, excuses for an inefficient hand-off of power at the
change, the transition, is, indeed, something we're going to be looking
into in depth.
Because of the circumstances of the election, it was the shortest
handover in memory. But in many ways, really, it was the longest
handover, certainly in my memory. Because while the Cabinet changed,
virtually all of the national and domestic security agencies and
executive action agencies remained the same _ combination of political
appointees from the previous administration and career appointees _
CIA, FBI, JCS, the CTC, the Counter-Terrorism Center, the DIA, the NSA,
the director of operations in CIA, the director of intelligence.
LEHMAN: So you really up almost until, with the exception of the INS
head leaving and there be an acting, and Louis Freeh leaving in June,
you essentially had the same government.
Now, that raises two questions in my mind.
One, a whole series of questions. What were you told by this short
transition from Mr. Berger and associates and the long transition
leading up to 9-11 by those officials about a number of key issues?
And I'd like to ask them quickly in turn.
And the other is, I'm struck by the continuity of the policies rather
than the differences.
And both of these sets of questions are really directed toward what I
think is the real purpose of this commission.
While it's certainly a lot more fun to be doing the Who-struck-John?
and pointing fingers as which policy was more urgent or more important,
so forth, the real business of this commission is to learn the lessons
and to find the ways to fix those dysfunctions. And that's why we have
unanimity and true nonpartisanship on this commission. So that's what's
behind the rhetoric that's behind the questioning that we have.
First, during the short or long transition, were you told before the
summer that there were functioning al-Qaida cells in the United States?
RICE: And we didn't respond by saying, We're at war with them. Now
we're going to use all means of our national assets to go against them.
There are other threats that gather against us.
And what we should have learned from September 11th is that you have to
be bold and you have to be decisive and you have to be on the
offensive, because we're never going to be able to completely defend.
LEHMAN: Thank you very much.
KEAN: Congressman Roemer?
ROEMER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Welcome, Dr. Rice. And I just want to say to you you've made it through
2 1/2 hours so far with only Governor Thompson to go. And if you'd like
a break of five minutes, I'd be happy to yield you some of Governor
Thompson's time.
(LAUGHTER)
Dr. Rice, you have said in your statement, which I find very
interesting, The terrorists were at war with us, but we were not at war
with them.
Across several administrations of both parties, the response was
insufficient. And tragically, for all the language of war spoken before
September 11th, this country simply was not on a war footing.
You're the national security advisor to the president of the United
States. The buck may stop with the president; the buck certainly goes
directly through you as the principal advisor to the president on these
issues.
And it really seems to me that there were failures and mistakes,
structural problems, all kinds of issues here leading up to September
11th that could have and should have been done better.
Doesn't that beg that there should have been more accountability? That
there should have been a resignation or two? That there should have
been you or the president saying to the rest of the administration,
somehow, somewhere, that this was not done well enough?
RICE: Mr. Roemer, by definition, we didn't have enough information, we
didn't have enough protection, because the attack happened _ by
definition. And I think we've all asked ourselves, what more could have
been done?
I will tell you if we had known that an attack was coming against the
United States, that an attack was coming against New York and
Washington, we would have moved heaven and earth to stop it.
But you heard the character of the threat report we were getting:
something very, very big is going to happen. How do you act on
something very, very big is going to happen beyond trying to put people
on alert? Most of the threat reporting was abroad.
I took an oath, as I've said, to protect...
ROEMER: I've heard it _ I've heard you say this....
RICE: And I take it very seriously. I know that those who attacked us
that day _ and attacked us, by the way, because of who we are, no other
reason, but for who we are _ that they are the responsible party for
the war that they launched against us...
ROEMER: But Dr. Rice...
RICE: ... the attacks that they made, and that our responsibility...
ROEMER: You have said several times...
RICE: ... that our responsibility is to...
ROEMER: You have said several times that your responsibility, being in
office for 230 days, was to defend and protect the United States.
RICE: Of course.
ROEMER: You had an opportunity, I think, with Mr. Clarke, who had
served a number of presidents going back to the Reagan administration;
who you'd decided to keep on in office; who was a pile driver, a
bulldozer, so to speak _ but this person who you, in the Woodward
interview _ he's the very first name out of your mouth when you suspect
that terrorists have attacked us on September the 11th. You say, I
think, immediately it was a terrorist attack; get Dick Clarke, the
terrorist guy.
ROEMER: Even before you mentioned Tenet and Rumsfeld's names, Get Dick
Clarke.
Why don't you get Dick Clarke to brief the president before 9/11? Here
is one of the consummate experts that never has the opportunity to
brief the president of the United States on one of the most lethal,
dynamic and agile threats to the United States of America.
Why don't you use this asset? Why doesn't the president ask to meet
with Dick Clarke?
RICE: Well, the president was meeting with his director of central
intelligence. And Dick Clarke is a very, very fine counterterrorism
expert _ and that's why I kept him on.
And what I wanted Dick Clarke to do was to manage the crisis for us and
help us develop a new strategy. And I can guarantee you, when we had
that new strategy in place, the president _ who was asking for it and
wondering what was happening to it _ was going to be in a position to
engage it fully.
The fact is that what Dick Clarke recommended to us, as he has said,
would not have prevented 9/11. I actually would say that not only would
it have not prevented 9/11, but if we had done everything on that list,
we would have actually been off in the wrong direction about the
importance that we needed to attach to a new policy for Afghanistan and
a new policy for Pakistan.
Because even though Dick is a very fine counterterrorism expert, he was
not a specialist on Afghanistan. That's why I brought somebody in who
really understood Afghanistan. He was not a specialist on Pakistan.
That's why I brought somebody in to deal with Pakistan. He had some
very good ideas. We acted on them.
RICE: Dick Clarke _ let me just step back for a second and say we had a
very _ we had a very good relationship.
ROEMER: Yes. I'd appreciate it if you could be very concise here, so I
can get to some more issues.
RICE: But all that he needed _ all that he needed to do was to say, I
need time to brief the president on something. But...
ROEMER: I think he did say that. Dr. Rice, in a private interview to us
he said he asked to brief the president...
RICE: Well, I have to say _ I have to say, Mr. Roemer, to my
recollection...
ROEMER: You say he didn't.
RICE: ... Dick Clarke never asked me to brief the president on
counterterrorism. He did brief the president later on cybersecurity, in
July, but he, to my recollection, never asked.
And my senior directors have an open door to come and say, I think the
president needs to do this. I think the president needs to do that. He
needs to make this phone call. He needs to hear this briefing. It's not
hard to get done.
But I just think that...
ROEMER: Let me ask you a question. You just said that the intelligence
coming in indicated a big, big, big threat. Something was going to
happen very soon and be potentially catastrophic.
I don't understand, given the big threat, why the big principals don't
get together. The principals meet 33 times in seven months, on Iraq, on
the Middle East, on missile defense, China, on Russia. Not once do the
principals ever sit down _ you, in your job description as the national
security advisor, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the
president of the United States _ and meet solely on terrorism to
discuss in the spring and the summer, when these threats are coming in,
when you've known since the transition that Al Qaida cells are in the
United States, when, as the PDB said on August, bin Laden determined to
attack the United States.
Why don't the principals at that point say, Let's all talk about this,
let's get the biggest people together in our government and discuss
what this threat is and try to get our bureaucracies responding to it ?
RICE: Once again, on the August 6th memorandum to the president, this
was not threat-reporting about what was about to happen. This was an
analytic piece that stood back and answered questions from the
president.
But as to the principals meetings...
ROEMER: It has six or seven things in it, Dr. Rice, including the
Ressam case when he attacked the United States in the millennium.
RICE: Yes, these are his...
ROEMER: Has the FBI saying that they think that there are conditions.
RICE: No, it does not have the FBI saying that they think that there
are conditions. It has the FBI saying that they observed some
suspicious activity. That was checked out with the FBI.
ROEMER: That is equal to what might be...
RICE: No.
ROEMER: ... conditions for an attack.
RICE: Mr. Roemer, Mr. Roemer, threat reporting...
ROEMER: Would you say, Dr. Rice, that we should make that PDB a public
document...
RICE: Mr. Roemer...
ROEMER: ... so we can have this conversation?
RICE: Mr. Roemer, threat reporting is: We believe that something is
going to happen here and at this time, under these circumstances. This
was not threat reporting.
ROEMER: Well, actionable intelligence, Dr. Rice, is when you have the
place, time and date. The threat reporting saying the United States is
going to be attacked should trigger the principals getting together to
say we're going to do something about this, I would think.
RICE: Mr. Roemer, let's be very clear. The PDB does not say the United
States is going to be attacked. It says bin Laden would like to attack
the United States. I don't think you, frankly, had to have that report
to know that bin Laden would like to attack the United States.
ROEMER: So why aren't you doing something about that earlier than
August 6th?
(APPLAUSE)
RICE: The threat reporting to which we could respond was in June and
July about threats abroad. What we tried to do for -- just because
people said you cannot rule out an attack on the United States, was to
have the domestic agencies and the FBI together to just pulse them and
have them be on alert.
ROEMER: I agree with that.
RICE: But there was nothing that suggested there was going to be a
threat...
ROEMER: I agree with that.
RICE: ... to the United States.
ROEMER: I agree with that.
So, Dr. Rice, let's say that the FBI is the key here. You say that the
FBI was tasked with trying to find out what the domestic threat was.
We have done thousands of interviews here at the 9/11 Commission. We've
gone through literally millions of pieces of paper. To date, we have
found nobody -- nobody at the FBI who knows anything about a tasking of
field offices.
We have talked to the director at the time of the FBI during this
threat period, Mr. Pickard. He says he did not tell the field offices
to do this.
And we have talked to the special agents in charge. They don't have any
recollection of receiving a notice of threat.
Nothing went down the chain to the FBI field offices on spiking of
information, on knowledge of Al Qaida in the country, and still, the
FBI doesn't do anything.
Isn't that some of the responsibility of the national security advisor?
RICE: The responsibility for the FBI to do what it was asked was the
FBI's responsibility. Now, I...
ROEMER: You don't think there's any responsibility back to the advisor
to the president...
RICE: I believe that the responsibility -- again, the crisis management
here was done by the CSG. They tasked these things. If there was any
reason to believe that I needed to do something or that Andy Card
needed to do something, I would have been expected to be asked to do
it. We were not asked to do it. In fact, as I've...
ROEMER: But don't you ask somebody to do it? You're not asking somebody
to do it. Why wouldn't you initiate that?
RICE: Mr. Roemer, I was responding to the threat spike and to where the
information was. The information was about what might happen in the
Persian Gulf, what might happen in Israel, what might happen in North
Africa. We responded to that, and we responded vigorously.
Now, the structure...
ROEMER: Dr. Rice, let me ask you...
RICE: ... of the FBI, you will get into next week.
ROEMER: You've been helpful to us on that -- on your recommendation.
KEAN: Last qu