Condoleezza Rice's testimony reinforced the view that most of Washington's pre-9/11 intelligence problems were due to bureaucratic failures.
Published April 9, 2004
We generally sympathize with Condoleezza Rice's complaint that much of the criticism of our national security operations prior to the 9/11 attacks amounts to unfair second-guessing. Old pieces of information that now look like glaring evidence of an impending terrorist attack were buried under mountains of data related to other real or imagined threats at the time. As the national security adviser told the 9/11 commission Thursday, she and her colleagues have to be right 100 percent of the time; terrorists need succeed only once to achieve their goals.
That said, Rice damages her credibility, and that of the Bush administration, when she denies the clear meaning of some of the evidence that was known to her and other national security officials prior to 9/11. For example, the Thursday hearings focused on an Aug. 6, 2001, presidential briefing paper - titled "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States" - that contained far more specific warnings than had previously been made public about al-Qaida's intentions to hijack domestic aircraft. The 9/11 attacks might not have been averted even if the government had responded far more vigorously to those warnings, but Rice's characterization of that briefing as containing only "historical" information is self-serving nonsense.
Rice disappointed those who expected her to use her public testimony for an across-the-board refutation of former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke. Her only direct challenge of Clarke's earlier testimony was unpersuasive. Clarke says he gave the Bush administration a plan for attacking al-Qaida in January 2001, but that it remained bogged down in the national security bureaucracy until just before the 9/11 attacks. Rice originally denied that such a plan was presented to her in January 2001. Thursday, she acknowledged having seen it. But she said it wasn't really a "plan," but merely a set of recommendations that, if followed, might have caused antiterrorism efforts to go "off course." Such semantic nit-picking doesn't aid the commission's work.
Intentionally or not, Rice's testimony reinforced the view that most of our government's failures prior to 9/11 were bureaucratic rather than partisan or ideological. The FBI didn't just do a poor job of communicating with other domestic agencies and the CIA; FBI officials didn't even communicate among themselves. The FAA apparently was never made aware of the specificity of threats involving passenger planes in the summer of 2001. And Rice testified Thursday that she - the highest ranking official in the national security apparatus - was unaware of several pieces of disturbing information that should have come to her attention.
Rice's brittle, bureaucratic mind-set, which was on repetitive display Thursday, exemplifies a lumbering, turf-conscious national security infrastructure in which even urgent counterterrorism plans can be shunted off for months of policy review. Even a thoughtful reorganization of that bureaucracy can do little to help our government cope more effectively with an agile, innovative enemy whose murderous plans do not have to pass through an interminable series of principals' meetings before being put into action.
