Weapons of Mass Discussion

Crispy Rice Treats - Part VII

From the Gorelick Segment of the Rice Testimony:

[GORELICK:] I'd like to pick up where Fred Fielding and you left off, which is this issue of the extent to which raising the level to the Cabinet level and bringing people together makes a difference.

And let me just give you some facts as I see them and let you comment on them.

First of all, while it may be that Dick Clarke was informing you, many of the other people at the CSG-level, and the people who were brought to the table from the domestic agencies, were not telling their principals.

Secretary Mineta, the secretary of transportation, had no idea of the threat. The administrator of the FAA, responsible for security on our airlines, had no idea. Yes, the attorney general was briefed, but there was no evidence of any activity by him about this.

You indicate in your statement that the FBI tasked its field offices to find out what was going on out there. We have no record of that.

The Washington field office international terrorism people say they never heard about the threat, they never heard about the warnings, they were not asked to come to the table and shake those trees.

SACs, special agents in charge, around the country _ Miami in particular _ no knowledge of this.

This is Gorelick's opening question/statement. She follows this litany with a crtique of the writing style of memos sent to the FBI that didn't bring the lower levels of the organization to "battle stations." Now, I can understand the line of questioning, if the goal is to get at the institutional breakdown in communications or the structural problems that prevented agencies from working cooperatively; but that isn't what I get from commissioner Gorelick. It seems clear to me that Gorelick would like for these memos (and how many of these are released in a year?) to ramp up the alert level every time one gets sent out. Which is a worthwhile goal; but she doesn't ask, nor provide her own opinion, about how to achieve that in a memo.

Gorelick then preaches to the crowd using Colleen Rowley and her frustration in the Moussaoui case. The crowd cheers (again, is this appropriate for a serious discussion? And again, neither the Commissioner nor the chairs address it.), but the point really gets lost. Rowley was "knocking on doors that weren't opening" but Gorelick fails to ask an adequte question that would address that issue.

[GORELICK:] So I just ask you this question as a student of government myself, because I don't believe it's functionally equivalent to have people three, four, five levels down in an agency working an issue even if there's a specialist. And you get a greater degree of intensity when it comes from the top. And I would like to give you the opportunity to comment on this, because it bothers me.

Rice disputes the characterization that the people handling the problem (Dick Clarke's CSG) were "four or five levels down" but rather experienced people who knew what they were doing. That isn't the question that Gorelick was asking, but I can see how Rice missed it; Gorelick didn't ask a question, she asked for commentary.

Gorelick then tries to make a point that Rice is supposed to respond to...

Now, you say that _ and I think quite rightly _ that the big problem was systemic, that the FBI could not function as it should, and it didn't have the right methods of communicating with the CIA and vice versa.

Oh good, we're going to start talking about solutions! Hardly...

At the outset of the administration, a commission that was chartered by Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, two very different people covering pretty much the political spectrum, put together a terrific panel to study the issue of terrorism and report to the new administration as it began. And you took that briefing, I know.

Oh, Bill Clinton saved the world! And we'll mention Newt Gingrich so you won't call me on it. Oh, boy...

That commission said we are going to get hit in the domestic, the United States, and we are going to get hit big; that's number one. And number two, we have big systemic problems. The FBI doesn't work the way it should, and it doesn't communicate with the intelligence community.

What did you know and when did you know it!? Ugh... This is devolving in to the same crap, different witness. Can we get to a question now?

Now, you have said to us that your policy review was meant to be comprehensive. You took your time because you wanted to get at the hard issues and have a hard-hitting, comprehensive policy. And yet there is nothing in it about the vast domestic landscape that we were all warned needed so much attention.

Can you give me the answer to the question why?

Here is Dr. Rice's on-the-mark analysis:

I would ask the following. We were there for 233 days. There had been recognition for a number of years before _ after the '93 bombing, and certainly after the millennium _ that there were challenges, if I could say it that way, inside the United States, and that there were challenges concerning our domestic agencies and the challenges concerning the FBI and the CIA.

We were in office 233 days. It's absolutely the case that we did not begin structural reform of the FBI.

Now, the vice president was asked by the president, and that was tasked in May, to put all of this together and to see if he could put together, from all of the recommendations, a program for protection of the homeland against WMD, what else needed to be done. And in fact, he had hired Admiral Steve Abbot to do that work. And it was on that basis that we were able to put together the Homeland Security Council, which Tom Ridge came to head very, very quickly.

But I think the question is, why, over all of these years, did we not address the structural problems that were there, with the FBI, with the CIA, the homeland departments being scattered among many different departments?

RICE: And why, given all of the opportunities that we'd had to do it, had we not done it?

And I think that the unfortunate _ and I really do think it's extremely tragic _ fact is that sometimes until there is a catastrophic event that forces people to think differently, that forces people to overcome all customs and old culture and old fears about domestic intelligence and the relationship, that you don't get that kind of change.

Governments don't change overnight unless there is a real reason to do so. And even then, it is usually because an event triggered such change. Rice describes the lay of the land in Washington DC accurately in this statement. The truth hurts: if politicians in Congress and the White House had wanted institutional change, they could have made it happen.

Once again, the question that doesn't get asked is: would institutional change at the FBI and the intelligence community prevented 9/11? I believe the answer is no, but, our chances would have definately improved.

You know, the only thing this segment is missing is some "Gotch Politics"...oh, here it is:

I was struck by your characterization of the NSPD, the policy that you arrived at at the end of the administration, as having the goal of the elimination of Al Qaida.

Because as I look at it _ and I thank you for declassifying this this morning, although I would have liked to have known it a little earlier, but I think people will find this interesting reading _ it doesn't call for the elimination of Al Qaida.

And it may be a semantic difference, but I don't think so. It calls for the elimination of the Al Qaida threat. And that's a very big difference, because, to me, the elimination of Al Qaida means you're going to go into Afghanistan and you're going to get them.

Ah, semantics. That'll get her! Sure. Gorelick will spin a web that Clinton's team had put together a military plan for taking out al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but Rice takes her, and the Clinton team, to task for a fundamental flaw in those plans:

Now, the whole tortured history of trying to use military power in support of counterterrorism objectives has been, I think, very admirably and adequately discussed by your staff in the military paper. And what is quite clear from that paper is that, from the time of Presidential Directive 62, which keeps the Defense Department focused on force protection and rendition of terrorists and so forth, all the way up through the period when we take office, this issue of military plans and how to use military power with counterterrorism objectives just doesn't get addressed.

What we were doing was to put together a policy that brought all of the elements together. It tasked the secretary of defense within the context of a plan that really focused not just on Al Qaida and bin Laden, but also on what we might be able to do against the Taliban. And that gave the kind of regional context that might make it possible to use military force more robustly, to work plans in that context.

I think without that context, you're just going to have military plans that never get used.

Darn that context...foiled again! Gorelick tries to recover by becoming a witness instead of a commissioner:

PDD 62, which was the presidential directive in the Clinton administration, was not the only way in which the Defense Department was tasked. I mean, Infinite Resolve went well beyond what you describe PDD 62 as doing. That's number one.

And number two, however good it might have been to change the text in which the military planning was ongoing, neither I, nor, I think, our staff, can find any functional difference between the two sets of plans. I'll leave it to my colleagues.

All hail Clinton! Ridiculous. Gorelick was exposed as being a Clintonista.

Mark's Remarks

Again, the question should be raised: why is this woman on the commission? She worked in the Attorney General's office under Clinton, and it was the Justice Dept. through the FBI that is also a point of this investigation.....So, isn't there a blatant conflict of interest? I mean, do you honestly think this woman will seek the truth if it leads to her own former boss's negligence? I don't think so. Further proof that this commission has been hijacked by political interests.