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RE: 9/11 - OPERATION INFINITE RESOLVE
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Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, was sworn in today for her testimony before the Sept. 11 commission.

Excepts from Rice's Sept. 11 Commission testimony
http://www.lancastereaglegazette.com/news/stories/20040409/localnews/201053.html

The Associated Press

Excerpts from national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's prepared opening statement before the Sept. 11 commission on Thursday, as released by the White House:

When threat reporting increased during the spring and summer of 2001, we moved the U.S. government at all levels to a high state of alert and activity. Let me clear up any confusion about the relationship between the development of our new strategy and the many actions we took to respond to threats that summer. Policy development and crisis management require different approaches. Throughout this period, we did both simultaneously.

The threat reporting that we received in the spring and summer of 2001 was not specific as to time, nor place, nor manner of attack. Almost all of the reports focused on al-Qaida activities outside the United States, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. In fact, the information that was specific enough to be actionable referred to terrorist operations overseas. More often, it was frustratingly vague. Let me read you some of the actual chatter that we picked up that spring and summer:

"Unbelievable news in coming weeks."

"Big event ... there will be a very, very, very, very big uproar."

"There will be attacks in the near future."

Troubling, yes. But they don't tell us when; they don't tell us where; they don't tell us who; and they don't tell us how.

In hindsight, if anything might have helped stop 9-11, it would have been better information about threats inside the United States, something made difficult by structural and legal impediments that prevented the collection and sharing of information by our law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

A band of vicious terrorists tried to decapitate our government, destroy our financial system, and break the spirit of America. As an officer of government on duty that day, I will never forget the sorrow and the anger I felt. Nor will I forget the courage and resilience shown by the American people and the leadership of the president that day.

After the September 11th attacks, our nation faced hard choices. We could fight a narrow war against al-Qaida and the Taliban or we could fight a broad war against a global menace. We could seek a narrow victory or we could work for a lasting peace and a better world. President Bush chose the bolder course.

And as we attack the threat at its sources, we are also addressing its roots. Thanks to the bravery and skill of our men and women in uniform, we removed from power two of the world's most brutal regimes -- sources of violence, and fear, and instability in the region. Today, along with many allies, we are helping the people of Iraq and Afghanistan to build free societies. ... This work is hard and dangerous, yet it is worthy of our effort and our sacrifice. The defeat of terror and the success of freedom in those nations will serve the interests of our nation and inspire hope and encourage reform throughout the greater Middle East.

Excerpts from national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's question and answer session before the Sept. 11 commission on Thursday:

KEAN: 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....

It was on the radar screen of any person who studied or worked in the international security field....

The decision that we made was to ... 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....

I talked to Dick Clarke ... shortly after his memo to me saying that al-Qaida was a major threat, we set out to try and craft a better strategy.

KEAN: 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: 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 ... 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....

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....

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: 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....

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....

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.

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....

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.

HAMILTON: 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....

There was no response to the Cole attack in the Clinton administration and none in the Bush administration....

RICE: .... 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....

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....

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: .... At the end of the day, of course, we were unable to protect our people....

RICE: 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....

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....

HAMILTON:

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....

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.... We're not going to see success 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.

But if America is avowedly values-centered in its foreign policy, we do better than when we do not stand up 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.

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: ... 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....

And I also understood ... that the FBI was pursuing these al-Qaida 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....

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....

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.

RICE: ... There was no threat reporting of any substance about an attack coming in the United States....

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.

FIELDING: We've all heard over the years the problem between the CIA, the FBI, coordination, et cetera.... 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: ... 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....

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....

The creation of a Department of Homeland Security is an absolutely critical issue... a single secretary is looking after the homeland every day....

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....

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.

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....

RICE: ... In 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: 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

• U.S. saw military options ahead of Sept. 11 — ROBERT BURNS, Sat Apr 10 15:13
• 9/11 Commission is Bush's New Lapdog — BILL CHRISTISON, Sat Apr 10 15:57