UNIVERSITY OF COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATISM (what is this?) 

COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATISM 300*
*Homework, Shmomework 
AKA 
George W. Bush's/Condi Rice's Asleep-at-the-Wheel Compassionate Policy on National/Homeland Security Pre-9/11

In this course you will learn about the asleep-at-the-wheel great and compassionate National/Homeland Security Policy of compassionate conservative² President George W. Bush. This course is structured largely using the testimony provided by National Security Adviser Condoleezza (Condi) Rice, Ph.D., to the 9/11 Commission (which represents the views of the White House) as well as other relevant speeches/statements made by her, the President, and White House officials prior to and after that testimony. (If no URL is provided below for a quoted statement, then the statement came from Dr. Rice's testimony.) As always, keeping President Bush's acclaimed interest in education in mind, we present this course as a study of the importance of homework.

[ASIDE: For a list of the Bush administration's misleading statements or lies compassion on Richard Clarke, go here]

Please stop by to check this site from time to time as the Election 04 (2004) campaign picks up steam, so that you can refresh your memory on Bush's compassion. For feedback and corrections, please go here. If you want to get on my mailing list, please email me at compassion-at-compassiongate-dot-com.

A detailed acknowledgement of the sites which I use to collate information at Compassiongate is listed at this location. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the following sites where I got most of my links from (for the collection below): Atrios/Eschaton, Center for American Progress (CAP) and DailyKos.

Note that each asleep-at-the-wheel instance of compassionate conservatism generates one Compassion Con credit.  

Total Compassion Con credits ³ available from this course to date =  42

Last Update: 4/13/04

A. Of course we did our homework!

A1.

RICE: Because of these briefings, and because we had watched the rise of al Qaeda over many years, we understood that the network posed a serious threat to the United States. We wanted to ensure that there was no respite in the fight against al Qaeda. On an operational level, therefore, we decided immediately to continue to pursue the Clinton administration's covert action authority and other efforts to fight the network.

CAP: Newsweek reported that "In the months before 9/11, the U.S. Justice Department curtailed a highly classified program called 'Catcher's Mitt' to monitor al-Qaida suspects in the United States." Additionally, AP reported "though Predator drones spotted Osama bin Laden as many as three times in late 2000, the Bush administration did not fly the unmanned planes over Afghanistan during its first eight months," thus terminating the reconnaissance missions started during the Clinton Administration. [Sources: Newsweek, 3/21/04; AP, 6/25/03]

Commissioner Lee Hamilton: You know very well that the commission is focusing on this whole question of, what priority did the Clinton administration and the Bush administration give to terrorism? 
The president told Bob Woodward that he did not feel that sense of urgency. I think that's a quote from his book, or roughly a quote from Woodward's book.
The deputy director for Central Intelligence, Mr. McLaughlin, told us that he was concerned about the pace of policymaking in the summer of 2001, given the urgency of the threat.
The deputy secretary of state, Mr. Armitage, was here and expressed his concerns about the speed of the process. And if I recall, his comment is that, "We weren't going fast enough." I think that's a direct quote.
There was no response to the Cole attack in the Clinton administration and none in the Bush administration.
Your public statements focused largely on China and Russia and missile defense. You did make comments on terrorism, but they were connected -- the link between terrorism and the rogue regimes, like North Korea and Iran and Iraq.
And by our count here, there were some 100 meetings by the national security principals before the first meeting was held on terrorism, September 4th. And General Shelton, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said that terrorism had been pushed farther to the back burner.

A2, A3.

RICE: The question that the president was asked by Mr. Woodward was, "Did you want to have bin Laden killed before September 11th?" That was the question...
When Bob Woodward says, "Well, I don't mean it as a trick question; I'm just trying to your state of mind," the president says, "Let me put it this way. I was not -- there was a significant difference in my attitude after September 11th. I was not on point, but I knew he was a menace and I knew he was a problem. I knew he was responsible. We felt he was responsible for bombings that had killed Americans. And I was prepared to look at a plan that would be a thoughtful plan that would bring him to justice and would have given the order to do just that.
"I have no hesitancy about going after him, but I didn't feel that sense of urgency and my blood was not nearly as boiling. Whose blood was nearly as boiling prior to September 11th?"
And I think the context helps here.
It is also the case that the president had been told by the director of central intelligence that it was not going to be a silver bullet to kill bin Laden, that you had to do much more.
And, in fact, I think that some of us felt that the focus, so much focus, on what you did with bin Laden, not what you did with the network, not what you did with the regional circumstances, might, in fact, have been misplaced.
...
We show 33 Principals Committee meetings during this period of time, not 100. We show that three of those dealt at least partially with issues of terrorism not related to al Qaeda. And so we can check the numbers, but we have looked at our files and we show 33, not 100.
The quotes by others about how the process is moving, again, it's important to realize that had parallel tracks here. We were continuing to do what the Clinton administration had been doing under all the same authorities that were operating. George Tenet was continuing to try to disrupt al Qaeda. We were continuing the diplomatic efforts.
But we did want to take the time to get in place a policy that was more strategic toward al Qaeda, more robust. It takes some time to think about how to reorient your policy toward Pakistan. It takes some time to think about how to have a more effective policy toward Afghanistan. It particularly takes some time when you don't get your people on board for several months.
...
And so, we simply had to take some time to get this right.

Compassiongate: A couple of OBVIOUS points here. 
(a) Rice is acknowledging that bin Laden was not considered a key focus by the Bush administration - and even thought of as not deserving such focus - even though he was the leader of Al Qaeda. Yet, they were obsessed with Saddam Hussein even though he was only the leader of the Baathists! Why is the leader irrelevant? They knew very little about Al Qaeda's operational strategy prior to 9/11 by their own admission - so how does one know for a fact that if the leader had been removed, the organization would not have been affected and the outcome changed? 
(b) Moreover, if Al Qaeda was considered so much more important than bin Laden and considered such a high priority, how come it didn't figure in a single Principals meeting until the week before September 11th? Certainly it takes "time to get any policy right" - but that explanation applies to missile defense policy, Iraq policy, etc. How come Principals meetings focused on all these other priorities even though the policy was not in place yet, even though they "had to take some time" to get these policies right as well? 

A4.

RICE: We also moved to develop a new and comprehensive strategy to try and eliminate the al Qaeda network. President Bush understood the threat, and he understood its importance. He made clear to us that he did not want to respond to al Qaeda one attack at a time. He told me he was tired of swatting flies. This new strategy was developed over the spring and summer of 2001 and was approved by the president's senior national security officials on September 4th.
...
The strategy set as a goal the elimination of the al Qaeda network and threat and ordered the leadership of relevant U.S. departments and agencies to make the elimination of al Qaeda a high priority and to use all aspects of our national power -- intelligence, financial, diplomatic and military -- to meet that goal.

Spencer Ackerman (TNR): Rice has [had] refused to testify publicly before the 9/11 Commission. In her stead yesterday, the White House sent the gregarious Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage. Gorelick confronted him with the difference between what Rice described in her op-ed and NSPD-9:
GORELICK: So I would ask you whether it is true, as Dr. Rice said in The Washington Post, "Our plan called for military options to attack Al Qaeda and Taliban leadership, ground forces and other targets, taking the fight to the enemy, where he lived" ? Was that part of the plan as prior to 9/11?
ARMITAGE: No, I think that was amended after the horror of 9/11..."

9/11 Commissioner Gorelick to Rice (bold text is Compassiongate emphasis):
GORELICK: Well, I have lots of other questions on this issue. But I am trying to get out what will probably be my third and last question to you. So if we could move through this reasonably quickly.
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 Qaeda.
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 Qaeda.
And it may be a semantic difference, but I don't think so. It calls for the elimination of the al Qaeda threat. And that's a very big difference, because, to me, the elimination of al Qaeda means you're going to go into Afghanistan and you're going to get them.
And as I read it, and as I've heard your public statements recently, there was not, I take it, a decision taken in this document to put U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan to get al Qaeda. Is that correct?
RICE: That is correct.
[later]
RICE: I am not going to tell thaw [that?] we were looking to invade Afghanistan during that seven months. We were not.

A5, A6, A7.

RICE: While we were developing this new strategy to deal with al Qaeda, we also made decisions on a number of specific anti-al Qaeda initiatives that had been proposed by Dick Clarke to me in an early memorandum after we had taken office. Many of these ideas had been deferred by the last administration, and some had been on the table since 1998. We increased counterterrorism assistance to Uzbekistan. We bolstered the Treasury Department's activities to track and seize terrorist assets. We increased funding for counterterrorism activities across several agencies. And we moved to arm Predator unmanned surveillance vehicles for action against al Qaeda.

CAP: The new Bush Treasury Department "disapproved of the Clinton Administration's approach to money laundering issues, which had been an important part of the drive to cut off the money flow to bin Laden." Specifically, the Bush Administration opposed Clinton Administration-backed efforts by the G-7 and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that targeted countries with "loose banking regulations" being abused by terrorist financiers. Meanwhile, the Bush Administration provided "no funding for the new National Terrorist Asset Tracking Center." [Source: "The Age of Sacred Terror," 2003]

CAP: According to AP, "the military successfully tested an armed Predator throughout the first half of 2001" but the White House "failed to resolve a debate over whether the CIA or Pentagon should operate the armed Predators" and the armed Predator never got off the ground before 9/11. [Source: AP, 6/25/03]

CAP: Upon taking office, the 2002 Bush budget proposed to slash more than half a billion dollars out of funding for counterterrorism at the Justice Department. In preparing the 2003 budget, the New York Times reported that the Bush White House "did not endorse F.B.I. requests for $58 million for 149 new counterterrorism field agents, 200 intelligence analysts and 54 additional translators" and "proposed a $65 million cut for the program that gives state and local counterterrorism grants." Newsweek noted the Administration "vetoed a request to divert $800 million from missile defense into counterterrorism." [Sources: 2001 vs. 2002 Budget Analysis; NY Times, 2/28/02; Newsweek, 5/27/02]

A8.

RICE: When threat reporting increased during the spring and summer of 2001, we moved the U.S. government at all levels to a high state of alert and activity.

CAP: Documents indicate that before Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush Administration "did not give terrorism top billing in their strategic plans for the Justice Department, which includes the FBI." Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff until Oct. 1, 2001, said during the summer, terrorism had moved "farther to the back burner" and recounted how the Bush Administration's top two Pentagon appointees, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, "shut down" a plan to weaken the Taliban. Similarly, Gen. Don Kerrick, who served in the Bush White House, sent a memo to the new Administration saying "We are going to be struck again" by al Qaeda, but he never heard back. He said terrorism was not "above the waterline. They were gambling nothing would happen." [Sources: Washington Post, 3/22/04; LA Times, 3/30/04]

A9. 

RICE: CSG members also had ready access to their Cabinet secretaries and could raise any concerns that they had at the highest levels.
...
RICE: The CSG was made up of not junior people, but the top level of counterterrorism experts. Now, they were in contact with their principals.

CAP: Clarke sent a memo to Rice principals on 1/24/01 marked "urgent" asking for a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with an impending Al Qaeda attack. The White House acknowledges this, but says "principals did not need to have a formal meeting to discuss the threat." No meeting occurred until one week before 9/11.

Richard Clarke (Salon.com): Within a week of the inauguration I wrote to Rice and Hadley asking "urgently" for a Principals, or Cabinet-level, meeting to review the imminent al-Qaida threat. Rice told me that the Principals Committee, which had been the first venue for terrorism policy discussions in the Clinton administration, would not address the issue until it had been "framed" by the Deputies. I assumed that meant an opportunity for the Deputies to review the agenda. Instead, it meant months of delay. The initial Deputies meeting to review terrorism policy could not be scheduled in February. Nor could it occur in March. Finally in April, the Deputies Committee met on terrorism for the first time. The first meeting, in the small wood-paneled Situation Room conference room, did not go well.

Jamie Gorelick, 9/11 Commissioner to Rice: 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.

A10.

RICE: And on July 5th, Chief of Staff Andy Card and I met with Dick Clarke, and I asked Dick to make sure that domestic agencies were aware of the heightened threat period and were taking appropriate steps to respond, even though we did not have specific threats to the homeland. 
Later that same day, Clarke convened a special meeting of his CSG, as well as representatives from the FAA, the INS, Customs and the Coast Guard. At that meeting, these agencies were asked to take additional measures to increase security and surveillance.
Throughout the period of heightened threat information, we worked hard on multiple fronts to detect, protect against and disrupt any terrorist plans or operations that might lead to an attack.
For instance, the Department of Defense issued at least five urgent warnings to U.S. military forces that al Qaeda might be planning a near-term attack and placed our military forces in certain regions on heightened alert.
The State Department issued at least four urgent security advisers and public worldwide cautions on terrorist threats, enhanced security measures at certain embassies, and warned the Taliban that they would be held responsible for any al Qaeda attack on U.S. interests.
The FBI issued at least three nationwide warnings to federal, state and law enforcement agencies and specifically stated that, although the vast majority of the information indicated overseas targets, attacks against the homeland could not be ruled out.
The FBI tasked all 56 of its U.S. field offices to increase surveillance of known suspects of terrorists and to reach out to known informants who might have information on terrorist activities.
The FAA issued at least five civil aviation security information circulars to all U.S. airlines and airport security personnel, including specific warnings about the possibility of hijacking.
The CIA worked around the clock to disrupt threats worldwide. Agency officials launched a wide-ranging disruption effort against al Qaeda in more than 20 countries.

Jamie Gorelick, 9/11 Commissioner to Rice: 
GORELICK: Dr. Rice, thank you for being here today.
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.
And so, I really come back to you -- and let me add one other thing. Have you actually looked at the -- analyzed the messages that the FBI put out?
RICE: Yes.
GORELICK: To me, and you're free to comment on them, they are feckless. They don't tell anybody anything. They don't bring anyone to battle stations.
And I personally believe, having heard Coleen Rowley's testimony about her frustrations in the Moussaoui incident, that if someone had really gone out to the agents who were working these issues on the ground and said, "We are at battle stations. We need to know what's happening out there. Come to us," she would have broken through barriers to have that happen, because she was knocking on doors and they weren't opening.

9/11 Commissioner Roemer to Rice: 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 Qaeda in the country, and still, the FBI doesn't do anything.

A11. This one qualifies for "Extra Credit" but I am placing it in this section for topical reasons.

RICE: And the president of the United States had us at battle station during this period of time. [Compassiongate emphasis] He expected his secretary of state to be locking down embassies. He expected his secretary of defense to be providing force protection.

Compassiongate: But in her opening statement to the Commission she had this to say!

RICE: The U.S. government did not act against the growing threat from imperial Japan until it became all too evident at Pearl Harbor. And tragically, for all the language of war spoken before September 11th, this country simply was not on war footing.

[later]

RICE: And for all of the rhetoric of war prior to 9/11 -- people who said we're at war with the jihadist network, people who said that they've declared war on us and we're at war with them -- we weren't at war. We weren't on war footing. We weren't behaving in that way. [Compassiongate emphasis]

This "not on war footing" statement was also reported by Dan Eggen and Walter Pincus in the Washington Post. However, to know what an egregious lie a compassionate statement Rice passed on to the commission with her "battle station" assertion, one needs to read more about how the Bush administration acted (or did not act) on 9/11/01, as Scot Paltrow lays out below.

Scot Paltrow (Wall Street Journal): The day [9/11/01] began with the president on his way to Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Fla., to promote his education bill, known as No Child Left Behind. White House staff members had redecorated a second-grade classroom, moving furniture and mounting banners for the benefit of the television cameras recording the event, Principal Gwen Rigell said. 
The arrival of the presidential motorcade was marked by a cacophony of cellphones: staffers at the White House calling colleagues on the trip with news of the first plane crash into the World Trade Center. Within seconds, aides had informed the president.
At the Dec. 4, 2001, town-hall meeting in Orlando, Mr. Bush said, "I was sitting outside the classroom, waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower -- the TV was obviously on. And I used to fly myself, and I said, 'Well, there's one terrible pilot.' " Several weeks later, he said essentially the same thing at another public event in Ontario, Calif.
Actually, no scenes of the first plane hitting the Trade Center were broadcast on television until late that night, when amateur video footage became available. The TV in the room where Mr. Bush waited wasn't even plugged in, according Ms. Rigell, the principal. "It's just a mistaken recollection" on the president's part, his spokesman, Mr. Bartlett, said in an interview. "There were lots of things going on fast at the time."
Just after 9 a.m., Mr. Bush took a seat in front of students, most of them from a poor neighborhood. He listened as teacher Sandra K. Daniels pointed to an easel, and the second-graders read aloud lists of words.
Then, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card strode into the classroom, leaned down and whispered in the president's ear, "A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack," Mr. Card has recounted.
Both Republican and Democratic commissioners have said they are focusing closely on what happened next -- and whether mere minutes could have affected the outcome on Sept. 11. The panel's investigators are looking at questions such as the timeliness of presidential orders about intercepting the jet that at 9:37 a.m. plowed into the Pentagon.
In a CNBC television interview almost a year later, Mr. Card said that after he alerted Mr. Bush, "I pulled away from the president, and not that many seconds later, the president excused himself from the classroom, and we gathered in the holding room and talked about the situation."
But uncut videotape of the classroom visit obtained from the local cable-TV station director who shot it, and interviews with the teacher and principal, show that Mr. Bush remained in the classroom not for mere seconds, but for at least seven additional minutes. He followed along for five minutes as children read aloud a story about a pet goat. Then he stayed for at least another two minutes, asking the children questions and explaining to Ms. Rigell that he would have to leave more quickly than planned.
Mr. Bartlett confirmed in an interview that the president stayed in the classroom for at least seven minutes. The spokesman said that as the president's staff was trying to learn more about the plane crashes, there was no need to talk to Mr. Bush or pull him away. The president didn't leave immediately after receiving the news of the second crash from Mr. Card because Mr. Bush's "instinct was not to frighten the children by rushing out of the room," the spokesman added. Mr. Bush's motorcade left the school at approximately 9:35 a.m., 32 minutes after he entered the classroom, according to a White House timeline and analysis of the uncut videotape.
President Aloft
The president learned the Pentagon also had been hit as his motorcade sped just over three miles to Sarasota/Bradenton International Airport, where Air Force One was waiting. At 9:56 a.m., the presidential 747 was airborne. Determined to avoid any dangers at lower altitudes, Air Force Col. Mark Tillman, the pilot, climbed so steeply that officials aboard said in interviews that the jet seemed to go almost vertical. It quickly reached the relatively safe altitude of 40,000 feet.
In the Dec. 4, 2001, town-hall meeting, the President said he didn't begin to make major decisions about the emergency until he was back aboard his plane. "I got on the phone from Air Force One, asking to find out the facts," he said.
...
Scrambling Fighters
The U.S. military began responding to the attacks on the morning of Sept. 11. The independent commission is examining how a variety of obstacles -- including the location of fighter jets, peacetime limits on how those planes operate and the timeliness of orders to shoot down hijacked airliners -- hindered the Air Force's reaction.
The Air Force has disclosed that on Sept. 11, no fighters that were armed and on alert were stationed closer than 130 miles to either New York or Washington. At Otis Air Force Base in Massachusetts, two F-15 fighters scrambled upon receiving word of a hijacking -- at almost the same moment that the first jet hit the World Trade Center. Their distance from New York meant the fighters had almost no chance to intercept the second jet that hit the Trade Center 16 minutes later, according to Brig. Gen. Donald Quenneville of the Massachusetts Air National Guard.
Officials with the North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad), the joint U.S.-Canadian force responsible for protecting continental air space, said in interviews that fighter basing on Sept. 11 reflected Cold War-era fear of attacks from overseas, not from hijacked domestic airliners. Since Sept. 11, the Pentagon has said it has moved additional fighters closer to Washington, New York and other major cities to protect against domestically launched terrorist attacks.
Norad fighters stationed at Langley Air Force Base near Hampton, Va., conceivably might have reached the Washington area in time to shoot down the hijacked plane that hit the Pentagon, Capt. Craig Borgstrom, one of the pilots who scrambled from Langley, said in an interview. But the three fighters in Virginia remained on the ground for a full 50 minutes after Norad had learned from the FAA that passenger jets had been hijacked, and 27 minutes after the second World Trade Center tower had been hit, according to Norad. The independent panel, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, has said it is investigating the cause of that delay.
Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold, who was in command of all Norad fighters in the U.S. on Sept. 11, said in an interview that the slow reaction at Langley reflected initial confusion about whether an attack on the U.S. was really under way. He also blamed what he said was relatively late notification by the FAA that one or more hijacked planes seemed to be headed for Washington.
Gen. Arnold also said an overall shortage of armed-and-ready aircraft at the time caused Norad to hold back until it knew where the danger was coming from. "We had so few airplanes on alert anywhere," he said. "If we got a resource airborne, and it went in the wrong direction, we didn't have anything else to back it up."
The FAA has said that it notified the military immediately when it determined that one or more jets had probably been hijacked.
Peacetime Restrictions
Once they got in the air, the Langley fighters observed peacetime noise restrictions requiring that they fly more slowly than supersonic speed and take off over water, pointed away from Washington, according to testimony before the commission. (Gen. Quenneville of the Massachusetts Air National Guard said the fighters from Otis Air Force Base ignored peacetime rules because the lead pilot concluded they faced an extraordinary situation.)
At public hearings last May, members of the Sept. 11 commission from both political parties raised questions about whether a faster response by the Langley fighters could have put them in range to stop American Airlines Flight 77 before it plowed into the Pentagon, and at least prevent the deaths of 125 people on the ground. Norad has said that commanders now have broader authority to suspend peacetime restrictions under certain emergency conditions.
Even if fighter pilots had arrived in Washington promptly, there would have been another hurdle: They hadn't received orders that at the time could come only from the president to fire on civilian airliners, according to Gen. Arnold. Mr. Bush has said repeatedly that he issued such a shoot-down order, but the White House hasn't publicly disclosed when he did so. The commission is trying to determine precisely when the order came, said Philip Zelikow, its executive director.
Mr. Zelikow said the panel's investigation also includes why the shoot-down order, whenever it was given, applied only to hijacked planes headed for Washington. This limitation meant that if there had been additional hijacked planes headed for other targets, fighters couldn't have tried to stop them. Since Sept. 11, the military has been given independent authority to shoot down hijacked passenger jets under certain circumstances...
Emergency Plans
In his address to the nation from the Oval Office on the night of Sept. 11, Mr. Bush said that "immediately following the first attack, I implemented our government's emergency-response plans." But in interviews, federal officials said that in fact, lower-level government employees activated the Interagency Domestic Terrorism Concept of Operations Plan.
Adopted in the late 1990s in response to an executive order from President Clinton, the 36-page "Conplan" details the responsibilities of seven federal agencies. It gives the Federal Bureau of Investigation responsibility for activating the plan and alerting the other agencies that a terrorist attack has occurred.
FBI spokesman Paul Bresson said the Conplan was activated quickly on Sept. 11, without any input from the president or White House. Because the Trade Center crashes were so widely known from television coverage, he said, most of the participating federal agencies swung into action without waiting for FBI notification.
A former Bush White House official said in an e-mail response to questions that the president "was actually not involved in making decision on 9/11 about emergency plans until he formally signed a disaster declaration" three days later, on Sept. 14. The White House didn't respond to written questions about the president's role in activating the Conplan.

Dana Milbank and Mike Allen (Washington Post): But if top officials were at battle stations, there was no sign of it on the surface. Bush spent most of August 2001 on his ranch here. His staff said at the time that by far the biggest issue on his agenda was his decision on federal funding of stem cell research, followed by education, immigration and the Social Security "lockbox."
Of course, many of the efforts to thwart an attack would not have been visible on the outside. But some officials on the inside -- notably former White House counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke -- say the administration was not acting with sufficient urgency to the spike in intelligence indicating a threat. And there is nothing in Bush's public actions or words from August 2001 to refute Clarke.
During that month, Bush's top aides were concentrating on the president's political standing: His approval rating had slipped, his relations with Congress were tense, and Democrats had regained control of the Senate. The only time Bush mentioned terrorism publicly that month was in the context of violence in Israel.
In public, Bush often engaged in playful banter. Reporters teased him about his golf game and whether he would take an afternoon nap. Bush teased them about their suffering in the Texas heat. "I know a lot of you wish you were in the East Coast, lounging on the beaches, sucking in the salt air, but when you're from Texas -- and love Texas -- this is where you come home," he said.
A former Bush aide who remains close to the White House said the use of the term "battle stations" by Rice was an overstatement as it is understood in what the White House constantly calls "the post-9/11 world." The former aide, who refused to be identified to avoid angering the president and his staff, said that some members of Bush's senior staff did not know the extent of the information he had been given about the al Qaeda threat, and that even those in his inner circle did not imagine "the scale, the precision, the magnitude" of the strikes on the World Trade Center and Pentagon...
Security issues did arise, but nothing about domestic terrorism. During the month, Bush announced his support of peace developments in Northern Ireland, spoke of U.S. withdrawal from an arms treaty with Russia, complained about the "menace" of Saddam Hussein shooting at U.S. planes over Iraq, and named Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers to be the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The possibility of terrorist attacks against the United States never came up.
In an Aug. 29 speech to the American Legion titled by the White House "President Discusses Defense Priorities," Bush spoke about higher pay for soldiers, an increase in military spending, military research and development, and the need to defend against missile attacks. "We are committed to defending America and our allies against ballistic missile attacks, against weapons of mass destruction held by rogue leaders in rogue nations that hate America, hate our values and hate what we stand for," he said.
Nor did terrorism have any place in a speech Bush gave at the end of August, after he returned to the White House from his Crawford ranch. The White House titled the Aug. 31 speech "President's Priorities for Fall: Education, Economy, Opportunity, Security." But the only one of these topics Bush discussed with more than a mention was education. "One of the things that I hope Congress does is work and act quickly on the education bill and get it to my desk as soon as they get back," he said. [the list goes on, read the whole article]

Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball (Newsweek): In fact, the commission staff released a wealth of new details over the past two days that tend to corroborate Clarke’s basic story: that the Bush White House did not treat Al Qaeda as an “urgent” priority in the months before September 11. In one staff report, the commission stated that deputy CIA director John McLaughlin had told the panel there was “great tension” in the summer of 2001 between the Bush administration policymakers and intelligence officials who believed, like him, “that this was a matter of great urgency.” The report added that two CIA analysts who specialized in monitoring Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden “were so worried about an impending disaster that one of them told us that they considered resigning and going public with their concerns.” 
Yet the commission’s staff reports suggest the new Bush administration was moving slowly on many fronts: Clarke himself was upbraided in January 2001 when he asked for an immediate “principals” meeting of cabinet chiefs to develop an urgent new anti-Al Qaeda policy and was told to instead work with a committee of “deputy” chiefs. By the summer of 2001, when this committee had finally drawn up recommendations, many of the "principals" had already departed Washington for their annual vacations and the meeting was not held until Sept. 4, a week before the attacks.
At the time, Clarke said, intelligence warnings of a “spectacular” attack were pouring in at a level higher than anything top intelligence officials had ever seen. Yet at the Pentagon, according to another commission report, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had devoted little time to the issue and some of his aides “told us that they thought the new team was focused on other issues”—such as dissolving an Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that was impeding the administration’s plans to develop a new Star Wars antimissile defense system. The commission noted that the Defense Department post that traditionally deals most with counterterrorism, an assistant secretary for special operations and low-intensity conflict, hadn’t even been filled at the time that one of the hijacked airlines slammed into the Pentagon.
Clarke himself was so deeply dismayed with the results of the Bush White House policy review on Al Qaeda—and thought it was so ineffective—that he fired off a memo to national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice just before the Sept. 4 meeting of cabinet chiefs. The memo, according to the commission staff, laid out Clarke’s frustrations with the Pentagon and the CIA for resisting his proposals for immediate, aggressive actions against bin Laden. In the memo, the commission staff stated, Clarke “urged policymakers to imagine a day after a terrorist attack, with hundreds of American dead at home and abroad, and ask themselves what they could have done.”

Talkingpointsmemo: [Outgoing Deputy National Security Advisor Lieutenant General Donald L. Kerrick], who stayed through the first four months of the Bush administration, said, "candidly speaking, I didn't detect" a strong focus on terrorism. "That's not being derogatory. It's just a fact. I didn't detect any activity but what Dick Clarke and the CSG [the Counterterrorism Strategy Group he chaired] were doing." General Hugh Shelton, whose term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff began under Clinton and ended under Bush, concurred. In his view, the Bush administration moved terrorism "farther to the back burner." America Unbound, p. 76 Ivo Daalder & James Lindsay.

B. We really weren't aware that we had any homework to do

B1. 

RICE: I don't remember the al Qaeda cells as being something that we were told we needed to do something about.

Compassiongate: How compassionate! With other issues like Iraq and Missile Defense, however, Dr. Rice actually thought they were important enough that they needed discussion in several Principals Meetings -- in spite of the fact that she and the Bush team were not "told" they had to do something about them. Indeed, on Iraq, Powell in early 2001 actually said Saddam had not developed any significant WMD capability. For example, see Joe Conason (Salon): "...Has everybody seen the videotape of Colin Powell's remarks about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction on Feb. 24, 2001?...Here is what Powell told reporters on that day in Cairo at a press conference with the Egyptian foreign minister Amr Moussa. Asked about angry local reaction to his visit because of American policy toward Iraq, the secretary of state sought to explain: "We had a good discussion, the foreign minister and I and the president and I, had a good discussion about the nature of the sanctions -- the fact that the sanctions exist -- not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein's ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was 10 years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors."..."
As Commissioner Roemer said:

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 Qaeda cells are in the United States, when, as the PDB said on August, bin Laden determined to attack the United States.

B2.

LEHMAN: Were you told that there were numerous young Arab males in flight training, had taken flight training, were in flight training?
RICE: I was not. And I'm not sure that that was known at the center.
LEHMAN: Were you told that the U.S. Marshal program had been changed to drop any U.S. marshals on domestic flights?
RICE: I was not told that.
LEHMAN: Were you told that the red team in FAA -- the red teams for 10 years had reported their hard data that the U.S. airport security system never got higher than 20 percent effective and was usually down around 10 percent for 10 straight years?
RICE: To the best of my recollection, I was not told that.
LEHMAN: Were you aware that INS had been lobbying for years to get the airlines to drop the transit without visa loophole that enabled terrorists and illegals to simply buy a ticket through the transit-without- visa-waiver and pay the airlines extra money and come in?
RICE: I learned about that after September 11th.
LEHMAN: Were you aware that the INS had quietly, internally, halved its internal security enforcement budget?
RICE: I was not made aware of that. I don't remember being made aware of that, no.
LEHMAN: Were you aware that it was the U.S. government established policy not to question or oppose the sanctuary policies of New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, San Diego for political reasons, which policy in those cities prohibited the local police from cooperating at all with federal immigration authorities?
RICE: I do not believe I was aware of that.
LEHMAN: Were you aware -- to shift a little bit to Saudi Arabia -- were you aware of the program that was well established that allowed Saudi citizens to get visas without interviews?
RICE: I learned of that after 9/11.
LEHMAN: Were you aware of the activities of the Saudi ministry of religious affairs here in the United States during that transition?
RICE: I believe that only after September 11th did the full extent of what was going on with the ministry of religious affairs became evident.
LEHMAN: Were you aware of the extensive activities of the Saudi government in supporting over 300 radical teaching schools and mosques around the country, including right here in the United States?
RICE: I believe we've learned a great deal more about this and addressed it with the Saudi government since 9/11.
LEHMAN: Were you aware at the time of the fact that Saudi Arabia had and were you told that they had in their custody the CFO and the closest confidant of al Qaeda -- of Osama bin Laden, and refused direct access to the United States?
RICE: I don't remember anything of that kind.
LEHMAN: Were you aware that they would not cooperate and give us access to the perpetrators of the Khobar Towers attack?
RICE: I was very involved in issues concerning Khobar Towers and our relations with several governments concerning Khobar Towers.
LEHMAN: Thank you.
Were you aware -- and it disturbs me a bit, and again, let me shift to the continuity issues here.
Were you aware that it was the policy of the Justice Department -- and I'd like you to comment as to whether these continuities are still in place -- before I go to Justice, were you aware that it was the policy and I believe remains the policy today to fine airlines if they have more than two young Arab males in secondary questioning because that's discriminatory?
RICE: No, I have to say that the kind of inside arrangements for the FAA are not really in my...
LEHMAN: Well, these are not so inside.
Were you aware that the FAA up until 9/11 thought it was perfectly permissible to allow four-inch knife blades aboard?
RICE: I was not aware.
LEHMAN: OK.

Compassiongate: How compassionate! The Bush administration, and Rice in particular were at "battle stations" alright!

C. We really weren't told that we had homework to do

C1. 

RICE: Dick Clarke had told me, I think in a memorandum -- I remember it as being only a line or two -- that there were al Qaeda cells in the United States.
Now, the question is, what did we need to do about that?
And I also understood that that was what the FBI was doing, that the FBI was pursuing these al Qaeda cells. I believe in the August 6th memorandum it says that there were 70 full field investigations under way of these cells. And so there was no recommendation that we do something about this; the FBI was pursuing it.

[later]

RICE: In the memorandum that Dick Clarke sent me on January 25th, he mentions sleeper cells. There is no mention or recommendation of anything that needs to be done about them. And the FBI was pursuing them.
And usually when things come to me, it's because I'm supposed to do something about it, and there was no indication that the FBI was not adequately pursuing the sleeper cells.

Compassiongate: How compassionate! With other issues like Iraq and Missile Defense, however, Dr. Rice actually thought they were important enough that they needed discussion in several Principals Meetings, even though there were people "pursuing" those topics independently! At the same time, Rice's statement has a contradiction. She says on the one hand " usually when things come to me, it's because I'm supposed to do something about it" - but on the other hand " There is no mention or recommendation of anything that needs to be done about them. And the FBI was pursuing them". Either they come to her because she needs to do something about it, or it is just an FYI report on which she had to do nothing. The bottomline is that unless she actually dug deep to find out, there is no way for anyone to know whether the FBI was doing something "adequate". This becomes clear if we applied her logic to areas like Iraq and Missile Defense. 

C2. 

RICE: And I want to say just one more thing, if you don't mind, about the issue of high-level attention.
The reason that I asked Andy Card to come with me to that meeting with Dick Clarke was that I wanted him to know -- wanted Dick Clarke to know -- that he had the weight not just of the national security advisor, but the weight of the chief of staff if he needed it. I didn't manage the domestic agencies. No national security advisor does.
And not once during this period of time did my very experienced crisis manager say to me, "You know, I don't think this is getting done in the agencies. I'd really like you to call them together or make a phone call."

[later]

ROMER: Nothing went down the chain to the FBI field offices on spiking of information, on knowledge of al Qaeda 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. [Bold text is Compassiongate emphasis]

Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball (Newsweek): In fact, the commission staff released a wealth of new details over the past two days that tend to corroborate Clarke’s basic story: that the Bush White House did not treat Al Qaeda as an “urgent” priority in the months before September 11. In one staff report, the commission stated that deputy CIA director John McLaughlin had told the panel there was “great tension” in the summer of 2001 between the Bush administration policymakers and intelligence officials who believed, like him, “that this was a matter of great urgency.” The report added that two CIA analysts who specialized in monitoring Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden “were so worried about an impending disaster that one of them told us that they considered resigning and going public with their concerns.” 
Yet the commission’s staff reports suggest the new Bush administration was moving slowly on many fronts: Clarke himself was upbraided in January 2001 when he asked for an immediate “principals” meeting of cabinet chiefs to develop an urgent new anti-Al Qaeda policy and was told to instead work with a committee of “deputy” chiefs. By the summer of 2001, when this committee had finally drawn up recommendations, many of the "principals" had already departed Washington for their annual vacations and the meeting was not held until Sept. 4, a week before the attacks.
At the time, Clarke said, intelligence warnings of a “spectacular” attack were pouring in at a level higher than anything top intelligence officials had ever seen. Yet at the Pentagon, according to another commission report, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had devoted little time to the issue and some of his aides “told us that they thought the new team was focused on other issues”—such as dissolving an Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that was impeding the administration’s plans to develop a new Star Wars antimissile defense system. The commission noted that the Defense Department post that traditionally deals most with counterterrorism, an assistant secretary for special operations and low-intensity conflict, hadn’t even been filled at the time that one of the hijacked airlines slammed into the Pentagon.
Clarke himself was so deeply dismayed with the results of the Bush White House policy review on Al Qaeda—and thought it was so ineffective—that he fired off a memo to national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice just before the Sept. 4 meeting of cabinet chiefs. The memo, according to the commission staff, laid out Clarke’s frustrations with the Pentagon and the CIA for resisting his proposals for immediate, aggressive actions against bin Laden. In the memo, the commission staff stated, Clarke “urged policymakers to imagine a day after a terrorist attack, with hundreds of American dead at home and abroad, and ask themselves what they could have done.”

D. Someone else had homework to do, not me

D1. 

RICE: But in a threat period -- and I don't think it's a proper characterization of the CSG to say that it was four or five levels down, these were people who had been together in numerous crises before and it was their responsibility to develop plans for how to respond to a threat.

D2. 

RICE: And they now actually have someone [Tom Ridge] who looks at critical infrastructure protection, looks at airport security, understands in greater detail than I think the national security adviser could ever understand all of the practices of what is going on in transportation security. That's why it is important that we made the change that we did.

Compassiongate: How compassionate!

F. We don't remember if we did our homework

F1. 

BEN-VENISTE: You acknowledged to us in your interview of February 7, 2004, that Richard Clarke told you that al Qaeda cells were in the United States.
Did you tell the president, at any time prior to August 6th, of the existence of al Qaeda cells in the United States?
...
RICE: I really don't remember, Commissioner, whether I discussed this with the president.

Compassiongate: How compassionate! Al Qaeda was a major focus and the NSA can't remember if she spoke to her boss, the President about Al Qaeda cells in the U.S.! 

F2. 

BEN-VENISTE: Did the president meet with the director of...the FBI between August 6th and September 11th?
...
RICE: I will have to get back to you on that. I am not certain.

F3. 

RICE: But all that he [Clarke] needed -- all that he needed to do was to say, "I need time to brief the president on something." But...
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.

Mark Memmott (USA Today): Richard Clarke...who left the White House in March 2003 and last month published the controversial best seller Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror said in an interview Thursday:...

• That even though Rice said she did not recall Clarke asking to brief President Bush on terrorism issues before 9/11, he did request such a meeting and was put off.

"When I briefed her and when I briefed the vice president separately at the beginning of the administration," Clarke said, "I said I would like to give this briefing to the president. And I was told 'OK, that's a good thing, but let's go through the policy development process so that when we have an NSPD — national security presidential directive — for the president to sign ... you can give him the briefing.' " That hadn't happened by 9/11.

G. We had other, more important homework to do

G1.

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.

H. The homework could not be done for various reasons

H1, H2.

RICE: In hindsight, if anything might have helped stop 9/11, it would have been better information about threats inside the United States -- something made very difficult by structural and legal impediments that prevented the collection and sharing of information by our law enforcement and intelligence agencies. So the attacks came.
...
RICE: And the legal impediments and the bureaucratic impediments -- but I want to emphasize the legal impediments. To keep the FBI and the CIA from functioning really as one, so that there was no seam between domestic and foreign intelligence, was probably the greatest one. 
The director of central intelligence and I think Director Freeh had an excellent relationship. They were trying hard to bridge that seam. I know that Louis Freeh had developed legal attaches abroad to try to help bridge that.
But when it came right down to it, this country, for reasons of history and culture and therefore law, had an allergy to the notion of domestic intelligence, and we were organized on that basis. And it just made it very hard to have all of the pieces come together.

[later]

GORELICK: And it is clear that you were worried about the domestic problem, because, after all, your testimony is you asked Dick Clarke to summons the domestic agencies.
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.
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.
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.
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?
RICE: 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. [Compassiongate emphasis] 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?
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.

Center for American Progress: Bush said [in May of 2001] that Cheney would direct a government-wide review on managing the consequences of a domestic attack, and 'I will periodically chair a meeting of the National Security Council to review these efforts.' Neither Cheney's review nor Bush's took place." By comparison, Cheney in 2001 formally convened his Energy Task Force at least 10 separate times, meeting at least 6 times with Enron energy executives. – Washington Post, 1/20/02 , GAO Report, 8/22/03, AP, 1/8/02.

David Talbot (Salon.com): Former Democratic Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado also directly told senior Bush officials loudly and clearly that, in his words, "The terrorists are coming, the terrorists are coming."
Hart was co-chair (with former Sen. Warren Rudman, R-N.H.) of the U.S. Commission on National Security, a bipartisan panel that conducted the most thorough investigation of U.S. security challenges since World War II. After completing the report, which warned that a devastating terrorist attack on America was imminent and called for the immediate creation of a Cabinet-level national security agency, and delivering it to President Bush on January 31, 2001, Hart and Rudman personally briefed Rice, Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell. But, according to Hart, the Bush administration never followed up on the commission's urgent recommendations, even after he repeated them in a private White House meeting with Rice just days before 9/11...
[Sen. Hart:] ...George Bush -- and this is often overlooked -- held a press conference or made a public statement on May 5, 2001, calling on Congress not to act and saying he was turning over the whole matter to Dick Cheney. 
So this wasn't just neglect, it was an active position by the administration. He said, "I don't want Congress to do anything until the vice president advises me." We now know from Dick Clarke that Cheney never held a meeting on terrorism, there was never any kind of discussion on the department of homeland security that we had proposed. There was no vice presidential action on this matter. 
In other words, a bipartisan commission of seven Democrats and seven Republicans who had spent two and a half years studying the problem, a group of Americans with a cumulative 300 years in national security affairs, recommended to the president of the United States on a reasonably urgent basis the creation of a Cabinet-level agency to protect our country -- and the president did nothing! 
By the way, when our final report came out in 2001, it did not receive word one in the New York Times. Zero. The Washington Post put it on Page 3 or 4, below the fold.

9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerry to Rice:
KERREY: But here's what Agent Kenneth Williams said five days later. He said that the FBI should investigate whether al Qaeda operatives are training at U.S. flight schools. He posited that Osama bin Laden followers might be trying to infiltrate the civil aviation system as pilots, security guards and other personnel. He recommended a national program to track suspicious flight schools.
Now, one of the first things that I learned when I came into this town was the FBI and the CIA don't talk. I mean, I don't need a catastrophic event to know that the CIA and the FBI don't do a very good job of communicating.
And the problem we've got with this and the Moussaoui facts, which were revealed on the 15th of August, all it had to do was to be put on Intelink. All it had to do is go out on Intelink, and the game's over. It ends. This conspiracy would have been rolled up.
KERREY: And so I...
RICE: Commissioner, with all due respect, I don't agree that we know that we had somehow a silver bullet here that was going to work.
What we do know is that we did have a systemic problem, a structural problem between the FBI and the CIA. It was a long time in coming into being. It was there because there were legal impediments, as well as bureaucratic impediments. Those needed to be overcome.
Obviously, the structure of the FBI that did not get information from the field offices up to FBI Central, in a way that FBI Central could react to the whole range of information reports, was a problem..
KERREY: But, Dr. Rice, everybody...
RICE: But the structure of the FBI, the restructuring of the FBI, was not going to be done in the 233 days in which we were in office...
KERREY: Dr. Rice, everybody who does national security in this town knows the FBI and the CIA don't talk...

K. Homework of our predecessors was weak and yet was graded very leniently - so that justifies our not doing much homework

K1.

RICE: It's also the case that I think if you actually look back at the millennium period, it's questionable to me whether the argument that has been made that somehow shaking the trees is what broke up the millennium period is actually accurate -- and I was not there, clearly.
But I will tell you this. I will say this. That the millennium, of course, was a period of high threat by its very nature. We all knew that the millennium was a period of high threat.
And after September 11th, Dick Clarke sent us the after-action report that had been done after the millennium plot and their assessment was that Ressam had been caught by chance -- Ressam being the person who was entering the United States over the Canadian border with bomb-making materials in store.
I think it actually wasn't by chance, which was Washington's view of it. It was because a very alert customs agent named Diana Dean and her colleagues sniffed something about Ressam. They saw that something was wrong. They tried to apprehend him. He tried to run. They then apprehended him, found that there was bomb- making material and a map of Los Angeles.
Now, at that point, you have pretty clear indication that you've got a problem inside the United States.
I don't think it was shaking the trees that produced the breakthrough in the millennium plot. It was that you got a -- Dick Clarke would say a "lucky break" -- I would say you got an alert customs agent who got it right.
And the interesting thing is that I've checked with Customs and according to their records, they weren't actually on alert at that point.
So I just don't buy the argument that we weren't shaking the trees enough and that something was going to fall out that gave us somehow that little piece of information that would have led to connecting all of those dots.

David Neiwert (Orcinus): In fact, just as Rice asserted today, Ressam was captured primarily through the work of a Customs agent who was simply doing her job as she might normally. (The Seattle Times had a riveting account of the arrest as part of its excellent series on the Ressam case.)
However, that's not the entire story, either.
I checked with Mike Milne, the PIO for Customs in Seattle -- which oversees the Port Angeles bureau where Ressam was caught -- and he confirmed that there was no "high alert" for his agents in December 1999.
"There wasn't such a thing back in those days as elevated alert levels or terrorist-watch kinds of issues within U.S. Customs at that time," Milne said. "What this was was a case of inspectors just doing their jobs as they normally would.
"I've sat through with Diana Dean on a number of occasions when she has done interviews with national, international and local media, and she would just tell you that she was doing her regular line of questioning, trying to determine if this person was somebody that could just be released, whether they required an additional secondary examination. In this case, what piqued her interest was the circuitous routing -- you know, he was going to Seattle via Victoria and Port Angeles. You know -- you can just drive down I-5 if you want to drive from Vancouver to Seattle."
After the Ressam capture, however, Milne said, "We in Customs Service went into an immediate change of how we did operations along the U.S.-Canada border."
So Rice is technically correct. But her "context" for the case omits the bigger picture -- which tends, in fact, to corroborate Clarke's version, and moreover paints Rice and her Team Bush cohorts in a decidedly incompetent light.
The bigger picture includes what happened next: Namely, FBI agents and the Clinton counterterror team, headed by Clarke -- realizing the enormity of what Ressam represented -- sprung quickly into action and soon uncovered most of the rest of his co-conspirators. Ressam, it must be remembered, was scheduled to bomb L.A. International Airport. However, there were at least three other millennium plots, all outside the U.S. but against mostly American targets. (As far as I know, the speculation that the Space Needle was targeted has been mostly discredited.) More to the point, investigators began uncovering a much broader assortment of Al Qaeda terrorist cells operating within the U.S.
This happened largely because of Clarke's "battle station" status for officials in Washington. The Seattle FBI agent investigating the case, Fred Humphries, was quickly brought under the wing of John O'Neill, Clarke's counterterrorism chief (and himself a victim of 9/11, having been forced out by the Bush administration). And O'Neill, as Clarke explained in a PBS interview last year, used Ressam to springboard into a broad swath of terrorist cells -- and because of that, the other components of the Millennium Plot were stymied:

What happened in the millennium plot was that we found someone who had lived in Boston who was the leader of the planned attack at the millennium in Jordan. We found someone who lived in Canada who was planning a simultaneous attack in Los Angeles. When we started pulling on the strings, what we found was there were connections to people in Seattle, Boston, Brooklyn, Manhattan and other cities throughout the United States.
Every time we looked at one of these individuals who looked like an Al Qaeda person, they lead us to someone else who was an Al Qaeda person -- probably, somewhere else in the United States.
So I think a lot of the FBI leadership, for the first time, realized that O'Neill was right -- that there probably were Al Qaeda people in the United States. They realized that only after they looked at the results of the investigation of the millennium bombing plot. So by February 2000, I think senior people in the FBI were saying there probably is a network here in the United States, and we have to change the way the FBI goes about finding that network.

Page 204 of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 noted that "In May 2001, the intelligence community obtained a report that Bin Laden supporters were planning to infiltrate the United States" to "carry out a terrorist operation using high explosives." The report "was included in an intelligence report for senior government officials in August [2001]." In the same month, the Pentagon "acquired and shared with other elements of the Intelligence Community information suggesting that seven persons associated with Bin Laden had departed various locations for Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States." [Sources: Joint Congressional Report, 12/02]

This case involved a suspect in custody in Minnesota: Zacarias Moussaoui, a French national of Moroccan descent. Moussaoui was a student pilot who had frightened flight-school trainers in Minneapolis by insisting on learning to steer a jumbo jet while showing no interest in learning to take off or land.
FBI agents in Minneapolis had questioned Moussaoui on Aug. 15 and asked to read files on his laptop computer. He refused to let them.
The agents needed probable cause to persuade a judge to issue a search warrant to seize the laptop. They contacted Ghimenti in Paris, asking him to find out what the French intelligence service might have on Moussaoui.
From the French, Ghimenti obtained a substantial dossier: The French had been tracking Moussaoui since 1995. He had links to al-Qaida. He had journeyed to Afghanistan several times and had trained at a terrorism camp.
Ghimenti passed the information along to Coleen Rowley, chief division counsel in the Minneapolis FBI office, and it went to the counterterrorism section at headquarters.
Rowley and other Minneapolis agents were convinced Moussaoui was a terrorist threat. So was the veteran Ghimenti. But for reasons still unclear, the counterterrorism section in Washington would not seek the warrant.

The public testimony of Condoleezza Rice before the 9/11 commission had a strategy and a structure, to use terms that she favors. The obvious strategy was to swathe every answer to a challenging question from the commissioners in "context" that did more to obfuscate than clarify.

Liberal Oasis: A seemingly comprehensive smack-down. Yet extremely misleading.
Her account of Ressam’s arrest is accurate. The Clinton Administration has never argued otherwise.
But Ressam was not the entirety of the millennium plot. He was just the part that got publicized because of the nature of his arrest.
On 1/6/00, Berger announced:
The last weeks of 1999 saw the largest US counter-terrorism operation in history.
Terrorist cells were disrupted in eight countries and attacks were almost certainly prevented thanks to the good work of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
And in last month’s 9/11 Commission testimony, Berger elaborated:
In late '99, as we approached the millennium celebrations, the CIA warned us of five to 15 plots against American targets…
…I convened national security principals at the White House virtually every day for a month.
During this millennium period, plots were uncovered in Amman against the Radisson Hotel and religious sites and against the Los Angeles airport.
Terror cells were broken up in Toronto, Boston, New York, and elsewhere.
(For better or worse, it would appear that while he was in government, Berger wasn't all that interested in sparking panic by explicitly saying what happened on our soil.)
That’s why Clarke, on MTP, referred to the millennium “attacks”, not “attack”.
Unfortunately, Condi’s half-truth was pounded by Tucker Carlson on CNN’s Crossfire, and the two Dems on the show clearly did not have the facts at the ready and were compelled to dodge.
But the facts are clear.
Under Clinton, when threats spiked, bureaucratic barriers were overcome with high-level action meetings.
Under Bush, when terrorists struck, bureaucratic barriers were an excuse.

Geraldine Sealey (Salon.com): As James Steinberg, another Clinton counterterrorism official, explained in this Frontline special, the administration was already on a state of high alert and took the opportunity of Ressam's arrest to shake the trees as hard as it could -- and got results. Clarke made this point on ABCNEWS' Nightline hours after Rice's testimony: "The incident that she cites where Diana Dean, a great customs officer found one of the terrorists entering the United States, was a lucky break. Dr. Rice is absolutely right. But that was just the beginning of the process. We then were able to get the FBI to uncover cells in Brooklyn and in Boston, Los Angeles. Ties to cells in Jordan where the CIA got involved. Ties to cells in Pakistan. The process only began where Dr. Rice described it as ending," Clarke told Ted Koppel. Unfortunately for America, a similar process did not take place during the Summer of Threat. Who knows what might have happened.

K2. 

RICE: But when you cannot tell people where a hijacking might occur, under what circumstances -- I can tell you that I think the best antidote to what happened in that regard would have been many years before to think about what you could do for instance to harden cockpits.
That would have made a difference. We weren't going to harden cockpits in the three months that we had a threat spike...
I think it is really quite unfair to suggest that something that was a threat spike in June or July gave you the kind of opportunity to make the changes in air security that could have been -- that needed to be made.

My Left Brain via Hullaballoo: Rice faults previous administrations for not looking at ways to harden cockpits, even though previous administrations never experienced the threat level that existed in the summer of 2001. She then excuses the Bush administration for not doing anything, despite having been notified of a possible imminent hijacking threat, because "three months" would not have been enough time to fortify the cockpits. This is illogical and false. 
After 9/11, it took the airlines fewer than three months to strengthen the cockpits by adding bars to the doors and other measures. In fact, it took them one month. Airlines were told to do something to secure cockpit doors in early October 2001 and the Transportation Secretary announced on November 9 that all airlines had completed this task.
This proves that had the Bush administration taken the threat of hijackings seriously in the summer of 2001, it would have taken one month to fortify all the cockpits on U.S. planes, thus averting or at least mitigating the tragedy of September 11. All this could have been done even if the "structural" problems of inter-agency communication had not been remedied.

L. Even if we did our homework, our grade would have been poor 

L1.

RICE: Yet, as your hearings have shown, there was no silver bullet that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks.

CBS News:
"...For the first time, the chairman of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is saying publicly that 9/11 could have and should have been prevented, reports CBS News Correspondent Randall Pinkston.
"This is a very, very important part of history and we've got to tell it right," said Thomas Kean.
"As you read the report, you're going to have a pretty clear idea what wasn't done and what should have been done," he said. "This was not something that had to happen."..."

Kirk Semple (New York Times):
"...he terrorist strikes of Sept. 11, 2001, could have been prevented had the United States government acted sooner to dismantle Al Qaeda and responded more quickly to other terrorist threats, the chairman of the commission investigating the attacks said today, even as the White House sought to dispel the notion that the attacks were avoidable.
Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the commission and former Republican governor of New Jersey, said that had the United States seized early opportunities to kill Osama bin Laden in the years before Sept. 11, "the whole story would've been different."
Mr. Kean's comments on the NBC News program "Meet the Press" echoed statements he made in December and January. But he emphatically declared that additional months of testimony and investigation had not altered his view.
"What we've found now on the commission has not changed that belief because there were so many threads and so many things, individual things, that happened," he said. "And if some of those things hadn't happened the way they happened," the attacks could have been prevented..."

L2. 

BEN-VENISTE: Do you believe that, had the president taken action to issue a directive to the director of CIA to ensure that the FBI had pulsed the agency, to make sure that any information which we know now had been collected was transmitted to the director, that the president might have been able to receive information from CIA with respect to the fact that two al Qaeda operatives who took part in the 9/11 catastrophe were in the United States -- Alhazmi and Mihdhar; and that Moussaoui, who Dick Clarke was never even made aware of, who had jihadist connections, who the FBI had arrested, and who had been in a flight school in Minnesota trying to learn the avionics of a commercial jetliner despite the fact that he had no training previously, had no explanation for the funds in his bank account, and no explanation for why he was in the United States -- would that have possibly, in your view, in hindsight, made a difference in the ability to collect this information, shake the trees, as Richard Clarke had said, and possibly, possibly interrupt the plotters?

RICE: My view, Commissioner Ben-Veniste, as I said to Chairman Kean, is that, first of all, the director of central intelligence and the director of the FBI, given the level of threat, were doing what they thought they could do to deal with the threat that we faced.
There was no threat reporting of any substance about an attack coming in the United States.
And the director of the FBI and the director of the CIA, had they received information, I am quite certain -- given that the director of the CIA met frequently face to face with the president of the United States -- that he would have made that available to the president or to me.
I do not believe that it is a good analysis to go back and assume that somehow maybe we would have gotten lucky by, quote, "shaking the trees." Dick Clarke was shaking the trees, director of central intelligence was shaking the trees, director of the FBI was shaking the trees. We had a structural problem in the United States.

Compassiongate: Why is that not a "good analysis"? If that kind of analysis is so poor, why did the Bush administration shake the leaves and trees to find every bit of intell