9/11: Intelligence 'too vague'

2004-04-08 19:10

Washington - President George W Bush's national security advisor, Condeleezza Rice, said on Thursday that for all the language of war spoken before September 11, the country "simply was not on a war footing".

She told an inquiry Bush had been well aware of a serious threat from al-Qaeda before 9/11, but added there had been no specific intelligence about the use of aircraft to attack the US.

Nor, Rice added, had there been a "silver bullet" that could have prevented the terror attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

In nearly three hours in the witness chair, Rice stoutly defended Bush when Democrats on the commission raised questions about the administration's attentiveness to terrorism, and implicitly and explicitly rebutted a series of charges made two weeks ago by former terrorism aide Richard Clarke.

In widely anticipated testimony, Rice offered no apology for the failure to prevent the attacks - as Clarke did two weeks ago.

Instead, she said, "as an officer of government on duty that day, I will never forget the sorrow and the anger I felt".

President 'tired of swatting flies'

Rice said the president came into office determined to develop a "more robust" policy to combat al-Qaeda.

"He made clear to me that he did not want to respond to al-Qaeda one attack at a time.

"He told me he was 'tired of swatting flies'," she told the commission delving into the attacks that killed nearly 3 000.

Her comment about swatting flies drew a sharp response from former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey, who noted the administration made no military response to an attack on the USS Cole in 2000.

"Dr Rice, we only swatted a fly once... How the hell could he (Bush) be tired," Kerrey asked.

"I think it's only a figure of speech," she replied, adding that Bush felt the CIA was "going after individual terrorists".

She later said a further, similar attack may have emboldened the perpetrators, and American interests were better served by a broader response designed to undermine al-Qaeda.

Rice also clashed with Richard Ben-Veniste and Tom Roemer when they pressed her to say how much the president had been informed of the threat of terror activity.

She said a classified briefing paper prepared for the president on August 6 2001 was a "historical" document despite its title: Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States.

She said it contained no "actionable" intelligence, meaning it lacked information that would have alerted agencies to the imminent threat.

Terror threat building for years

Commission chair Thomas Kean said at the end of the hearing that he would ask the White House to declassify the document.

Rice was emphatic on one point - that the threat of terrorism had been building for years, and the administration had been in office only for 233 days before al-Qaeda struck.

"The terrorists were at war with us, but we were not yet at war with them," she said.

"For more than 20 years, the terrorist threat gathered and America's response across several administrations of both parties was insufficient," Rice acknowledged.

"In hindsight, if anything might have helped stop 9/11, it would have been better information about threats inside the United States, something made difficult by structural and legal impediments that prevented the collection and sharing of information by our law enforcement and intelligence agencies," she said.

Rice's testimony, under oath and on live national television, came after weeks of White House resistance.

Bush yielded in response to repeated public requests from members of the commission - as well as quiet proddings of Republicans in Congress - that an on-the-record rebuttal was needed in response to Clarke's explosive charges.

Rice's appearance businesslike

The former White House aide testified last month that the Bush administration gave a lower priority to combating terrorism than had former President Bill Clinton and that the decision to invade Iraq undermined the war on terror.

In addition to raising questions about administration attention to the threat of terrorism, his remarks implicitly challenged a key underpinning of Bush's campaign for re-election.

Rice's appearance was businesslike for the most part, first turning contentious when Ben-Veniste pressed her on what was known about the terrorist threat in advance of the September 11 attacks.

They interrupted one another repeatedly, the interrogator and the witness.

"I would like to finish my point," she said when he began speaking while she was.

"I didn't know there was a point," he replied.

Under questioning, Rice acknowledged she had spoken too broadly once when she said that no one had ever envisioned terrorists using planes and crashing them into buildings.

She said that aides came to her within days and said there had been reports or memos about that possibility, but that she hadn't seen them.

Pointing a finger of blame, she said that senior officials "have to depend on intelligence agencies to tell you what is relevant".

She also directly challenged one of the claims made by Clarke, who said earlier the administration had moved slowly on some of the recommendations he and others made before the attacks.

- AP