by Elisabeth Bumiller and Philip Shenon, The New York Times March 26, 2004 WASHINGTON -- The White House may have sent a phalanx of top officials to Capitol Hill this week to be grilled by the Sept. 11 panel, but the one official who did not appear publicly has turned out to be the official the panel wanted most: Condoleezza Rice. As she prepares to leave her job at the end of the year, Ms. Rice, the president's national security adviser, now finds herself at the center of a political storm, furiously defending both the White House and her own reputation. But her effort to blunt the criticism by spending the week on television and in news briefings may have had the opposite effect. She has infuriated some members of the panel, who wonder why she has time for CNN but not for them. On Thursday they questioned again whether she should be subpoenaed to testify if she does not appear in public to answer questions about the Bush administration's handling of Al Qaeda before the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. "My gosh, I think she was on every single network the day the commission opened its hearing this week, attacking our witnesses," said former Senator Bob Kerrey, a commission member and a Democrat. Ms. Rice has said repeatedly that if she had her way, she would testify, and late on Thursday she offered to be interviewed in private, as she was for four hours on Feb. 7. But President Bush, her close confidante, has been adamant, White House officials say, that any public appearance would violate longstanding precedent against incumbent national security advisers testifying before a legislative body. Ms. Rice is described by administration officials as being frustrated at having to remain publicly silent before the commission and as being eager to make her arguments against the case that Richard A. Clarke, her former subordinate, has marshaled against her. In a new book and in extensive public testimony to the panel on Wednesday, Mr. Clarke, the administration's former counterterrorism chief, said that Ms. Rice essentially demoted him and blocked his access to the president and cabinet members, as well as the access of other White House specialists on terrorism. Mr. Clarke, who had spent eight years in counterterrorism in the previous White House, had frequent face-to-face contact with President Bill Clinton. "At the senior policy levels in the Clinton administration, there was an acute understanding of the terrorist threat," Mr. Clarke told the panel. In contrast, he said, "the Bush administration saw terrorism policy as important but not urgent, prior to 9/11." Ms. Rice, in a briefing in her West Wing office on Wednesday called specifically to rebut Mr. Clarke's charges, said that Mr. Clarke had not been demoted and that she was puzzled by his remark that the current White House did not see terrorism as urgent. "I don't know what it means," she said, surrounded by some 20 reporters, three National Security Council spokesmen and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley. Ms. Rice then ticked off what she described as the administration's efforts on terrorism, particularly a plan to develop a "more robust" strategy, which she said drew from a number of ideas that Mr. Clarke had given to her in a memorandum on Jan. 25, 2001. But that memorandum was a source of another of Mr. Clarke's criticisms of Ms. Rice. In it, he outlined his plan for stepping up the government's effort to combat Al Qaeda, including covert assistance to anti-Taliban rebels in Afghanistan and more money for the Central Intelligence Agency. But this week, Ms. Rice dismissed Mr. Clarke's memorandum as unrelated to the question of possible terrorist activity in the United States, including so-called sleeper cells, underground groups of terrorists. "The Jan. 25 memo is somewhat remarkable for what's not in it," Ms. Rice said this week, adding that "there's one mention of sleeper cells -- at 10 pages, two words at the end of one line." Mr. Clarke also said he had pushed Ms. Rice in a letter in January 2001 to hold a meeting so that he could brief cabinet members on the possibility of what he believed to an imminent terrorist attack on the United States. But the meeting was not held until Sept. 4, he said, a week before the attacks, and after a summer of dire warnings of a possible imminent, catastrophic Al Qaeda strike. A staff report released this week by the independent panel said that on that same day, Sept. 4, Mr. Clarke wrote a prophetic letter to Ms. Rice outlining his frustrations and urging policymakers "to imagine a day after a terrorist atack, with hundreds of Americans dead at home and abroad, and ask themselves what they could have done better." Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, acknowledged in his own public testimony to the panel this week that the White House had moved too slowly in developing the adminstration's plans for eradicating Al Qaeda. "I think it is the case -- it is certainly in hindsight -- that we weren't going fast enough," Mr. Armitage said. "You can make your own judgments about whether we were going faster or slower than other administrations." Mr. Armitage also raised questions about the accuracy of Ms. Rice's account of the counterterrorism policy that was about to be presented to Mr. Bush in early September 2001. Asked at the hearings this week about an opinion article that Ms. Rice had written for The Washington Post, in which she said that the policy could have resulted in "military options to attack Al Qaeda," Mr. Armitage said that there was no direct military component to the policy at the time of the attacks. On Wednesday, Ms. Rice was asked in one of her news briefings how damaging she thought the furor over Mr. Clarke and the 9/11 commission was to the Bush presidency. Ms. Rice deflected the question, and instead told reporters that "the American people do not believe that the president of the United States is pursuing a folly in the war on terrorism." Published by The New York Times

Also: Rice contradicts CIA, Cheney, Armitage, herself Condoleezza Rice's credibility gap Sept. 11, 2001 Log of lies from the Bush Administration Rice contradicts CIA, Cheney, Armitage, herself by Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank, Washington Post March 25, 2004 This week's testimony and media blitz by former White House counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke has returned unwanted attention to his former boss, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. The refusal by President Bush's top security aide to testify publicly before the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks elicited rebukes by commission members as they held public hearings without her this week. Thomas H. Kean (R), the former New Jersey governor Bush named to be chairman of the commission, observed: "I think this administration shot itself in the foot by not letting her testify in public." At the same time, some of Rice's rebuttals of Clarke's broadside against Bush, which she delivered in a flurry of media interviews and statements rather than in testimony, contradicted other administration officials and her own previous statements. Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage contradicted Rice's claim that the White House had a strategy before 9/11 for military operations against al Qaeda and the Taliban; the CIA contradicted Rice's earlier assertion that Bush had requested a CIA briefing in the summer of 2001 because of elevated terrorist threats; and Rice's assertion this week that Bush told her on Sept. 16, 2001, that "Iraq is to the side" appeared to be contradicted by an order signed by Bush on Sept. 17 directing the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq. Rice, in turn, has contradicted Vice President Cheney's assertion that Clarke was "out of the loop" and his intimation that Clarke had been demoted. Rice has also given various conflicting accounts. She criticized Clarke for being the architect of failed Clinton administration policies, but also said she retained Clarke so the Bush administration could continue to pursue Clinton's terrorism policies. National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack defended many of Rice's assertions, saying that she has been more consistent than Clarke. This is not the first time in her tenure that Rice has been questioned over disputed national security claims by the administration. Making the case about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction in September 2002, she said that aluminum tubes the United States intercepted on their way to Iraq were "only suited for nuclear weapons programs." But at the time, the U.S. intelligence community was split over the use of the tubes, and today the majority view is that the tubes were for antiaircraft rockets. Rice so far has refused to provide testimony under oath to the commission that could possibly resolve the contradictions. On Wednesday night, she told reporters, "I would like nothing better in a sense than to be able to go up and do this, but I have a responsibility to maintain what is a long-standing constitutional separation between the executive and the legislative branch." Other presidential aides have waived their immunity; President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, did, as did President Bill Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger. McCormack said the comparisons are not applicable because Berger did not testify in public about policy matters. The White House, reacting to the public relations difficulties caused by the refusal to allow Rice's testimony, yesterday asked the commission to give Rice another opportunity to speak privately with panel members to address "mischaracterizations of Dr. Rice's statements and positions." Democratic commission member Richard Ben-Veniste disclosed this week that Rice had asked, in her private meetings with the commission, to revise a statement she made publicly that "I don't think anybody could have predicted that those people could have taken an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center . . . that they would try to use an airplane as a missile." Rice told the commission that she misspoke; the commission has received information that prior to Sept. 11, U.S. intelligence agencies and Clarke had talked about terrorists using airplanes as missiles. In an op-ed published Monday in The Washington Post, Rice wrote that "through the spring and summer of 2001, the national security team developed a strategy to eliminate al Qaeda" that included "sufficient military options to remove the Taliban regime" including the use of ground forces. But Armitage, testifying this week as the White House representative, said the military part was not in the plan before Sept. 11. "I think that was amended after the horror of 9/11," he said. McCormack said Rice's statement is accurate because the team discussed including orders for such military plans to be drawn up. In the same article, Rice belittled Clarke's proposals by writing: "The president wanted more than a laundry list of ideas simply to contain al Qaeda or 'roll back' the threat. Once in office, we quickly began crafting a comprehensive new strategy to 'eliminate' the al Qaeda network." Rice asserted that while Clarke and others provided ideas, "No al Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration." That same day, she said most of Clarke's ideas "had been already tried or rejected in the Clinton administration." But in her interview with NBC two days later, Rice appeared to take a different view of Clarke's proposals. "He sent us a set of ideas that would perhaps help to roll back al Qaeda over a three- to five-year period; we acted on those ideas very quickly. And what's very interesting is that . . . Dick Clarke now says that we ignored his ideas or we didn't follow them up." Asked about this apparent discrepancy, McCormack pointed a reporter to a Clarke background briefing in 2002 in which the then-White House aide was defending the president's efforts in fighting terrorism. Similarly, Rice implicitly criticized Clarke on CNN on Monday, saying that "he was the counterterrorism czar for a period of the '90s when al Qaeda was strengthening and when the plots that ended up September 11 were being hatched." But in a White House briefing two days later, she said she kept Clarke on the job because "I wanted somebody experienced in that area precisely to carry on the Clinton administration policy." McCormack said Clarke was kept on for continuity. Among the most serious discrepancies in Rice's claims to emerge this week is about a briefing on terrorism Bush received on Aug. 6, 2001. Rice had said on May 12, 2002, that the briefing was produced because Bush had asked about dangers of al Qaeda attacking the United States. But at the commission hearing, Ben-Veniste said that the CIA informed the 9/11 panel last week that the author of the briefing does not recall such a request from Bush and that the idea to compile the briefing came from within the CIA. McCormack said that when the CIA briefer presented the paper, he said it was in response to the president's questions. Published by Washington Post What do you think?

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