The pending appearance of President Bush before the September 11 commission once looked like a formality of grim memories. Presidential National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice held the real key to the panel’s factual case.
Now, Mr. Bush’s testimony looks more interesting. Miss Rice’s testimony, though crisp and closely reasoned, about her own judgment during the months before September 11, 2001, leaves questions only Mr. Bush can answer.
The national security adviser is a critical office, to be sure. But it is still a staff assignment, and its scope is limited even when supercharged dynamos like Henry Kissinger run it.
Miss Rice had the expertise to manage problems with foreign governments like Pakistan that were essential to the war on terrorism. Richard Clarke — her assistant in charge of terrorism, who has turned into the leading critic of the Bush administration — seems to have been left with the portfolio for terrorism policy in the domestic agencies, including the FBI, without any real authority over them.
Miss Rice said there were no orders for her to assemble and galvanize all the government agencies to respond to apparent intelligence warnings in summer 2001 of impending hijackings, possibly targeting American cities.
“We were not asked to do it,” Miss Rice said, when asked about whether the FBI and other domestic agencies should have been summoned when intelligence intercepts of terrorist “chatter” indicated something big was coming down.
Those warnings showed up in the president’s daily intelligence report, which goes to Mr. Bush, but nothing came of them. And Miss Rice noted Mr. Bush had frequent up-to-date briefings from CIA Director George Tenet on all such developments.
Unfortunately, commission members noted, nothing seems to have been done. FBI field offices seem to have been kept in the dark. Other agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration and the Transportation Department hadn’t a clue, either.
An astonishing mass of documents and testimony about all this is being assembled by the commission, under executive director Philip Zelikow of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. It could be the most impressive public record of any inquiry in history, provided the commission’s requests for lifting secrecy orders are heeded.
Regardless, this commission will break new ground when Mr. Bush appears alongside Vice President Dick Cheney sometime during the next couple of months to answer questions.
Exactly how this is will work or how long this will last hasn’t been determined. Tying up the two top constitutional officers of the country simultaneously during a shooting war is not a simple matter. But there are already so many distractions in a political campaign year nobody seems to mind. Partisanship, actually, has been mainly absent during this inquiry.
There were moments during the questioning of Miss Rice and her nemesis, former terrorism adviser Mr. Clarke, when individual commissioners from both ends of the spectrum started orbiting into partisan politics.
But Chairman Tom Kean, former Republican governor of New Jersey, and Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton of Indiana, former Democratic House Foreign Affairs chairman, have both kept these proceedings on an even course.
Mr. Hamilton did not get a definitive answer from Miss Rice on why Mr. Bush did not authorize the assassination of Osama bin Laden for the attack on the USS Cole, an act of war. Will he ask Mr. Bush himself?
The other questions are whether the president saw warnings of forthcoming airline hijackings in daily briefings, including one on Aug. 6, 2001, titled “bin Laden is determined to attack inside the United States,” what Mr. Bush thought and what he did. Miss Rice minimized that presidential daily briefing paper as a “historical” document produced at the president’s request. But she did not say why he had requested it or why — when it was brought forth — evidence of al Qaeda’s growing presence within the United States was dismissed as “speculative.”
Miss Rice praised the president’s courage during the crisis and his leadership since. “President Bush is leading this country during this time of crisis and change,” she told the commission.
John Hall is senior Washington correspondent of Media General News Service. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.