Condoleezza Rice denies 911 culpability
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice Sunday vehemently denied that she ever received a special CIA warning about an imminent terrorist attack on the United States, angrily refuting new allegations about her culpability in U.S. policy failures before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks by al Qaeda.
She said it was “incomprehensible” that she would have ignored such explicit intelligence or appeals by senior CIA officials.
Rice, talking to reporters en route to the Middle East, also dismissed as “simply ludicrous” other reports in a new book by Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward that she supported replacing Donald H. Rumsfeld and that the president had to intervene to get the secretary of defense to return some of her telephone calls.
Rice was responding to charges in Woodward’s new book, “State of Denial,” that details disarray within the Bush administration over its troubled foreign policy.
The book describes a special meeting requested on July 10, 2001 by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet and CIA counterterrorism chief J. Cofer Black to get Rice to focus on increasing intelligence pointing to an impending attack on U.S. soil.
The book describes both men as frustrated by Rice’s polite but inattentive response, allegedly brushing them off.
Rice acknowledged Sunday that the White House was receiving a “steady stream of quite alarmist reports of potential attacks” during daily meetings from Tenet during that period.
But she said the targets were assumed to be in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Israel and Jordan.
She said no reports mentioned the United States.
“What I am quite certain of, however, is that I would remember if I was told–as this account apparently says–that there was about to be an attack in the United States.
The idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible,” she told reporters.
Rice said her staff is now going back to check if there even was a meeting on July 10.
2001. Philip Zelikow, who was executive director of the 9/11 Commission and is now one of Rice’s top advisers, stayed behind in Washington to try to reconstruct the sequence of events, she said.
Refuting descriptions in the book that she was inattentive, Rice said she was concerned enough about a potential attack in the United States–even without specific intelligence warnings–that she had a meeting on July 5, 2001 with White House chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr.
to urge him to hold a terrorism intelligence briefing for the Federal Aviation Agency and other domestic agencies.
National Security Council counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke also attended the July 5 meeting, she said.
In addition, she asked that then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft be shown the terrorism threat reporting, since the Justice Department oversees the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Zubaida was captured in Pakistan after the Sept. 11 attack and is believed to have been among the dozen high-value prisoners held in CIA prisons abroad until a recent transfer to Guantanamo Bay.
The administration had also ordered taking protective measures, including redeploying the fifth fleet “out of harm’s way,” putting military forces on alert in a half dozen countries and issuing travel alerts for Americans abroad, Rice said.
On allegations in the book that there were tensions among administration officials, Rice said she talked to Rumsfeld daily as part of the so-called principals calls among Bush’s top foreign policy team, until it went to three days a week.
“The idea that he was not returning my phone calls is simply ludicrous,” she said.
Rice also denied Woodward’s claim that she had endorsed ousting Rumsfeld at the end of Bush’s first term, although she said she did tell President Bush that he might want to consider changing his entire foreign policy team.
Rice spoke en route to a five-day tour of the Middle East.
She is scheduled to visit Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Rice also announced en route to a refueling stop in Ireland that she may attend a meeting on Iran in Europe with the five permanent members of the Security Council, plus Germany, en route home.