Cached 4/8/04 from:
http://www.startribune.com/stories/561/4712842.html
Last update: April 8, 2004 at 7:04 PM
Editorial: Connecting dots/Bush's culpability for 9/11
April 9, 2004ED0409

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's testimony to the 9/11 commission Thursday allows for only one conclusion: The Bush administration was outrageously derelict in its duty to protect the American people as the Al-Qaida threat developed. Consider a few of the many issues on which Rice and the commission focused:
•Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright previously told the commission that during the millennium threat of 1999, key members of the Cabinet met almost daily at the White House to discuss the threat with counterterrorism director Richard Clarke. Clarke said those meetings ensured that Cabinet members would "shake the trees" in their departments and bring forward any information about the threat. It worked.
Rice testified Thursday that in the high-threat period during the summer of 2001, "I just [didn'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." Moreover, Clarke wasn't allowed by the Bush administration to interact directly with the Cabinet.
Those differences were critically important because, as Rice said, longstanding "systemic" problems hampered coordination of efforts and proper sharing of information in and between the CIA and FBI. And that's just the point: In a high-threat period, getting the top-level people together and pushing them hard was the only way to break through the bureaucratic inertia. Rice's failure to do that meant the FBI, in particular, didn't learn of information about Al-Qaida operatives already in the United States or about suspicious men of Middle Eastern origins taking flight instruction.
Rice didn't create the systemic problems she spoke of, but knowing about them and then failing to do the logical thing to overcome them in the face of an urgent threat is unconscionable.
As Commission Member Jamie Gorelick reminded Rice, the report of the Hart-Rudman Commission, a comprehensive, three-year effort timed to be available for the incoming administration, warned early in 2001 that the United States would get hit "big" and that the FBI wasn't working the way it should to discover and foil such a plot. Hart-Rudman also was ignored.
• The title of the Aug. 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing was revealed Thursday: "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States." The briefing also, according to Commission Member Bob Kerrey, warned that "the FBI indicates patterns of suspicious activity in the United States consistent with preparations for hijacking."
Rice gave a two-pronged answer: The Aug. 6 document was "historical" in nature -- meaning, apparently, it looked back -- and that all through the summer, federal agencies, including FBI field offices, had been "tasked" with investigating this information.
But the language from the memo certainly doesn't sound "historical," and as for tasking federal agencies, Gorelick responded: "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."
Commission Member Tim Roemer came back to the same point: "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."
The exchanges between commission members and Rice reveal a criminal lack of interest in trying to prevent an attack on the United States that the administration had strong reason to expect. It's one thing to wait for a new strategic plan before taking the fight to Al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It's another entirely to ignore evidence that mounted all through 2001 that the United States was about to be hit. Almost nothing of a defensive nature was done to guard against -- to prevent -- the horrific spectacle that unfolded on Sept. 11.



© Copyright 2004 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.