Rice ignored warning of 9/11 attacks, says report

Dawn

Washington — The White House records show that the Bush administration ignored a CIA warning that could have prevented the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

The controversy could not only tarnish the administration’s image but also cause the ruling Republican Party to lose next month’s congressional elections.

Opinion polls conducted before the allegation surfaced already showed that an increasing majority in the US plans to vote against the Republicans in next month’s elections because of its decision to invade Iraq.

The new controversy revolves around a July 10, 2001, meeting that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says she does not recall attending, but the White House records show that she did.

“I don’t know that this meeting took place, but…what I’m quite certain of, is that it was not a meeting in which I was told there was an impending attack and I refused to respond,” she said.

The meeting was first reported by veteran journalist Bob Woodward, who unveiled the Watergate Scandal, in his latest book The State of Denial.

According to the book, then CIA director George Tenet and his counterterrorism chief J. Cofer Black had warned Ms Rice in the starkest terms that an Al Qaeda attack was imminent and that immediate action was needed. Ms Rice, then National Security Adviser, listened to them politely, but failed to grasp their message. They left totally frustrated.

Initially, the Bush administration disputed Mr Woodward’s claim but by Wednesday, spokesman for Ms Rice’s own State Department had confirmed that the meeting did take place.

Spokesman Sean McCormack said records showed that the Sept 11 Commission had also been informed about the meeting.

On Saturday, the White House issued a press release entitled “Myth/Fact: Five Key Myths in Bob Woodward’s Book.” Regarding the July 10 meeting, the White House merely quoted an earlier statement by the State Department spokesman, saying that “the report of the Sept 11 commission, which had sworn testimony from Mr Tenet and others at the meeting, made no mention of the July 10 encounter. The recollections as portrayed in the Woodward book in no way reflect the public and private testimony under oath of those individuals to the 9/11 commission,” said Mr McCormack.

In his new statement, Mr McCormack changed his earlier stance and confirmed the meeting, but said that the information presented was ‘not new’ and was only ‘a good summary’ of several weeks of threat reporting.

He also said Ms Rice had asked Mr Tenet to provide Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld and then Attorney General John Ashcroft the same briefing. “They were briefed on July 17th,” said Mr McCormack.

But Mr Ashcroft said he had received no briefing at that time from Mr Tenet. The 9/11 Commission’s record, however, showed that Mr Ashcroft was briefed on July 5, 2001, with “warning that a significant terrorist attack was imminent”.

Even before the State Department’s confirmation, Ms Rice’s top aide and executive director of the Sept 11 Commission, Philip D. Zelikow, had hinted that the meeting may have occurred but said it was not clear to him what immediate action could have been taken.

Ms Rice, however, dismissed the story as “simply ludicrous”. On Monday, she seriously questioned whether the July 10 meeting ever occurred.

“I was told … that there was about to be an attack in the United States, and … I would somehow have ignored that, I find it incomprehensible,” she said.

White House records and National Archives, however, indicate that the July 10 meeting did occur. A transcript of Mr Tenet’s interview to the 9/11 commission also shows that he told the commission about the meeting. The interview took place on Jan 28, 2004, in his office at the CIA headquarters at Langley.

Both Mr Zelikow and 9/11 Commission member Richard Ben-Veniste were present during the interview.

After the State Department’s first clarification, the US media raised new questions about the controversy: Why would Mr Tenet request an urgent extraordinary meeting to brief Ms Rice on a summary of old news? And why would she possibly grant such odd request?

If the briefing contained nothing new, why would Ms Rice request that Mr Tenet provides the same briefing to Mr Rumsfeld and Mr Ashcroft?

In his interview to the 9/11 Commission, the CIA director told the members that he quickly called for a car and telephoned the White House to set up an urgent meeting in order to share what he had just learned.

Mr Tenet warned that Al Qaeda was preparing multiple, simultaneous attacks that would cause major human casualties. “The system is blinking red,” he told Ms Rice.

Mr Ben-Veniste, however, disputes Mr Woodward’s characterization of Ms Rice’s response to Mr Tenet and Mr Black’s briefing.

“We particularly questioned him about whether he had the sense that Dr Rice and the others on the White House side understood the gravity of what he was telling them. He said that they believed that they did… We asked him further whether Dr Rice just shrugged this off, and he said he did not have such an impression,” Mr Ben-Veniste said.

But Mr Black, who accompanied the CIA director to the meeting, gave a different version. “The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head,” Mr Black said.