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Edited on Tue Sep-07-04 05:54 PM by buycitgo
An Opportunity to Set the Record Straight: National Security Advisor Rice Should Correct Her Misstatements About the Bush Administration's Record Before and After 9/11 As part of a concerted effort to undermine the credibility of Richard Clarke, the former Bush Administration counterterrorism czar who recently criticized the Administration's handling of the terrorist threat prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks, National Security Advisor Dr. Condoleezza Rice said, "This story has so many twists and turns now that I think he needs to get his story straight." While the basic elements of Clarke's assertions have been confirmed, frequently by President Bush and other senior Administration officials, a review of the record demonstrates that it is Dr. Rice who should set the record straight. Condoleezza Rice's Misstatements About the Administration's actions prior to the September 11 Terrorist Attacks Dr. Rice claimed that no one could have predicted before September 11 that terrorists would hijack airplanes and strike sites in America. "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon. that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile." (Press Briefing, 5/16/03)
The bipartisan Congressional inquiry into the September 11 attacks "confirmed that, before September 11, the Intelligence Community produced at least twelve reports over a seven-year period suggesting terrorists might use airplanes as weapons." According to a news report summarizing the joint inquiry's findings, "intelligence reports from December 1998 until the attacks said followers of bin Laden were planning to strike U.S. targets, hijack U.S. planes, and two individuals had successfully evaded checkpoints in a dry run at a New York airport." (Reuters, 7/24/03)
More specifically, "White House officials acknowledged that U.S. intelligence officials informed President Bush weeks before the September 11 attacks that bin Laden's terrorist network might try to hijack American planes." (Reuters, 7/24/03) On July 10, 2001, FBI agent Kenneth Williams sent his "Phoenix memo" to FBI headquarters in Washington, warning that several Islamic militants he had been tracking were enrolled in flight school in Arizona and recommending that the FBI sweep flight schools across the country. On several occasions, government officials from Germany, Italy, Egypt, Russia, and other nations warned the Bush Administration of possible imminent terrorist attacks against the U.S. Finally, Dateline NBC has reported that, on August 6, 2001, the President personally "received a one-and-a-half page briefing advising him that Osama bin Laden was capable of a major strike against the US, and that the plot could include the hijacking of an American airplane." (9/10/02)
Dr. Rice claimed that the Bush Administration had a military plan to attack al Qaeda and Taliban leadership prior to September 11.
"Through the spring and summer of 2001, the national security team developed a strategy to eliminate Al-Qaida - which was expected to take years. Our strategy marshaled all elements of national power to take down the network, not just respond to individual attacks with law enforcement measures. Our plan called for military options to attack Al-Qaida and Taliban leadership, ground forces and other targets - taking the fight to the enemy where he lived. It focused on the crucial link between Al-Qaida and the Taliban." (Washington Post, 3/22/04)
Dr. Rice claimed that the Bush Administration had a plan in place before September 11 to eliminate al Qaeda by using military force to target terrorist leaders.
However, President Bush did not approve the Administration's counter-terrorism plan until after September 11. Moreover, during a recent public hearing of the independent 9/11 Commission, Richard Clarke responded under oath to a question about whether it was accurate to assert that the Administration plan included military options. "No," Clarke responded, "it is not." (9/11 Commission Hearing, 3/24/04)
Dr. Rice claimed that the Bush Administration recognized that the terrorist threat was, "both important and urgent," and it did "everything it could" to prevent terrorist attacks on the U.S.
"What we did suggests that we thought it both important and urgent. We kept in place an experienced team of counterterrorism experts from the Clinton administration, whose responsibility it was to keep the Clinton administration strategy going. We did everything during that period of time that we could." (Press Briefing, 3/24/04)
According to President Bush, "I knew was a menace, but I didn't feel that sense of urgency." (Bush at War, Bob Woodward, 2002) According to Richard Clarke, President Bush's former top anti-terrorism advisor, President Bush "ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11." Despite the fact that Clarke wrote Rice a memo, "on January 24th, 2001...asking for, urgently - underlined urgently - a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with the impending al Qaeda attack...that urgent memo - wasn't acted on." (3/21/04) Moreover, although President Bush's National Security Council "met formally nearly 100 times in the months prior to the Sept. 11 attacks...terrorism was the topic during only two of those sessions." (Associated Press, 6/29/02). Finally, though President Bush announced on May 8, 2001 that Vice President Cheney would "oversee the development of a coordinated national effort" to prevent catastrophic terrorist attacks, this effort never materialized. In fact, according to the 9-11 Commission, the Cheney Task Force "was just getting under way when the 9/11 attack occurred." (9-11 Commission, Staff Statement Number 8, "National Policy Coordination," p. 9).
Dr. Rice claimed that the Administration requested the August 6 Presidential Daily Briefing from CIA on the terrorist threat.
" had said to his briefer,`I'd like you from time to time to give me summaries of what you know about potential attacks.' And this was an analytic piece that tried to bring together several threads - in 1997, they talked about this; in 1998, they talked about that; it's been known that maybe they want to try and release the blind sheik - I mean, that was the character of it." (Press Briefing, 5/16/02)
With these words, Dr. Rice suggested that President Bush initiated the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) on the threat of terrorist hijackings. However, after CIA Director George Tenet testified that his staff's recollection about the PDB was that it originated with the CIA, Commission member Richard Ben-Veniste read this statement into the record: "The author of this piece and others familiar with it say they have no information to suggest that this piece was written in response to a question from the president. And indeed, it goes on to say that it was prompted by an idea from the CIA." (9/11 Commission Hearing, 3/24/04)
Dr. Rice claimed President Bush increased counterterrorism funding.
"The President increased counterterrorism funding several-fold in order to be more aggressive." (NBC Nightly News, 3/24/04)
According to the bipartisan joint inquiry investigating the 9/11 attacks, an FBI budget official informed the commission that "counterterrorism was not a priority for Attorney General Ashcroft before September 11, and the FBI faced pressure to make cuts in counterterrorism to satisfy his other priorities." The New York Times has reported that, before 9/11, the Bush Administration "proposed a $65 million cut for the program that gives state and local law enforcement officials counterterrorism grants" and "did not endorse F.B.I. requests for $58 million for 149 new counterterrorism field agents, 200 intelligence analysts and 54 additional translators." (2/28/02) Further, according to The Washington Post, the White House trimmed an FBI request for additional counterterrorism funds by almost $1 billion. (3/22/04)
Unfortunately, the Bush Administration's opposition to counterterrorism funding continued even after the September 11 attacks. The Administration cut the FBI's counterterrorism funding request by nearly two-thirds during debate over a supplemental appropriations package. Though the FBI requested an additional $1.5 billion to enhance its counterterrorism efforts and create 2,024 new positions, the Bush Administration requested only $538 million from Congress. And more recently, as The New York Times reported earlier this month, President Bush has tried to eliminate a $12 million request by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which says it needs the small injection of new money "to increase by 50% the number of criminal financial investigators" necessary to do its part in the fight against terrorism. ("I.R.S. Request for More Terrorism Investigators Is Denied," 3/31/04)
Dr. Rice denied that on the day after the September 11 attacks President Bush pressured his staff to come up with any evidence that linked Iraq to the attacks.
"I don't remember this meeting. said that the president pulled him aside. I don't know." (Good Morning America, 3/22/04)
According to former Treasury Secretary O'Neill, President Bush instructed Defense Secretary to draw up military options against Iraq at the Administration's very first meeting of its National Security Council in January 2001. This focus on Iraq evidently continued in the immediate aftermath of September 11. Richard Clarke stated that the day after the September 11 attacks, President Bush pressured him to find evidence linking Saddam Hussein to these attacks. Mr. Clarke said that despite the fact that he informed President Bush that we already knew who conducted these attacks - al Qaeda - the President insisted that he look again for any evidence that could link Iraq to these attacks. Initially, Condoleezza Rice and other White House officials denied that such a conversation ever took place. Just a few days later, however, Dr. Rice admitted that this conversation had occurred: "The president asked, I believe, though none of us recall the specific conversation, the president asked a perfectly logical question - we'd just been hit and hit hard - was did Iraq have anything to do with this, were they complicit in it?" (CBS, 60 Minutes, 03/28/04)
Condoleezza Rice's Misstatements About the War in Iraq
Dr. Rice claimed that Bush Administration sought a peaceful solution to Iraq situation.
"We're going to seek a peaceful solution to this. We think that one is possible." (CBS, 10/20/02)
"We are still in a diplomatic phase here." (ABC, 3/9/03)
In public, Dr. Rice stated on several occasions that the Bush Administration was seeking a peaceful, diplomatic resolution to the conflict with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Yet Richard Haas, the Bush Administration's director of policy planning at the State Department, directly contradicted Dr. Rice's public comments, asserting that the decision to go to war had been made as early as July 2002: "The moment was the first week of July <2002>, when I had a meeting with Condi. I raised this issue about were we really sure that we wanted to put Iraq front and center at this point, given the war on terrorism and other issues. And she said, essentially, that the decision's been made, don't waste your breath. And that was in early July. So then when Powell had his famous dinner with the President, in early August, 2002, the agenda was not whether Iraq, but how." (The New Yorker, 3/31/03)
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has stated that the decision to go to war with Iraq was made much earlier. In the book The Price of Loyalty, Ron Suskind writes that, with regard to war in Iraq, "already by February <2001>, the talk was mostly about logistics. Not the why, but the how and how quickly." (p. 96, emphasis added)
Finally, Time magazine offers the following glimpse into the development of the Bush Administration's policy toward Iraq in early 2002: "`F___ Saddam. We're taking him out.' Those were the words of President George W. Bush, who had poked his head into the office of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. It was March 2002, and Rice was meeting with three U.S. Senators, discussing how to deal with Iraq through the United Nations, or perhaps in a coalition with America's Middle East allies. Bush wasn't interested. He waved his hand dismissively, recalls a participant, and neatly summed up his Iraq policy in that short phrase. The Senators laughed uncomfortably; Rice flashed a knowing smile. The President left the room." ("First Stop, Iraq," 3/31/03)
Dr. Rice claimed that the Administration did not know of doubts about the sources and accuracy of its claims about Iraq's alleged nuclear programs.
"No one in our circle knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery." (NBC Meet the Press, 6/8/03)
When reports surfaced that President Bush's 16-word sentence in his 2003 State of the Union address regarding Iraq's alleged attempts to procure uranium from Niger was based on false documents, Dr. Rice feigned ignorance about existing doubts on the documents. Just over a month after Dr. Rice made this claim, however, the White House acknowledged that "the CIA sent two memos to the White House in October voicing strong doubts about a claim President Bush made three months later in the State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear material in Africa." (The Washington Post, 7/23/03) Furthermore, The Los Angeles Times has reported that "deputy national security advisor Stephen Hadley told reporters that he received two memos from the CIA in October that cast doubt on intelligence reports that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from Niger to use in developing nuclear weapons. Hadley said Tuesday that as the White House drafted Bush's State of the Union address in January, he did not remember reading either memo. But he said he should have, and he took the blame for the assertion's inclusion in that speech...Both memos were also sent to chief speechwriter Michael Gerson and one was sent to national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, Hadley said." (7/23/03, emphasis added)
Dr. Rice asserted the CIA cleared the President's proposed remarks on inaccurate Iraq uranium claims.
"There was even some discussion on that specific sentence, so that it reflected better what the CIA thought and the speech was cleared...Some specifics about amount and place were taken out...with the change in that sentence, the speech was cleared." (ABC, 7/11/03)
With the White House soon to acknowledge that it did have prior knowledge regarding doubts about claims on Iraq's attempts to procure uranium, Dr. Rice shifted tactics and said that the CIA cleared the President's "16 words." However, as noted above, the CIA had sent two memos to the White House months earlier casting doubt on the uranium claim. Further, just a few months before the State of the Union address, CIA director George Tenet persuaded Stephen Hadley to take a reference to Iraq's attempts to procure uranium out of an October 7, 2002 presidential address on Iraq's threat. The 2002 National Intelligence Estimate includes a dissenting opinion asserting that "claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are...highly dubious."
Dr. Rice made irresponsible claims about an alleged link between Iraq and al Qaeda.
"There is no question in my mind about the al Qaeda connection. And what emerges is a picture of a Saddam Hussein who became impressed with what al Qaeda did after it bombed our embassies in 1998 in Kenya and Tanzania, began to give them assistance in chemical and biological weapons, something they were having trouble achieving on their own, that harbored a terrorist network under this man Zarqawi, despite the fact that Saddam Hussein was told that Zarqawi was there." (CNN, 2/5/03)
Dr. Rice proclaimed - beyond any doubt - that a working relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda flourished before the war.
However, President Bush himself acknowledged that "we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th." (September 17, 2003) Moreover, the New York Times reported three days before her statement that, "at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, some investigators said they were baffled by the Bush administration's insistence on a solid link between Iraq and Osama bin Laden's network. `We've been looking at this hard for more than a year and you know what, we just don't think it's there,' a government official said." (2/2/03)
http://democrats.senate.gov/dpc/dpc-doc.cfm?doc_name=fs-108-2-100
links on page
they have this great cache in their own back pocket.....do they realize it?
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