Condi's Big Con

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.

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.

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.

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.

Well, August 6th is most certainly an historical document that says, Here's how you might think about Al Qaida. A warning is when you have something that suggests that an attack is impending. And we did not have, on the United States, threat information that was, in any way, specific enough to suggest that something was coming in the United States.

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.
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.

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….
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.

Adam Trueblood	Most recent article	Home
Condi’s Big Con As I watched Condoleeza Rice’s testimony before the 9-11 commission I couldn’t help but think of an expert concert performer who becomes so enamored of her performance technique, she loses sight of the truth of the piece being performed. Her fingers move brilliantly, she smiles triumphantly, yet the audience comes away feeling that there was something… false. Before her appearance at the commission Ms. Rice had already set the stage for tough questioning of her truthfulness due to glaring contradictions between her public statements and records available to those in the national security domain. Though she said on May 16, 2002 "I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile," there is a wealth of evidence to show that the government indeed had unambiguous indications that this was a likely means of attack. To name just a few instances: The FBI, CIA and FAA were aware since 1995 of Project Bojinka, an Al Qaeda plan to use hijacked planes as bombs against US targets including the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Details of this plan later became part of the public record during the 1997 trial of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers. The President’s Daily Brief on August 6, 2001 was titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike In U.S.” and discussed hijackings by Al Qaeda, mentioning targets such as New York and Washington D.C. In 2001 the FBI Minneapolis and Phoenix offices both warned of potential terrorist flight training at aviation schools. Pentagon drills were conducted in 2000-2001 simulating suicide hijacking attacks on the World Trade Center (USA Today, April 18, 2004). The 1996 Atlanta Olympics had extensive air force security established to prevent airplane attacks on US venues. In 1994, in separate incidents, a lone pilot crashed a plane into the White House grounds, just outside the president’s bedroom, and Islamic radicals hijacked a plane and threatened to crash it into the Eiffel tower. In 1993 the Pentagon conducted a study of airplanes being used as bombs against national landmarks. It is inconceivable that the National Security Advisor, one of the few most important directors of a $30 billion intelligence apparatus, would not be aware of some or all of these details and could therefore be oblivious to a national threat related to airplanes and Al Qaeda. Ms. Rice’s talent for dissimulation came out in force during her 9-11 testimony, as she stressed that there was nothing that could have provided the government with the necessary information to effectively prepare for hijacking attacks. The most interesting part of her tendentious testimony was her balancing of two contradictory ideas: that the Bush administration was fully cognizant of terrorist threats while at the same time innocent of the failure to stop them. In such a massive failure to decipher looming threats, one would ordinarily assume that those security officials responsible were either guilty of gross negligence in not efficiently performing their duties or somehow complicit in allowing the attacks to happen. There really is no middle ground; either the government failed us or it succeeded in allowing the attacks to proceed. Ms. Rice, however, came well prepared with a story line that revolved around four crucial points: 1) The President himself requested the President’s Daily Brief of August 6, 2001 due to his concerns about domestic terrorism, 2) The PDB of August 2001 was “historical” in nature and did not reflect any current threats, 3) The Bush administration was vigorously engaged in fighting terrorism but was focused on threats outside the country, and 4) Despite some credible warnings about attacks in the US, the Bush administration was not responsible for the 9-11 intelligence failure due to general systemic problems in intelligence gathering. Each of these points was stressed repeatedly throughout her presentation, to the degree where her answers seemed almost pre-recorded and packaged, with her smooth delivery and deft maneuvers almost succeeding in concealing the basic lie beneath each contention. The first lie, that Bush was aggressively inquiring about domestic terrorism threats, was necessary to show that he was a hands on manager with a tough stance on terrorism. Commissioner Ben-Veniste touched on the suspicious nature of this story line as he remarked: “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.” If Bush really were that concerned and involved in thinking about domestic terrorism, why is it that Ms. Rice couldn’t recall ever discussing with him the presence of Al Qaeda cells here in the US? She states later in her testimony that despite being given this information by Richard Clarke, she wasn’t sure if she did anything with it, an omission that would be unthinkable if the President really were pushing his security team to look into major threats on the domestic front. In response to Ben-Veniste’s question about this, she remarked: 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. And later she continued: 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. Is it really believable that a president who is not asleep at the wheel, one who has the curiosity and alarm to ask about domestic terrorism threats in particular, would then just shrug the whole issue off after being told that our biggest enemy is already in the country, planning attacks, casing major population centers and landmarks in a manner consistent with previous large scale operations? When Ms. Rice’s lie began to unravel she awkwardly tried to exit the issue by claiming that no further follow up was necessary because no one told her or the President how to behave. The second lie that she relied upon throughout her testimony was that the PDB of August 6, 2001 was “historical” in nature rather than an assessment of current threats. If her contention were true that Bush pushed for the preparation of this assessment due to his concerns about impending terrorism, then the description of the document as “historical” would be false on the surface, as this information would not satisfy the President’s query. The lie was plausible during her testimony because the PDB had not yet been declassified, but with its release her deceptiveness again became clear. The title itself indicates that the document is not “historical” in nature, as it references the future: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US”. The brief outlines Bin Laden’s desire to attack the US, discusses previous Al Qaeda operations, and states that current threat reports in the US are consistent with preparations for a large scale attack at some point in the future. After noting that Bin Laden “prepares operations years in advance” and that his “associates surveilled our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as early as 1993”, the report states that “FBI information since that time [a 1998 threat report relating to hijackings] indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.” Asked about this brief, Ms. Rice stated the following: 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. So according to Ms. Rice’s interpretation, a memo discussing the presence the world’s most powerful terrorist organization within our borders, a memo discussing various possibilities for future attacks including hijackings and explosives is purely “historical”, i.e. not anything that she or the President could have acted on. She insisted: 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. Pressed further by Commissioner Roemer, who asked “What is a warning, if August 6th isn't and September 4th isn't, to you?” Ms. Rice continued her elusive defense, providing an argument remarkable for the woman entrusted with our national security: Well, August 6th is most certainly an historical document that says, Here's how you might think about Al Qaida. A warning is when you have something that suggests that an attack is impending. And we did not have, on the United States, threat information that was, in any way, specific enough to suggest that something was coming in the United States. Is it not specific enough when a CIA memo to the President states that a terrorist group has planted cells in our nation, is conducting surveillance of potential targets in major capitals and has referenced specific means of attack such as hijackings and explosives? The third lie central to Ms. Rice’s performance related to the fiction that the Bush administration was aggressively pursuing terrorist threats yet was more involved with perceived dangers abroad than those within our own borders. Ms. Rice went into lofty discussions of tactical and strategic moves related to Afghanistan and Pakistan, yet when pressed by Bob Kerrey to provide one example of a counter terrorism move, she could only fall into a smoke screen of abstractions about strategy. 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. 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. The final fabrication in Condi’s graceful run had to do with impunity, as she pointed out repeatedly that regardless of what happened on September 11, neither she nor her boss were to blame because there were major systemic problems that prevented the government security apparatus from functioning properly. 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…. 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. And with that, our National Security Advisor neatly wrapped up the package that she had come to deliver, as she had created an image of herself and her President as concerned anti-terrorism warriors who were failed by nebulous intelligence on the domestic front and not told how to act by a system that did not function perfectly. Her cool demeanor, crafty maneuvers, big smile, and refusal to be cornered together served to defeat, for the most part, her questioners. Only Commissioners Kerrey, Ben-Veniste, and Roemer addressed issues that were worthy of a truth-seeking committee, and her elegant dance around the issues and outright fabrications left most viewers with nothing of substance to further their understanding, only the vague impression of having been lied to by an expert. April, 2004