Condi on Terror: "Not our fault."

What's that thing about stones and glass houses? If you're going to dump on previous administrations wouldn't you think they would want the 9-11 Commission to have all the documents so we can see how pure the motives are here? (She also makes the mistake of looking at history through the lenses of today. )
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October 31, 2003
Rice Faults Past Administrations on Terror
By DAVID E. SANGER, NYTimes

Oct. 30 — President Bush's national security adviser said on Thursday that the Clinton and other past administrations had ignored evidence of growing terrorist threats and that despite repeated attacks on American interests, "until Sept. 11, the terrorists faced no sustained, systematic and global response" from the United States.

"They became emboldened," the adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said of Al Qaeda, "and the result was more terror and more victims."

With these comments, in a speech in New York on Thursday evening to the National Legal Center for the Public Interest, Ms. Rice waded into what has become a central theme of the early days of the 2004 presidential race.

In recent weeks, most Democratic candidates have sharpened their arguments, contending that Mr. Bush's with-us-or-against-us approach — an approach embodied in the "National Security Strategy of the United States" that Ms. Rice drafted — has made the United States more vulnerable and alienated allies.

While never naming Mr. Clinton or other past presidents, she argued that Mr. Bush had no choice but to take a far more muscular approach to American security, given the world he inherited, one in which she said the biggest threats to America were never taken seriously enough.

She spoke more bluntly later Thursday night on "The Charlie Rose Show" on PBS.

"It wasn't working with North Korea," she said. "No, it wasn't working with Iran. No, having Iraq for 12 years defy the United Nations on 17 different resolutions — it wasn't working. And we had to confront that."

Parts of Ms. Rice's speech could also be read as being critical of the Reagan administration and the administration of the president's father, George H. W. Bush, for not connecting the dots on earlier attacks.

"It is now undeniable that the terrorists declared war on America and on the civilized world many years before Sept. 11, 2001," she said in remarks delivered to the legal center at the Waldorf-Astoria. "The attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, the hijacking of the Achille Lauro in 1985, the bombing of Pan Am 103 in 1988, the World Trade Center in 1993, the attacks on American installations in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996, the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000: These and other atrocities were part of a sustained, systematic campaign to spread devastation and chaos. Yet until Sept. 11, the terrorists faced no sustained, systematic and global response."

Ms. Rice's comments make no reference to what the Bush administration itself did between Mr. Bush's inauguration on Jan. 20, 2001, and the Sept. 11 attacks.

In the past she has said that a detailed plan to counter Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups was on her desk, approved, when the attacks occurred. That plan became the basis for the decision to drive Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan and topple the Taliban.

But Mr. Bush himself made little reference to the threat of Al Qaeda, the need to topple the Taliban or other terrorism-related issues prior to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Similarly, asked in an interview with The New York Times the week before his inauguration whether Iraq had "bedeviled" his father's administration, he said. referring to Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi ruler: "I wouldn't say it bedeviled the past Bush administration. I think the past Bush administration dealt with it very firmly and left a regime in place that isolated Saddam."

Ms. Rice appears to have a slightly different take on history. She said it had been clear for 12 years that Mr. Hussein was killing his own people, setting up torture centers and posing a threat to the Middle East.

"Let us be clear," she said. "Saddam was not going to go away of his own accord. For 12 years, he gave every indication that he would never disarm and never comply with the Security Council's just demands. In fact, he mocked those demands and made every effort to circumvent them through a massive program of denial and deception."

Her speech to the legal center dwelt at some length on what she views as mistakes of the 1990's, and she was specifically critical of Mr. Clinton's approach to North Korea and to Iran. She argued that Mr. Bush is now succeeding at forcing the countries to roll back their nuclear programs.

"The path of least resistance would have been for the United States to engage in bilateral talks with North Korea," she said, failing to add that the State Department had advised that the Bush administration do exactly that. "But this would have simply repeated the failed experience of the past, when North Korea accepted — and then systematically violated — an agreement offered in good faith by the United States." Ms. Rice referred to the 1994 accord that froze, but did not dismantle, North Korea's nuclear program.

Democrats note that in the case of both Iran and North Korea, it appears that weapons-making has accelerated in the first two and a half years of the Bush presidency.

 

Clark gets it...
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In response to Rice's remarks, General Wesley Clark says:

"Once again, this administration is trying to blame others for what went wrong on their watch. This is yet another example of weak leadership.

"The White House was told that Al Qaeda was the biggest threat America faced. They ignored that threat and focused instead on missile defense and other skewed priorities. Even as they blame other administrations for 9/11, they are stonewalling the 9/11 Commission. Instead of blaming others, they should try to figure out what went on between January 20 and September 10, 2001.

"This White House consistently fails to take responsibility for what went wrong under its watch, while claiming credit for its supposed successes. Harry Truman used to say the buck stops here. This White House doesn't even know where the buck is. We need new leadership that will make the right choices to make our country secure."

 

My wife will, but I've vacillated between Kerry, Dean, and Clark.
I don't think I currently have a solid read on any of these three, though that will, I'm sure, change in the next few weeks.

(I would like a nominee that is able to win by so many votes that even the Republicans have to admit they lost.)

 

That plan was left by the Clinton Administration. They were ready to take major action in Afghanistan, but didn't think they should start something like that a few weeks before Bush took office, so they gave all the intelligence and plans to the Bushies. If Gore had been sworn in, it's a good bet he would have executed the plan over the enormous protestations of the GOP.

 

Bush held up plan to hit Bin Laden

Julian Borger in Washington
Monday August 5, 2002
The Guardian

The Bush administration sat on a Clinton-era plan to attack al-Qaida in Afghanistan for eight months because of political hostility to the outgoing president and competing priorities, it was reported yesterday.
The plan, under which special forces troops would have been sent after Osama bin Laden, was drawn up in the last days of the Clinton administration but a decision was left to the incoming Bush team.

However, a top-level discussion of the proposals took place only on September 4, a week before the al-Qaida attacks on New York and Washington. In the months in between, the plan was shuffled through the bureaucracy by an administration distrustful of anything to do with Bill Clinton and which appeared fixated on national missile defence and the war on drugs, rather than the struggle against terrorism.

The news emerged as the political truce that followed the terrorist attacks evaporates in the heat of the looming congressional elections in November. It represents the strongest indictment so far of the Bush team's preparedness for an attack.

The plan to take the counter-terrorist battle to al-Qaida was drafted after the attack on the warship the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000. Mr Clinton's terrorism expert, Richard Clarke, presented it to senior officials in December, but it was decided that the decision should be taken by the new administration.

According to today's Time magazine, Mr Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger and Mr Clarke outlined the threat in briefings they provided for Condoleezza Rice, George Bush's national security adviser, in January 2001, a few weeks before she and her team took up their posts.

At the key briefing, Mr Clarke presented proposals to "roll back" al-Qaida which closely resemble the measures taken after September 11. Its financial network would be broken up and its assets frozen. Vulnerable countries like Uzbekistan, Yemen and the Philippines would be given aid to help them stamp out terrorist cells.

Crucially, the US would go after Bin Laden in his Afghan lair. Plans would be drawn up for combined air and special forces operations, while support would be channelled to the Northern Alliance in its fight against the Taliban and its al-Qaida allies.

Mr Clarke, who stayed on in his job as White House counter-terrorism tsar, repeated his briefing for vice president Dick Cheney in February. However, the proposals got lost in the clumsy transition process, turf wars between departments and the separate agendas of senior members of the Bush administration.

It was, the Time article argues, "a systematic collapse in the ability of Washington's national security apparatus to handle the terrorist threat".

Bush administration officials have played down the significance of the January briefings, describing them as simply advocating "a more active approach". Ms Rice issued a statement saying she did not even recall a briefing at which Mr Berger was present.

But the Time report quotes Bush officials as well as Clinton aides as confirming the seriousness of the Clarke plan. The sources said it was treated the same way as all policies inherited from the Clinton era, and subjected to a lengthy "policy review process".

The proposals were not re-examined by senior administration officials until April, and were not earmarked for consideration by the national security heads of department until September 4.

"If we hadn't had a transition," a senior Clinton administration official is quoted as saying, "probably in late October or early November 2000, we would have had [the plan to go on the offensive] as a presidential directive."

However, Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, was more interested in the national missile defence plan, and the new attorney general, John Ashcroft, was more interested in using the FBI to fight the "war on drugs" and clamping down on p*rnography. In August, he turned down FBI requests for $50m for the agency's counter-terrorist programme.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, appeals from the Northern Alliance's leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud, for more US aid fell on deaf ears. He was assassinated on September 9.