Thursday, April 08, 2004

The New York Times - Text: Testimony of Condoleezza Rice Before 9/11 Commission (reg. required)
Some excerpts:

"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."
...
"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..."
...
"RICE: Well, actually when you have principals meetings they really sometimes are to tell -- for the principals to say what their staffs have said -- have told them to say. THOMPSON: Right. RICE: I just have to say we may simply disagree on this with some of the commissioners. I do not believe that there was a lack of high-level attention. The president was paying attention to this. How much higher level can you get? The secretary of state and the secretary of defense and the attorney general and the line officers are responsible for responding to the information that they were given and they were responding. The problem is that the United States was effectively blind to what was about to happen to it and you cannot depend on the chance that some principal might find out something in order to prevent an attack. That's why the structural changes that are being talked about here are so important."

So basically, "nobody told me to do anything". But the president was paying attention. Lovely. Look: you are not going to be able to change the structure of government. Ever. The purpose of the executive branch is to be able to OVERRIDE that structure in the name of the people. GET THINGS DONE. ASK QUESTIONS. You don't sit there reading memos looking for the line where it says "Rice has to do this." Her testimony was extremely enlightening...and damning.

No comments: