Transcript of Rice’s 60 minutes interview
Does anyone think that Dr. Rice scored a KO for the home team?
It seemed like DDSOS to me.
Really? Well, here is her statement on the defining features of our national interest from 2000. Please find her serious concerns regarding bin Laden. Hint: you won’t. There is no metion of Osama bin Laden or al Quada. There is hardly a mention of terrorism, excepting terrorist acts of rogue regimes.
http://www.foreignpolicy2000.org/library/issuebriefs/readingnotes/fa_rice.html
I do not at all blame her for failing to have the foresight to place bin Laden and al Quada at the very top of the list regarding our national interests. It is with the benefit of hindsight that we see how significant they ultimately have been. However, it is not correct to pretend in hindsight that she took them as seriously as you and Rush Limbaugh appear to suggest that she did, given that they didn’t warrant a mention in her summary document. Nor, in fact, did even the type of terrorism that they practice receive its due mention. It’s almost as if…gasp…she believed Iraq (and North Korea) to be more important.
This has been repeated several times over: have you missed the issue here?
Clarke’s statement regards an apparent confusion and or lack of knowledge about Al Qaeda. It does not regard a confusion about the existence of a terrorist named Bin Laden.
To assume that a mention of one is necessarily a demonstration of knowledge of the other is a clear example of an logical fallacy.
And to assume that mentioning something in a speech means that politicians will do something about it, let alone the right thing, isn’t any sort of fallacy, but just a mistake.
A Deptartment of Homeland Security had bipartisan support prior to 9/11. It was opposed by the White House even after 9/11 until it became clear that it would now have the votes with or without Presidential objections.
She really flubbed the Iraq question as well. The basic problem is that there were any number of states that had the means, opportunity, and motive to sponsor terrorists, but the President only pushed hard for infomation about one of them: Iraq. Now, you’d think, when asked this question, she’d dispute the statement I just made, saying something like “well, that’s not true, he did ask about all the others just as much, he wanted to know if any of them were involved.” But instead she defends the focus on Iraq, and then sort of stumbles off topic when asked the question again in a more pointed fashion. If the President did care about other potential culprits, why not say that he did? Why not dispute the claim that was his focus, and instead defend it? We knew within days that most of the terrorists were Saudis, and Saudi money was somehow involved. But somehow the President never seems to have said “investigate my family friends, business partners, and drinking buddies, find out if they had any connection to this.”
I think the most plausible argument I’ve heard is that the President wanted to focus on Iraq so he could have solid evidence to DISPROVE Wolfy, who definately wanted to hit Iraq. But this case is a pretty weak one given how many other instances we have of the President being the one who needed to be talked out of it, not just the neo-cons, and how he continued to publically try to link Iraq to Al Qaeda right up until he declared his intention to pursue the Iraqi invasion.
This was not known on 9/12 when the meeting in question took place.
As for Bush’s Iraq inquiry, I think she makes a valid point, due to our recent hostile history with Iraq it was a completely logical question.
Bush didn’t attempt to disillusion the public about the Iraq-9/11 link until after the invasion: Bush Distances from Cheney on Saddam-9/11 Link (September 18, 2003)
If you want to believe that Dr Rice could specifically cite the dangers of OBL and the flaw in US intellegence agencies (before her appointment) and not have knowledge of Al Queda after her appointment then go ahead. IMO that’s a blind assertion to make about someone who is better educated than most people on this board and has better intel then everyone on this board.
FYI, if you buy 2 of Clark’s book the shipping is free so you might think about getting one for your friends.
Hi: you are the one making the assertion about Clarke’s credibility in light of the clip Limbaugh played. You are the one who have failed to connect the dots in that attack on Clarke’s credibility, but yet have declared them connected by that clip. All I did was point out that the clip does not directly call into question Clarke’s statement, and its use is primarily an attempt to use current associations to imply knowledge of past ones.
Rice is probably one of the most intelligent people in civil service. Her background, however, was the Cold War, and she was certainly not omniscient. Just because she knew that Bin Laden was a dangerous terrorist does not mean she knew much about the organization that he was a spiritual leader for, no matter how brilliant she is.
It was completely logical if it was one of many questions about many different countries and figures. Anyone who knows anything about terrorist sponsors in the Middle East knows there are a whole host of different players in and out of various states. Why not ask about all of them? Why not “check and doublecheck the list of usual suspects, find out who was involved?” Why “find out if there’s anything on Iraq” and “but there’s so many good [bombing?] targets in Iraq!” when there are so many others we have history with? The point is valid if you ignore that it is not only incomplete, but an evasion of the actual question.
And say what you will about Clarke’s apology for failing to prevent the attacks: at least he is prepared to say that much. Rice answered that question by saying “well, we’re very sorry that those people died” and made it clear that was pretty much it. Credit for success… no blame for failure.
Oh, and note from Rush’s own account: in Clarke’s book, Clarke seems to know that Rice knows who Bin Laden is, as he says he explains Al Qaeda by saying that it is Bin Laden’s group. Is it really that inconcievable that she didn’t know a whole lot about this particular subject, out of the whole host of subjects that she covered in the link Hentor posted that she was thinking about (which didn’t include Al Qaeda)? A lot of people had never heard of Al Qaeda before 9/11 even though they knew of and had read about Bin Laden. Just because you are a scholar in things like Russian relations and Cold War politics doesn’t make you an expert on everything.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_03/003570.php
Kevin Drum’s take on why Clarke may have turned partisan.
I feel confident in saying OBL and Al Qaeda were mentioned often in security briefs. I can’t specify everything I’ve heard because a lot of it is 2nd hand anecdotal but it was known that the crap was about to hit the fan. I have followed terrorism (as a general interest) since the days of President Carter and I vividly remember President Clinton talking about it in his final days in office. He was giving a speech about something (don’t remember) and he stated point-blank that terrorism was going to be the #1 issue in the next century. Since it wasn’t the basis of his speech I thought it odd he brought it up. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
John O’Neill (WTC security chief) had mentioned (days before 9/11) that something was in the pipeline. He retired from the FBI’s counter-terrorism unit months before the attack.
President Clinton is on record discussing the legality of capturing OBL (I believe it was 1998). I’m not going to get into a who should have done what game but I think it’s logical to conclude that if OBL was a hot topic, then by extension so was his army of ner-do-wells.
The reason I don’t play the blame game is simple. Knowing there are people intent on doing harm is different than knowing what specific harm they plan on doing. It’s damn hard for a leader to act before an attack is made.
And for the record, OBL is not the end-all terrorist target. Finding him, IMO, is more payback then prevention. The machinery behind the man is the real target.
Unfortunately not hard enough. GW fast-talked Congress (the members should have been more skeptical) into giving him authority to attack Iraq on the basis of a possible attack.
This is all just hot air so far. Yes, people knew about terrorism as a concept. I’d be surprised if they didn’t. That’s not at issue here.
Yes, he resigned in frustration at not being allowed to do anything, and having his superiors block his efforts. That seems to be a common thing with the Bush administration…
More irrelevant hot air.
This is Bush’s latest line, isn’t it. Yeah, sure he was told about terrorism. Yeah sure he was told that Osama intended to hijack American planes and hit the US. But nobody gave poor GW the date and the exact targets, so therefore he was justified in doing absolutley nothing to prevent the attacks.
I guess the Bush cheer-squad can’t see or don’t care about the difference between trying but failing, and not trying and therefore making failure inevitable.
It’s my hunch that the Bush team decided to do nothing about the hijack attempt warnings, because they thought it was going to result in a hostage situation. That’d have been a no-lose situation for the Bush. Whether Bush secured their release or not, it would have justified the invasion of Iraq. They didn’t believe the warnings about suicide attacks using planes, and the records they’re hiding reflect that.
All right. You’re Grand Supreme High-yu-Muckamuck of the US and you know that there may be a threat to the US. Whattaya going
All right. You’re Grand Supreme High-yu-Muckamuck of the US and you know that there may be a threat to somewhere in the US. What are you going to do? Establish screeners at airports, subways, etc.? You don’t know what it’s going to be, and it is impossible to establish even today’s level of screenings in time. (It takes a ton of work to set up such screenings, especially with the bureaucratic inertia).
And I’m not certain, but I think that pre-9-11 security threats have occured in the past without anything materializing. Is that true?
Are you talking about false alarms, or about successful prevention of attacks? Both have occurred. Clarke talked about the Millenium attacks, and the process that enabled them to be prevented.
If you’re talking about false alarms, do you think a prior false alarm is a justification to do nothing? Say you’re the school principal, and you receive a telephone bomb threat. It’s probably the fiftieth one you’ve received, and the school’s never actually been blown up before. What do you do? You ring the police and evacuate, even if it turns out to be a false alarm, because you cannot know in advance whether it’s going to be a false alarm or not.
Yes, you raise the alert, notify the airlines, and increase security at the airports. Standard procedure. It’s not standard procedure to keep the threat secret.
Other things you could do:
Ask the FBI about suspicious hijacking related activity. That might encourage the head of the FBI to ask the field operatives whether they’d noticed anything. That could prompt a response from the field like: “Well, this ex-Al Qaeda guy who’s been a reliable informant for the past 10 years rang me, and gave me the name and address of an Al Qaeda cell member who’s been doing suspicious shit, and I’ve checked it out and he and a bunch of others are taking flying lessons. In fact I’ve had these same people reported by the operators of the flying schools, too. I think there’s something seriously wrong here, these guys obviously intend to hijack planes.”
Things that you could do armed with the information the FBI had, but didn’t know you wanted:
Arrest the people that the FBI was watching. Or watch them a bit more closely. Or don’t let them get on any fucking planes. You know, that kind of stuff.
The Clinton administration responded to high threat levels by holding ~daily meetings with top security officials. This kept everyone’s feet to the fire. What was the Bush administration’s rationale for discontinuing this practice? Did they impliment something more effective?
Squink, is that the same Clinton that never had a one-on-one meeting with CIA Director Woolsey during the 2 years he held that position?
So? Do you think Rice read every single security brief on every subject prior to her first briefing? Is it really your position that everyone involved in national policy knows every detail about every threat to the U.S.? This has not been my experience at all,
So I guess I don’t find it implausible that Rice might not have known much about Al Qaeda when she first started.
The thing is, it’s not such a bad thing. Clarke doesn’t present it as a “slander” in his book, doesn’t call particular attention to it as proof that she’s an idiot. In fact, in his book he very cleary praises Rice for her intelligence. He just doesn’t think she was well informed about counter-terrorism issues. Which is not surprising, given that her background and expertise lay elsewhere.
That’s part of what I don’t here. You’re acting like the issue here is whether or not Rice was an idiot. But Clarke isn’t claiming that she was an idiot, just that she was unfamiliar with Al Qaeda. That’s the point he’s making in that part of the book. This isn’t a crime. The perfectly reasonable response is that she can’t know about everything in great detail, and she learned a lot more about them as she took on her responsibilities. But somehow, people never get to that point. Conservative pundits instead inflame the charge to the worst and most insulting possible (Coulter says that Clarke is an outright racist) and then try to prove it wrong with a bait-n-switch. That’s nonsense.
Clarke recounts in his book (have you read it? Do you know the context of that Rice passage?) that on 9/11 he was innudated with people asking who the heck Al Qaeda were. So apparently not everyone knew all about them. Just because you followed terrorism doesn’t mean that everyone else did: that everyone else paid attention to that subject, remembered details.