Transcript: Rice's Testimony on 9/11

And I think this commission can be very important in helping us to focus on those lessons and then to make sure that the structures of government reflect those lessons, because those structures of government now are going to have to last us for a very long time.

I think we've done, under the president's leadership, we've done extremely important structural change. We've reorganized the government in a greater way than has been done since the 1947 National Security Act created the Department of Defense, the CIA and the National Security Council.

I think that we need to -- we have a major reorganization of the FBI, where Bob Mueller is trying very hard not to just move boxes but to change incentives, to change culture. Those are all very hard things to do.

I think there have been very important changes made between the CIA and FBI. Yes, everybody knew that they had trouble sharing, but in fact, we had legal restrictions to their sharing. And George Tenet and Louis Freeh and others have worked very hard at that. But until the Patriot Act, we couldn't do what we needed to do.

And now I hear people who question the need for the Patriot Act, question whether or not the Patriot Act is infringing on our civil liberties. I think that you can address this hard question of the balance that we as an open society need to achieve between the protection of our country and the need to remain the open society, the welcoming society that we are. And I think you're in a better position to address that than anyone.

And I do want you to know that when you have addressed it, the president is not going to just be interested in the recommendations. I think he's going to be interested in knowing how we can press forward in ways that will make us safer.

The other thing that I hope you will do is to take a look back again at the question that keeps arising. I think Senator Gorton was going after this question. I've heard Senator Kerrey talk about it, which is, you know, the country, like democracies do, waited and waited and waited as this threat gathered.

And we didn't respond by saying, "We're at war with them. Now we're going to use all means of our national assets to go against them." There are other threats that gather against us.

And what we should have learned from September 11th is that you have to be bold and you have to be decisive and you have to be on the offensive, because we're never going to be able to completely defend.

LEHMAN: Thank you very much.

KEAN: Congressman Roemer?

ROEMER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Welcome, Dr. Rice. And I just want to say to you you've made it through 2 1/2 hours so far with only Governor Thompson to go. And if you'd like a break of five minutes, I'd be happy to yield you some of Governor Thompson's time.

(LAUGHTER)

Dr. Rice, you have said in your statement, which I find very interesting, "The terrorists were at war with us, but we were not at war with them."

Across several administrations of both parties, the response was insufficient. And tragically, for all the language of war spoken before September 11th, this country simply was not on a war footing.

You're the national security advisor to the president of the United States. The buck may stop with the president; the buck certainly goes directly through you as the principal advisor to the president on these issues.

And it really seems to me that there were failures and mistakes, structural problems, all kinds of issues here leading up to September 11th that could have and should have been done better.

Doesn't that beg that there should have been more accountability? That there should have been a resignation or two? That there should have been you or the president saying to the rest of the administration, somehow, somewhere, that this was not done well enough?

RICE: Mr. Roemer, by definition, we didn't have enough information, we didn't have enough protection, because the attack happened -- by definition. And I think we've all asked ourselves, what more could have been done?

I will tell you if we had known that an attack was coming against the United States, that an attack was coming against New York and Washington, we would have moved heaven and earth to stop it.

But you heard the character of the threat report we were getting: something very, very big is going to happen. How do you act on "something very, very big is going to happen" beyond trying to put people on alert? Most of the threat reporting was abroad.

I took an oath, as I've said, to protect...

ROEMER: I've heard it -- I've heard you say this....

RICE: And I take it very seriously. I know that those who attacked us that day -- and attacked us, by the way, because of who we are, no other reason, but for who we are -- that they are the responsible party for the war that they launched against us...

ROEMER: But Dr. Rice...

RICE: ... the attacks that they made, and that our responsibility...

ROEMER: You have said several times...

RICE: ... that our responsibility is to...

ROEMER: You have said several times that your responsibility, being in office for 230 days, was to defend and protect the United States.

RICE: Of course.

ROEMER: You had an opportunity, I think, with Mr. Clarke, who had served a number of presidents going back to the Reagan administration; who you'd decided to keep on in office; who was a pile driver, a bulldozer, so to speak -- but this person who you, in the Woodward interview -- he's the very first name out of your mouth when you suspect that terrorists have attacked us on September the 11th. You say, I think, immediately it was a terrorist attack; get Dick Clarke, the terrorist guy.

Even before you mentioned Tenet and Rumsfeld's names, "Get Dick Clarke."

Why don't you get Dick Clarke to brief the president before 9/11? Here is one of the consummate experts that never has the opportunity to brief the president of the United States on one of the most lethal, dynamic and agile threats to the United States of America.

Why don't you use this asset? Why doesn't the president ask to meet with Dick Clarke?

RICE: Well, the president was meeting with his director of central intelligence. And Dick Clarke is a very, very fine counterterrorism expert -- and that's why I kept him on.

And what I wanted Dick Clarke to do was to manage the crisis for us and help us develop a new strategy. And I can guarantee you, when we had that new strategy in place, the president -- who was asking for it and wondering what was happening to it -- was going to be in a position to engage it fully.

The fact is that what Dick Clarke recommended to us, as he has said, would not have prevented 9/11. I actually would say that not only would it have not prevented 9/11, but if we had done everything on that list, we would have actually been off in the wrong direction about the importance that we needed to attach to a new policy for Afghanistan and a new policy for Pakistan.

Because even though Dick is a very fine counterterrorism expert, he was not a specialist on Afghanistan. That's why I brought somebody in who really understood Afghanistan. He was not a specialist on Pakistan. That's why I brought somebody in to deal with Pakistan. He had some very good ideas. We acted on them.

Dick Clarke -- let me just step back for a second and say we had a very -- we had a very good relationship.

ROEMER: Yes. I'd appreciate it if you could be very concise here, so I can get to some more issues.

RICE: But all that he needed -- all that he needed to do was to say, "I need time to brief the president on something." But...

ROEMER: I think he did say that. Dr. Rice, in a private interview to us he said he asked to brief the president...

RICE: Well, I have to say -- I have to say, Mr. Roemer, to my recollection...

ROEMER: You say he didn't.

RICE: ... Dick Clarke never asked me to brief the president on counterterrorism. He did brief the president later on cybersecurity, in July, but he, to my recollection, never asked.

And my senior directors have an open door to come and say, "I think the president needs to do this. I think the president needs to do that. He needs to make this phone call. He needs to hear this briefing." It's not hard to get done.

But I just think that...

ROEMER: Let me ask you a question. You just said that the intelligence coming in indicated a big, big, big threat. Something was going to happen very soon and be potentially catastrophic.

I don't understand, given the big threat, why the big principals don't get together. The principals meet 33 times in seven months, on Iraq, on the Middle East, on missile defense, China, on Russia. Not once do the principals ever sit down -- you, in your job description as the national security advisor, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the president of the United States -- and meet solely on terrorism to discuss in the spring and the summer, when these threats are coming in, when you've known since the transition that al Qaeda cells are in the United States, when, as the PDB said on August, bin Laden determined to attack the United States.

Why don't the principals at that point say, "Let's all talk about this, let's get the biggest people together in our government and discuss what this threat is and try to get our bureaucracies responding to it"?

RICE: Once again, on the August 6th memorandum to the president, this was not threat-reporting about what was about to happen. This was an analytic piece that stood back and answered questions from the president.

But as to the principals meetings...

ROEMER: It has six or seven things in it, Dr. Rice, including the Ressam case when he attacked the United States in the millennium.

RICE: Yes, these are his...

ROEMER: Has the FBI saying that they think that there are conditions.

RICE: No, it does not have the FBI saying that they think that there are conditions. It has the FBI saying that they observed some suspicious activity. That was checked out with the FBI.

ROEMER: That is equal to what might be...

RICE: No.

ROEMER: ... conditions for an attack.

RICE: Mr. Roemer, Mr. Roemer, threat reporting...

ROEMER: Would you say, Dr. Rice, that we should make that PDB a public document...

RICE: Mr. Roemer...

ROEMER: ... so we can have this conversation?

RICE: Mr. Roemer, threat reporting is: "We believe that something is going to happen here and at this time, under these circumstances." This was not threat reporting.

ROEMER: Well, actionable intelligence, Dr. Rice, is when you have the place, time and date. The threat reporting saying the United States is going to be attacked should trigger the principals getting together to say we're going to do something about this, I would think.

RICE: Mr. Roemer, let's be very clear. The PDB does not say the United States is going to be attacked. It says bin Laden would like to attack the United States. I don't think you, frankly, had to have that report to know that bin Laden would like to attack the United States.

ROEMER: So why aren't you doing something about that earlier than August 6th?

(APPLAUSE)

RICE: The threat reporting to which we could respond was in June and July about threats abroad. What we tried to do for -- just because people said you cannot rule out an attack on the United States, was to have the domestic agencies and the FBI together to just pulse them and have them be on alert.

ROEMER: I agree with that.

RICE: But there was nothing that suggested there was going to be a threat...

ROEMER: I agree with that.

RICE: ... to the United States.

ROEMER: I agree with that.

So, Dr. Rice, let's say that the FBI is the key here. You say that the FBI was tasked with trying to find out what the domestic threat was.

We have done thousands of interviews here at the 9/11 Commission. We've gone through literally millions of pieces of paper. To date, we have found nobody -- nobody at the FBI who knows anything about a tasking of field offices.

We have talked to the director at the time of the FBI during this threat period, Mr. Pickard. He says he did not tell the field offices to do this.

And we have talked to the special agents in charge. They don't have any recollection of receiving a notice of threat.

Nothing went down the chain to the FBI field offices on spiking of information, on knowledge of al Qaeda in the country, and still, the FBI doesn't do anything.

Isn't that some of the responsibility of the national security advisor?

RICE: The responsibility for the FBI to do what it was asked was the FBI's responsibility. Now, I...

ROEMER: You don't think there's any responsibility back to the advisor to the president...

RICE: I believe that the responsibility -- again, the crisis management here was done by the CSG. They tasked these things. If there was any reason to believe that I needed to do something or that Andy Card needed to do something, I would have been expected to be asked to do it. We were not asked to do it. In fact, as I've...

ROEMER: But don't you ask somebody to do it? You're not asking somebody to do it. Why wouldn't you initiate that?

RICE: Mr. Roemer, I was responding to the threat spike and to where the information was. The information was about what might happen in the Persian Gulf, what might happen in Israel, what might happen in North Africa. We responded to that, and we responded vigorously.

Now, the structure...

ROEMER: Dr. Rice, let me ask you...

RICE: ... of the FBI, you will get into next week.

ROEMER: You've been helpful to us on that -- on your recommendation.

KEAN: Last question, Congressman.

ROEMER: Last question, Dr. Rice, talking about responses.

Mr. Clarke writes you a memo on September the 4th, where he lays out his frustration that the military is not doing enough, that the CIA is not pushing as hard enough in their agency. And he says we should not wait until the day that hundreds of Americans lay dead in the streets due to a terrorist attack and we think there could have been something more we could do.

Seven days prior to September the 11th, he writes this to you.

What's your reaction to that at the time, and what's your response to that at the time?

RICE: Just one final point I didn't quite complete. I, of course, did understand that the attorney general needed to know what was going on, and I asked that he take the briefing and then ask that he be briefed.

Because, again, there was nothing demonstrating or showing that something was coming in the United States. If there had been something, we would have acted on it.

ROEMER: I think we should make this document public, Dr. Rice. Would you support making the August 6th PDB public?

RICE: The August 6th PDB has been available to you. You are describing it. And the August 6th PDB was a response to questions asked by the president, not a warning document.

ROEMER: Why wouldn't it be made public then?

RICE: Now, as to -- I think you know the sensitivity of presidential decision memoranda. And I think you know the great lengths to which we have gone to make it possible for this commission to view documents that are not generally -- I don't know if they've ever been -- made available in quite this way.

Now, as to what Dick Clarke said on September 4th, that was not a premonition, nor a warning. What that memorandum was, as I was getting ready to go into the September 4th principals meeting to review the NSPD and to approve the new NSPD, what it was a warning to me that the bureaucracies would try to undermine it.

Dick goes into great and emotional detail about the long history of how DOD has never been responsive, how the CIA has never been responsive, about how the Predator has gotten hung up because the CIA doesn't really want to fly it.

And he says, if you don't fight through this bureaucracy -- he says, at one point, "They're going to all sign on to this NSPD because they won't want to be associated -- they won't want to say they don't want to eliminate the threat of al Qaeda." He says, "But, in effect, you have to go in there and push them, because we'll all wonder about the day when thousands of Americans" and so forth and so on.

So that's what this document is. It's not a warning document. It's not a -- all of us had this fear.

I think that the chairman mentioned that I said this in an interview, that we would hope not to get to that day. But it would not be appropriate or correct to characterize what Dick wrote to me on September 4th as a warning of an impending attack. What he was doing was, I think, trying to buck me up, so that when I went into this principals meeting, I was sufficiently on guard against the kind of bureaucratic inertia that he had fought all of his life.

ROEMER: What is a warning, if August 6th isn't and September 4th isn't, to you?

RICE: Well, August 6th is most certainly an historical document that says, "Here's how you might think about al Qaeda." A warning is when you have something that suggests that an attack is impending.

And we did not have, on the United States, threat information that was, in any way, specific enough to suggest that something was coming in the United States.

The September 4th memo, as I've said to you, was a warning to me not to get dragged down by the bureaucracy, not a warning about September 11th.

ROEMER: Thank you, Dr. Rice.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

KEAN: Thank you, Congressman, very, very much.

Our last questioner will be Governor Thompson.

THOMPSON: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Dr. Rice, first, thank you for your service to this nation and this president. I think you can fairly be described by all, whether they agree with you or not, on various issues, as devoted to the interests of the president and the country. And all Americans, I believe, appreciate that.

Thank you also for finally making it here.

I know there was a struggle over constitutional principles. I don't think your appearance today signals any retreat by the president from the notion that the Congress should not be allowed to hail presidential aides down to the Capitol and question them.

We are not the Congress. We are not a congressional committee. That's why you gave us the PDBs.

And so, we appreciate your appearance and we appreciate the decision of the president to allow you to appear to not just answer our questions -- because you've done that for five hours in private -- but to answer the questions of Americans who are watching you today.

I'm going to go through my questions -- some of which have been tossed out because my brothers and sisters asked them before me -- as quickly as I can because we have to depart. And I would appreciate it if you would go through your answers as quickly as you could, but be fair to yourself.

I don't believe in beating dead horses, but there's a bunch of lame ones running around here today. Let's see if we can't finally push them out the door.

Please describe to us your relationship with Dick Clarke, because I think that bears on the context of this -- well, let's just take the first question.

He said he gave you a plan. You said he didn't give you a plan. It's clear that what he did give you was a memo that had attached to it, not only the Delenda plan -- or whatever you want to describe Delenda as -- but a December 2000 strategy paper.

Was this something that you were supposed to act on, or was this a compilation of what had been pending at the time the Clinton administration had left office but had not been acted on, or was this something he tried to get acted on by the Clinton administration and they didn't act on it?

What was it? How did he describe it to you? What did you understand it to be?

RICE: What I understood it to be was a series of decisions, near-term decisions that were pending from the Clinton administration, things like whether to arm the Uzbeks -- I'm sorry -- whether to give further counterterrorism support to the Uzbeks, whether to arm the Northern Alliance -- a whole set of specific issues that needed decision. And we made those decisions prior to the strategy being developed.

He also had attached the Delenda plan, which is my understanding was developed in 1998, never adopted and, in fact, had some ideas. I said, "Dick, take the ideas that you've put in this think piece, take the ideas that were there in the Delenda plan, put it together into a strategy, not to roll back al Qaeda" -- which had been the goal of the Clinton -- of what Dick Clarke wrote to us -- "but rather to eliminate this threat." And he was to put that strategy together.

But by no means did he ask me to act on a plan. He gave us a series of ideas. We acted on those. And then he gave me some papers that had a number of ideas, more questions than answers about how we might get better cooperation, for instance, from Pakistan. We took those ideas. We gave him the opportunity to write a comprehensive strategy.

THOMPSON: I'd like to follow up on one of Commissioner Roemer's questions, the principals meetings.

With all due respect to the principals, Cabinet officers of the president of the United States, Senate confirmed, the notion that when principals gather the heavens open and the truth pours forth is, to borrow the phrase of one of my fellow commissioners, a little bit of hooey, I think.

Isn't it a fact that when principals gather in principals meetings they bring their staffs with them? Don't they line the walls? Don't they talk to each other? Doesn't the staff speak up?

RICE: Well, actually when you have principals meetings they really sometimes are to tell -- for the principals to say what their staffs have said -- have told them to say.

THOMPSON: Right.

RICE: I just have to say we may simply disagree on this with some of the commissioners. I do not believe that there was a lack of high-level attention. The president was paying attention to this. How much higher level can you get?

The secretary of state and the secretary of defense and the attorney general and the line officers are responsible for responding to the information that they were given and they were responding.

The problem is that the United States was effectively blind to what was about to happen to it and you cannot depend on the chance that some principal might find out something in order to prevent an attack. That's why the structural changes that are being talked about here are so important.

THOMPSON: What you say in your statement before us today on page 2 reminds me that terrorism had a different face in the 20th century than it does today. I just want to be sure I understand the attitude of the Bush administration, because you referenced the Lusitania and the Nazis and all these state-sponsored terrorist activities when we know today that the real threat is from either rogue states -- Iran, North Korea -- or from stateless terrorist organizations -- al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas. Does the Bush administration get this difference?

RICE: We certainly understand fully that there are groups, networks that are operating out there. The only thing I would say is that they are much more effective when they can count on a state either to sponsor them or to protect them or to acquiesce in their activities. That's why the policy that we developed was so insistent on sanctuaries being taken away from them. You do have to take away their territory. When they can get states to cooperate with them or when they can get states to acquiesce in their being on their territory, they're much more effective.

THOMPSON: The Cole -- why didn't the Bush administration respond to the Cole?

RICE: I think Secretary Rumsfeld has perhaps said it best.

We really thought that the Cole incident was passed, that you didn't want to respond tit-for-tat. As I've said, there is strategic response and tactical response.

And just responding to another attack in an insufficient way we thought would actually probably embolden the terrorists. They had been emboldened by everything else that had been done to them. And that the best course was to look ahead to a more aggressive strategy against them.

I still believe to this day that the al Qaeda were prepared for a response to the Cole and that, as some of the intelligence suggested, bin Laden was intending to show that he yet survived another one, and that it might have been counterproductive.

THOMPSON: I've got to say that answer bothers me a little bit because of where it logically leads, and that is -- and I don't like "what if" questions, but this is a "what if" question.

What if, in March of 2001, under your administration, al Qaeda had blown up another U.S. destroyer? What would you have done and what -- would that have been tit-for-tat?

RICE: I don't know what we would have done, but I do think that we were moving to a different concept that said that you had to hold at risk what they cared about, not just try and punish them, not just try to go after bin Laden.

I would like to think that we might have come to an effective response. I think that in the context of war, when you're at war with somebody, it's not an issue of every battle or every skirmish; it's an issue of, can you do strategic damage to this organization? And we were thinking much more along the lines of strategic damage.

THOMPSON: Well, I'm going to sound like my brother Kerrey, which terrifies me somewhat.

(LAUGHTER)

But blowing up our destroyers is an act of war against us, is it not?

THOMPSON: I mean, how long would that have to go on before we would respond with an act of war?

RICE: We'd had several acts of war committed against us. And I think we believed that responding kind of tit-for-tat, probably with inadequate military options because, for all the plans that might have been looked at by the Pentagon or on the shelf, they were not connected to a political policy that was going to change the circumstances of al Qaeda and the Taliban and therefore the relationship to Pakistan.

Look, it can be debated as to whether or not one should have responded to the Cole. I think that we really believed that an inadequate response was simply going to embolden them. And I think you've heard that from Secretary Rumsfeld as well, and I believe we felt very strongly that way.

THOMPSON: I'll tell you what I find remarkable. One word that hasn't been mentioned once today -- yet we've talked about structural changes to the FBI and the CIA and cooperation -- "Congress."

Congress has to change the structure of the FBI. The Congress has to appropriate funds to fight terrorism. Where was the Congress?

RICE: Well, I think that when I made the comment that the country was not on war footing, that didn't just mean the executive branch was not on war footing.

The fact is that many of the big changes, quite frankly, again, we were not going to be able to make in 233 days. Some of those big changes do require congressional action.

The Congress cooperated after September 11th with the president to come up with the Patriot Act, which does give to the FBI and the CIA and other intelligence agencies the kind of ability, legal ability, to share between them that was simply not there before.

You cannot depend on the chance that something might fall out of a tree. You cannot depend on the chance that a very good Customs agent, who's doing her job with her colleagues out in the state of Washington, is going to catch somebody coming across the border of the United States with bomb-making materials to be the incident that leads you to be able to respond adequately.

This is hard, because, again, we have to be right 100 percent of the time, they only have to be right once. But the structural changes that we've made since 9/11 and the structural changes that we may have to continue to make give us a better chance in that fight against the terrorists.

THOMPSON: I read this week, an interview with Newsweek, with your predecessor, Mr. Brzezinski, he seemed to be saying that there is a danger that we can obsess about al Qaeda and lose sight of equal dangers. For example, the rise of a nuclear state, Iran, in the Middle East, and the apparent connection to Hezbollah and Hamas, which may forecast even more bitter fighting, as we're now learning in Iraq. Or the ability of Hezbollah or Hamas to attack us on our soil, within the Untied States, in the same way al Qaeda did.

Are we keeping an eye on that?

RICE: We are keeping an eye and working actively with the international community on Iran and their nuclear ambitions.

I think the one thing that the global war on terrorism has allowed us to do is to not just focus on al Qaeda. Because we have enlisted countries around the world, saying that terrorism is terrorism is terrorism -- in other words, you can't fight al Qaeda and hug Hezbollah or hug Hamas -- that we've actually started to delegitimatize terrorism in a way that it was not before.

We don't make a distinction between different kinds of terrorism. And we're, therefore, united with the countries of the world to fight all kinds of terrorism. Terrorism is never an appropriate or justified response just because of political difficulty. So, yes, we are keeping an eye on it.

But it speaks to the point that we, the United States administration, cannot focus just on one thing. What the war on terrorism has done is it's given us an organizing principle that allows us to think about terrorism, to think about weapons of mass destruction, to think about the links between them, and to form a united front across the world to try and win this war.

THOMPSON: Last simple question. If we come forward with sweeping recommendations for change in how our law enforcement and intelligence agencies operate to meet the new challenges of our time, not the 20th century or the 19th century challenges we faced in the past, and if the president of the United States agrees with them, can you assure us that he will fight with all the vigor he has to get them enacted?

RICE: I can assure you that if the president agrees with the recommendations, and I think we'll want to take a hard look at the recommendations, we're going to fight.

Because the real lesson of September 11th is that the country was not properly structured to deal with the threats that had been gathering for a long period of time. I think we're better structured today than we ever have been. We've made a lot of progress. But we want to hear what further progress we can make.

And because this president considers his highest calling to protect and defend the people of the United States of America, he'll fight for any changes that he feels necessary.

THOMPSON: Thank you, Dr. Rice.

RICE: Thank you.

(APPLAUSE)

KEAN: Thank you.

I might announce, before I thank Dr. Rice, that there's a lot of discussion today about the PDB, the presidential daily briefing, of August 6th.

This is not to do with Dr. Rice. But we have requested from the White House that that be declassified because we feel it's important that the American people get a chance to see it. We're awaiting an answer on our request, and hope by next week's hearing that we might have it.

Dr. Rice, thank you. You have advanced our understanding of key events. We thank you for all the time you've given us.

We have a few remaining classified matter that at some point we'd like to discuss with you in closed session, if we could...

RICE: Of course.

KEAN: ... and I thank you for that.

We appreciate very much your service to the nation.

This concludes our hearing. The commission will hold its next hearing on April 13th and 14th on law enforcement and the intelligence community.

Thank you very much.

RICE: Thank you.

END