Crispy Rice Treats - Part VIII
From the Gorton Segment of the Rice Testimony:GORTON: Before 9/11, did any adviser to you, or to your knowledge to this administration or to its predecessor, counsel the kind of all-out war against the Taliban and Al Qaida in Afghanistan that the United States actually conducted after 9/11?Gorton's opening gambit here is a partisan attempt to discredit the Gorelick questioning which Dr. Rice had already done. Here comes the soundbite:
RICE: No, sir. No one counseled an all-out war against Afghanistan of the kind that we did after 9/11.
RICE: There was a good deal of talk about the inadequacy of military options to go after Al Qaida. Dick Clarke was quite clear in his view that the very things that had been tasked were inadequate to the task.
And so, people were looking for other kinds of military options. But no, an all-out invasion of Afghanistan, it was not recommended.
GORTON: Was it possible to conduct that kind of war in Afghanistan without the cooperation of Pakistan?
RICE: It was absolutely not possible.
And this goes also to the point that I was making to Commissioner Gorelick. You can have lots of plans but unless _ since the United States sits protected by oceans, or no longer protected _ the United States sits across oceans _ unless you find a way to get regional cooperation from Pakistan, from the Central Asian countries, you're going to be left with essentially stand-off options, meaning bombers and cruise missiles, because you're not going to have the full range of military options.
GORTON: Would the program recommended on September 4th have prevented 9/11 had it been adopted in, say, February or March of 2001?While true and certainly a good question; Gorton doesn't come out and ask a question that implies Clinton negligence allowed 9/11 to happen, and Rice does the dance right around it.
RICE: Commissioner, it would not have prevented September 11th if it had been approved the day after we came to office.
Now let's talk about the need for time for the new strategy to be developed and implemented:
GORTON: Now, in retrospect, and given the knowledge that you had, you and the administration simply believed that you had more time to meet this challenge of Al Qaida than was in fact the case. Is that not true?Nothing new here...can we move on now? How about jinxing ourselves?
RICE: It is true that we understood that to meet this challenge it was going to take time. It was a multiyear program to try and meet the challenge of Al Qaida.
That doesn't mean that when you get immediate threat reporting that you don't do everything that you can to disrupt at that particular point in time.
But in terms of the strategy of trying to improve the prospects of Pakistan withdrawing support from Taliban, with presenting the Taliban with possible defeat because you were dealing not just with the Northern Alliance but with the southern tribes, that, we believed, we going to take time.
GORTON: It turned out, in retrospect, you didn't have the time to do it.
GORTON: One subject that certainly any administration in your place would not like to bring up but I want to bring up in any event is, the fact is that we've now gone two and a half years and we have not had another incident in the United States even remotely comparable to 9/11.That's like inviting disaster... Imagine the political implications of a major al Qaeda attack in the homeland now. I can hear Teddy Kennedy and John Kerry now: "You said we were safer! Lie after lie after lie after lie." Ugh. Let's get to some solutions, shall we?
GORTON: In your view _ there have been many such horrific incidents in other parts of the world, from Al Qaida or Al Qaida lookalikes.
In your view, have the measures that have been taken here in the United States actually reduced the amount of terrorism, or simply displaced it and caused it to move elsewhere?
RICE: I believe that we have really hurt the Al Qaida network. We have not destroyed it. And it is clear that it was much more entrenched and had relationships with many more organizations than I think people generally recognize.
I don't think it's been displaced. But they realize that they are in an all-out war. And so you're starting to see them try to fight back. And I think that's one reason that you're getting the terrorist attacks that you are.
But I don't think it's been displaced; I think it's just coming to the surface.
GORTON: Well, maybe you don't understand what I mean by displacement. Do you not think that Al Qaida and these terrorist entities are now engaged in terrorism where they think it's easier than it would be in the United States? That's what I mean about displacement.
RICE: Oh, I see. I'm sorry. I didn't understand the question.
I think that it is possible that they recognize the heightened security profile that we have post-September 11th, and I believe that we have made it harder for them to attack here.
I will tell you that I get up every day concerned because I don't think we've made it impossible for them.
RICE: We're safer, but we're not safe.
And as I said, they have to be right once; we have to be right 100 percent of the time.
But I do think some of the security measures that we have taken, some of the systemic and systematic security measures that we have taken, have made it a lot harder for them.
GORTON: I think, in one sense, there are three ways in which one can deal with a threat like this, and I would like your views on how well you think we've done in each of them and maybe even their relative importance.So let me get this straight; there are three ways to deal with the threat: 1) hardening potential targets, 2) prevention of actions taken by threat forces, and 3) preemption of actions taken by threat forces.
So one is hardening targets, like kind of disruptions we have every time we try to travel on an airplane.
The second is prevention. And a lot has been spoken here about that, whether we're better able to find out what their plans are and frustrate those plans.
And the third is one that you talked about in your opening statement: preemption, going at the cause.
How do you balance, in a free society, those three generic methods of going after terrorism?
RICE: I sincerely hope that one of the outcomes of this commission is that we will talk about balance between those, because we want to prevent the next terrorist attack. We don't want to do it at the expense of who we are as an open society.
And I think that, in terms of hardening, we've done a lot. If you look at the airport security now, it's considerably very much different than it was prior. And there's a transportation security agency that's charged with that.
Tom Ridge and his people have an actual unit that sits around and worried about critical infrastructure protection and works with local and state governments to make sure the critical infrastructure is protected.
I think we're making a lot of progress in hardening. In terms of _ but we're never going to be able to harden enough to prevent every attack.
We have, in terms of prevention, increased the worldwide attention to this problem.
When Louis Freeh put together the Legat System, the Legal Attache System, abroad, it was _ and I'm sure that you, Commissioner Gorelick, as a former deputy attorney general, will remember that _ it became a very important tool also post-9/11 to be able to work with the law enforcement agencies abroad now married up with foreign intelligence in a way that helps us to be able to disrupt abroad in ways that I think we were not capable of disrupting before.
RICE: Many of our democratic partners are having some of the same debates that we are about how to have prevention without issues of civil liberties being exposed.
We think the Patriot Act gets just the right balance and that it's extremely important to prevention because it makes law enforcement _ usually in law enforcement you wait until a crime is committed and then you act. We cannot afford in terrorism to wait until a crime is committed.
And finally, in terms of preemption, I have to say that the one thing I've been struck by in the hearings is when I was listening to the former secretaries and the current secretaries the other day, is the persistent argument, the persistent question of whether we should have acted against Afghanistan sooner.
Given that the threats were gathering, given that we knew Al Qaida had launched attacks against us, why did we wait until you had a catastrophic attack to use strategic military power _ not tit for tat, not a little tactical military strike _ but strategic military power against this country.
And the president has said many times that after September 11th, we have learned not to let threats gather. And yet we continue to have a debate about whether or not you have to go against threats before they fully materialize on your soil.
Point 1 is clearly being addressed, however adequately, by the Department of Homeland Security. Is there a ton of work left to do? Yes, but progress is being made.
Point 2 deals with breaking down the legal and cultural barriers that handcuffed our intelligence and law enforcement agencies from taking appropriate action and getting access to critical information.
Point 3 really makes the case for the invasion of Iraq without specifically doing so. Ideally, we should take action to disrupt those who would attack us before they get the opportunity to strike. We should not wait until the threat is imminent; because if we do that, it will be too late.
Mark's Remarks
Gorton's opening remarks are a point to show that no one administration is only to blame, that instead of (like Gorelick) basically saying Bill Clinton or George Bush saved the world; that instead we need to change our focus back to the issues. And, in my own opinion, it does not hurt that he takes a swipe at Clinton in the process.....
Gorton then gets to the heart of the matter and asks questions about what new strategies were developed and implemented...but then he simply rehashes what Rice and others have said....we had things in place, there just wasn't the time to get it all done....geez....
While it is good to talk about what we have done and our successes, we cannot gloat over them, because while we are safer, we are not impervious, nor will we ever be....what this commission should be talking about is how we can get even better....
And Gorton and Rice close with the three points that Matt discusses. I think Bush is dealing with these three points rather well, especially in terms of breaking down the structural and procedural barriers via things like the Patriot Act. As to point three, if this does not make the case for the war in Iraq, then nothing will.....
