Rice defends refusal to testify

In a day of talk show debate, the national security adviser makes her case on 60 Minutes. Richard Clarke calls for more documents to be declassified.

WASHINGTON - National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, at the center of a controversy over her refusal to testify before the Sept. 11 commission, Sunday renewed her determination not to give public testimony and said she could not list anything she wished she had done differently in the months before the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Administration officials reportedly were searching for a compromise Sunday night with the commission that would limit the political damage from her refusal to testify.

But a defiant Rice gave no hint of that as she defended the Bush administration's counterterrorism performance on CBS's 60 Minutes - the same venue used a week earlier by former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke to launch his criticism that the Bush administration did too little on terrorism before Sept. 11.

Rice's appearance, and that of other top Bush officials on the airwaves Sunday, came at the end of a week in which the Bush administration labored to discredit Clarke, who challenged the White House on Sunday to release more classified counterterrorism documents.

Rice, the top foreign-policy official in President Bush's White House, brushed aside the notion that the U.S. government should apologize to Sept. 11 victims' families for not stopping the attacks, saying, "It's important that we keep focused on who did this to us." Rice asserted that "we are safer today than we were on Sept. 10," and, asked whether there were any mistakes or misjudgments before the attacks, replied: "I think we did what we knew how to do."

But the Bush adviser gave no ground on the administration's decision that she will not appear in public before the committee or testify under oath because Bush officials believe doing so would compromise the constitutional powers of the executive branch.

"Nothing would be better, from my point of view, than to be able to testify," Rice said. "I would really like to do that. But there is an important principle involved here: It is a longstanding principle that sitting national security advisers do not testify before the Congress."

Rice also acknowledged Sunday that on the day after the terrorist attacks, Bush pressed Clarke to find out whether Iraq was involved.

Bush wanted to know "did Iraq have anything to do with this? Were they complicit in it?" Rice recounted.

Bush was not trying to intimidate anyone to "produce information," she said. Rather, given the United States' "actively hostile relationship" with Iraq at the time, he was asking Clarke "a perfectly logical question," she said.

The conversation - which the White House suggested last week never took place - centers on perhaps the most volatile charge that Clarke has made public in recent days: that the Bush White House became fixated on Iraq and Saddam Hussein at the expense of focusing on al-Qaida's role in the terrorism.

Clarke also hit the talk shows Sunday. In an interview on NBC's Meet the Press, he urged the Bush administration to make public the testimony he gave in 2002 to a joint congressional committee that was investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.

He said declassifying his testimony - as well as other memos and materials from Rice and the administration - would show he had long complained that the Bush administration failed to take aggressive action against al-Qaida before the Sept. 11 attacks.

In particular, he urged the administration to make public a memo on counterterrorism initiatives that he wrote just days after Bush took office as well as a counterterrorism plan that the White House ultimately approved more than seven months later, a week before the attacks.

"Let's see if there's any difference between those two, because there isn't," he said. "And what we'll see when we declassify what they were given on Jan. 25 and what they finally agreed to on Sept. 4 is that they are basically the same thing, and they wasted months when we could have had some action."

Sharpening his criticism, Clarke said President Clinton was more aggressive than Bush in trying to confront al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden's organization.

"He did something, and President Bush did nothing prior to Sept. 11," Clarke said.

"I think they deserve a failing grade for what they did before" Sept. 11, Clarke said of the Bush administration. "They never got around to doing anything."

But Rice said the Bush administration regarded terrorism as "an urgent problem."

Rice says the approach formulated over the eight-month span was "a more comprehensive plan to eliminate al-Qaida."

Asked about Clarke's request for the declassification, Secretary of State Colin Powell on CBS's Face the Nation, said, "My bias will be to provide this information in an unclassified manner not only to the commission, but to the American people."

Powell also came to Rice's defense, saying that the national security adviser has gotten a "bum rap" from Clarke.

"It's being set up as "Condi, I told you everything that you needed to do,' and she ignored it all. That's not accurate," he said.

Members of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks pressed Rice to appear publicly before the commission to explain the events leading up to the attack.

"Dr. Rice has appeared everywhere except my local Starbucks," Richard Ben-Veniste, a member of the commission, said in an interview. "For the White House to continue to refuse to make her available simply does not make sense."

Republican commissioner John Lehman, who has written extensively on separation-of-powers issues, said "the White House is making a huge mistake" by blocking Rice's testimony and decried it as "a legalistic approach."

"The White House is being run by a kind of strict construction of interpretation of the powers of the president," Lehman said on ABC's This Week. "There are plenty of precedents that the White House could use if they wanted to do this."

Rice met with the commission in February to discuss pre-Sept. 11 initiatives, but an official involved in that meeting said the White House insisted that she would not be put under oath and that the session would not be recorded. Commissioners were allowed to take notes, but no verbatim transcript of her comments is thought to exist.

Rice was "very, very forthcoming in her first meeting with us," former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, a Republican named by Bush to lead the commission, said on Fox News Sunday. "But we do feel unanimously as a commission that she should testify in public." He added, however, that a subpoena appears unlikely.

While Clarke pressed his case on the talk show circuit, administration officials continued to question his credibility and his motives. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Clarke quoted him at a Sept. 4, 2001, meeting that Rumsfeld said he did not attend.

"It's hard for me to explain a person who would characterize a conversation in a meeting that I was not even in the room or the building when it supposedly took place," he said on Fox News Sunday.

But Rumsfeld also acknowledged in another question-and-answer session that the administration could have done more to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks.

"In retrospect with 20/20 hindsight, one would say you wish more had been done, or something else could have been done. I don't know quite what," he said on ABC.

- Information from the Washington Post, New York Times and Associated Press was used in this report.

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