Rice likely to be grilled about 9-11

Chicago Tribune (KRT) WASHINGTON In defending the White House against accusations by a former aide that President Bush was not paying adequate attention to potential terrorist attacks prior to Sept. 11, 2001, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice portrayed the accuser, Richard Clarke, as someone who couldn’t keep his story straight. But when she appears before the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, possibly next week, Rice is expected to face a grilling from commissioners about inconsistencies in the way she and other members of the administration have portrayed events leading up to those attacks. Commission members and Democrats have noted that over the past week, while Rice has been chastising Clarke for flip-flopping on his story, she has contradicted herself, contradicted other administration officials and been contradicted by others testifying on behalf of the White House. Among the issues Rice will have to clarify are whether administration officials were focused so intently on Iraq that they failed to pay enough attention to the threat of terrorism; when the administration put in place a plan to combat al-Qaida; and what the president knew about al-Qaida before Sept. 11. “We’ve got to try and clear up those discrepancies as best we can,” commission Chairman Thomas Kean said. “Some of those questions may be important to the fact-finding in our report. And obviously we will, in our hearing, go to those questions.” The stakes are particularly high for Rice because her testimony will be the White House’s final public word in front of the high-profile commission on Bush’s efforts to combat terrorism. The Sept. 11 commission, as part of its agreement to get Rice to testi, agreed not to call any other White House aides to testify publicly. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have agreed to meet with the commission jointly but privately. Democrats have been particularly gleeful that Rice will have to explain the administration’s inconsistencies in public and that Bush was forced by political pressures to reverse course on Tuesday and allow her to appear publicly and under oath. The episode has given Democrats a way of challenging Bush’s main argument for re-election, his leadership in the war on terror. “The Democrats now have a competing narrative about 9/11 and the war on terrorism to that of the president,” said Thomas Mann, a presidential scholar at the Brookings Institution. “If that narrative — Bush gave a low priority to terrorism before 9/11 and then unwisely diverted resources to the war against Iraq — holds up in the weeks and months ahead, the major rationale for the president’s re-election will have been damaged,” Mann said. White House spokesman Scott McClellan was dismissive of the impact that further probing by the Sept. 11 commission will have on the administration. “Most Americans view Dick Clarke and his contradictions as yesterday’s story,” McClellan said. “This is about the war on terrorism and the important role that the 9/11 commission plays in helping us move forward in the war on terrorism.” Despite White House efforts to discredit Clarke, who was a top adviser on terrorism to Bush and President Clinton, Kean, the commission’s Republican chairman, gave Clarke’s high marks as a witness. Kean, appearing Wednesday on CBS’ “Early Show,” said Clarke was “a good witness and a very, very important witness because he went over both administrations.” While Republicans claim Clarke’s public testimony last week contradicted statements he made privately to those investigating the attacks, Kean said there was “not that great a difference, a difference of emphasis” in Clarke’s retellings of events privately and publicly. Rice, in an op-ed article published in The Washington Post on March 22, claimed that Bush had a plan to take military action against al-Qaida before Sept. 11. But Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, under questioning by the commission, said Rice’s claim was not true and that a military plan was not put in place until “after the horror of 9/11.” Rice also claimed that Bush was engaged so deeply on the issue of terrorism that he had personally requested a CIA briefing on the threat posed by al-Qaida, which he received in August 2001 at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. The CIA, however, later said that it had acted on its own in preparing that report. Rice has given several accounts of Clarke’s role in developing a plan to combat terrorism. In her Washington Post article, Rice said Clarke did not turn over a plan to the new administration when it first took office. She later said publicly that Clarke did turn over a plan but that it consisted of ideas that “had been already tried or rejected in the Clinton administration.”Her description changed again in an interview with NBC, during which she said that Clarke had not only turned over a plan but that the Bush administration “acted on those ideas very quickly.” Rice also contradicted Cheney, who claimed in a radio interview that Clarke had been “out of the loop” on terrorism issues in the Bush White House even though he was supposed to be Bush’s top adviser on such issues. “I would not use the word ‘out of the loop,’ ” Rice later told reporters. “He was in every meeting about terrorism.” Rice has already had to correct at least one substantive claim she made about Sept. 11, commission member Richard Ben-Veniste has said. Rice once defended Bush by saying, “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that those people could have taken an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center … that they would try to use an airplane as a missile.” But the commission has been told that Clarke and intelligence officials talked about terrorists using airplanes in an attack. Ben-Veniste, a Democrat, said Rice told the commission in private that she had misspoken in claiming that the possibility was never discussed before Sept. 11. Karen Hughes, one of Bush’s closest advisers and one who urged him to let Rice testify publicly, suggested Wednesday that any corrections that need to made involve comments made by others to the commission, not Rice. “We’ve seen a number of misrepresentations made before the 9/11 commission,” Hughes said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “It’s important for the public to hear the facts and to hear from her directly.” The key question, according to Mann of the Brookings Institution, is: “Who will prove the more credible witness: Clarke or Rice? We shall see.”