Crispy Rice Treats - Part XI
From the Roemer Segment of the Rice Testimony:ROEMER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.Nothing like starting off with lame joke. I sense another partisan attack coming.
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 hstructural 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: You have said several times that your responsibility, being in office for 230 days, was to defend and protect the United States.All Hail! Dick Clarke! SAVIOR! Ugh.
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.
ROEMER: 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.
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...Ah, we have the "Gotcha Politics" sighting. This script is getting predictable...
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.
Let's rehash some more stuff next:
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.OK, let's review. The August 6th PDB did not contain actionable intelligence. That means there was nothing in the memo that would lead the President, the National Security Advisor, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, or anyone else in any administration to take action. Why? Because in order to act, you need some specifics to go on. This memo didn't have that. As I understand it, nobody had that information but al Qaeda.
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 Qaida 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.
I see in the script here that we should open the next clip with a pandering to the audience.
ROEMER: So why aren't you doing something about that earlier than August 6th?As an administrator, I know that I have to delegate a LOT of my workload. I have to trust the people who accept the responsibility delegated. Do I have a responsibility to check on it? Yes, when problems are discovered. In an organization as large as the U.S. government, that is an awful lot to ask. It sounds to me that Dr. Rice did what was required of her. She identified what she thought needed to be done. She tasked the FBI to do it. She never heard of any problems; in her place, I would have assumed that people were doing what they were supposed to be doing.
(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 Qaida 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.
Let's close with another plea for something that the commission has already seen but would be unprecedented to fully release:
ROEMER: I think we should make this document public, Dr. Rice. Would you support making the August 6th PDB public?The goal of the Commission is to find answers. The Commission has received amazing cooperation from the White House. The Commission will be able to draw whatever information they need from the August 6th PDB because THEY'VE SEEN IT.
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.
Get over it already.
Mark's Remarks
You know, these hacks on this commission must be bipolar. On the one hand, they seem to love to take things so seriously and out of proportion, then you have this schmuck like Roemer making such a lame joke! Is this really the place for that, Mr. Roemer?
Roemer then falls into the same pattern as bin Vineste and Kerrey and Co....Ask a question, and when you don't get the answer you were looking for, interrupt and call Rice a staller or an equivocator. Sad, pathetic, and not at the root of why this commission was formed.
And really, Mr. Roemer, don't you watch the news? I thought all Hamsters looked at polls....a high number of Americans don't believe Dick Clarke...now I know that is not what you are seeing from the 9/11 families that have been suckered into the Bush hating by having their grief manipulated, but that is a fact. Mr. Clarke has NO credibility. He has claimed he is a Republican, but every time in his book he talks about one, he gets very negative. Contrast that with every time he talks about Hillary, and you would think that bonebag was the Messiah. Mr. Clarke cannot get his story straight, and changes it every interview, every other year, every other breath. Get over this opportunist....
Of course, what Roemer fails to mention, as do the other hacks, is that Clinton had many more terror warnings, had offers of bin Laden's head on a pike, and at no time did "all the principals" get together and discuss the issue, except to turn down an offer or two....And, then, of course, as hamsters are famous for doing, he is taking statements from the August 6 PDB out of context, adding his own, and using it to strike out at the witness....Sad, pathetic, and transparent....This guy is really shameless, and he is even less subtle than Kerrey and bin Vineste....And then he engages in pandering, which of course is straight from hamster class 101....
Lastly, Mr. Roemer picks up the shameless bin Vineste Vibe and pushes for this document to be made public, even though the Commission has seen it. Why is it important to be made public? Here is where this fits in: the Partisan Media will do the same thing as Roemer and Co. on a MUCH LARGER SCALE... They will pull out of context, using fragments, incomplete quotes, and other clever uses of the document to paint the President as knowing these attacks would come....That is why Roemer wants it public, not so you can read it, but so the Partisan Media can frame it to the masses as a smoking gun...Again, where is the sense of duty to the people of this country and the duty to honor and truth? Oh wait, we are talking about another hack. Along with the word spine, words like honor and truth are anathema to them.
