Here's the bottom line: Rice said something in passing that rather sums up the situation: "There are plans and plans and plans. And the problem is, unless those plans are engaged by the civilian leadership... those plans simply sit." So: Why didn't the civilian leadership, AKA the White House, engage?

• Before 9/11 the intelligence agencies were adrift because the White House wasn't doing its job of overseeing and coordinating them.
• Although the Bush Administration was given copious warning of an impending terrorist attack, it didn't occur to them to take any actions that might have prevented it. 

Condi keeps repeating that there was no silver bullet -- no one simple action -- that would have prevented 9/11. But as I said yesterday, nobody was asking for a silver bullet. There are a number of actions that, taken together, might have stopped at least some of the hijackers. (Be sure to read or watch "9/11 Widows React to Condi.") Condi's excuse is that, since there wasn't one simple thing the White House might have done, they was nothing they could do. And that's just wrong.

There's no guarantee that 9/11 could have been prevented, no matter how hard the White House tried. But it's damn certain that their doing nothing made the hijackers' work a lot easier.

Today some editorialists are saying that it wasn't realistic to expect the White House to have taken action before 9/11. Here's one:

Some commissioners seem to have forgotten what life was like before the Sept. 11 attacks. They're ignoring the fact that the security policies made sense and fit the circumstances, until the circumstances changed. And they're ready to point fingers at Rice and President Bush for not pushing for changes that Americans never would have accepted until after Sept. 11. [Debra Saunders, "Swatting at Flies," The San Francisco Chronicle, April 9, 2004]

How dysfunctional was the Bush administration during that fateful summer? Commissioner Jamie Gorelick challenged Rice's assertion that federal agencies and their field offices had been put on alert status during the threat spike. Citing previous commission interviews with the FAA administrator, FBI officials from around the country, and Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, among others, Gorelick said that none of them had ever heard the warnings of a potential attack.

Bush spent the morning watching national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's televised testimony to the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, then toured his ranch with Wayne LaPierre Jr., chief executive of the National Rifle Association, and other leaders of hunting groups and gave an interview to Ladies' Home Journal. On Sunday, he is to appear in public at nearby Fort Hood, the home base for seven soldiers recently killed in Baghdad. [Dana Milbank and Robin Wright, "Powell Calls U.S. Casualties 'Disquieting,'" The Washington Post, April 9, 2004]

The problem for Dr. Rice in her testimony," as Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, put it, "is that the concept of bureaucracy she offers is essentially a passive, not an active concept." ...

Though the still-classified memo was entitled, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States," Rice said, "This was not a threat report to the president or a threat report to me. If there was any reason to believe that I needed to do something or that [Chief of Staff] Andy Card needed to do something, I would have been expected to be asked to do it. We were not asked to do it," Rice said.

At least some of the 10 commissioners saw the issue a different way: Not did the administration do what it was asked, but did it ask what it should do?

Since when does upper management sit around passively waiting for the bureaucracy below to tell them what to do? Again, what we're seeing are a pack of people who have absolutely no clue what their jobs are.

Of course, the White House can be fierce as mother tigers when faced with a political challenge. But don't get me started on that ...

Remember the picture of the president in the classroom, being told of the attack by chief of staff Andy Card? The American people thought they were seeing a man suddenly thrust into a grave challenge no one could have anticipated. That won him enormous sympathy and patience from the voters. But what if he was literally on vacation—at the ranch in Crawford—when he should have been making sure that someone was ringing alarm bells throughout the bureaucracy?

Already on the defensive for his leadership in the post-9/11 world—the war in Iraq grows less popular by the day—Bush now finds himself with questions to answer about his pre-9/11 leadership. He says he’s running for re-election as a “war president.” But by Rice’s own standards, the war was well underway by the time he took office. He was a “war president” the moment he took the oath. But did he act like one? The election may hinge on the answer.

Asked at the hearing why she hadn’t pressed the FBI more closely about what it knew, or didn’t know, about domestic terrorist threats, Rice acted as though the question was an odd one: it wasn’t her job. Well, in retrospect, it was and now certainly is.

Rice identified the chief “structural” problem—that the CIA and FBI don’t share information—in a speech she gave in October 2000. She even said that the problem could result in a disastrous domestic terrorist attack. And yet, based on her own testimony, she did little or nothing before 9/11 to break down those walls. The student of bureaucratic change didn’t really attempt to foment any, at least not with the kind of urgency we know she needed to have.

One clear inference can be drawn from Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the 9/11 commission this morning: She has been a bad national security adviser—passive, sluggish, and either unable or unwilling to tie the loose strands of the bureaucracy into a sensible vision or policy. In short, she has not done what national security advisers are supposed to do.

 

her job as a high-ranking decision-maker is to strip away the blinders and maneuver around the constraints. This is especially so given that she is the one decision-maker who is supposed to coordinate the views of the various agencies and present them as a coherent picture to the president of the United States. Her testimony today provides disturbing evidence that she failed at this task—failed even to understand that it was part of her job description.

... 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.

So I think the president is responding to go a specific set of questions.

All that I can tell you is that what the president wanted was a plan to eliminate al-Qaida so he could stop swatting at flies. He knew that we had in place the same crisis-management mechanism, indeed the same personnel, that the Clinton administration, which clearly thought it a very high priority, had in place.

And so, I think that he saw the priority as continuing the current operations and then getting a plan in place.

KERREY:

Let me ask you, first of all, a question that's been a concern for me from the first day I came on the commission, and that is the relationship of our executive director to you.

Let me just ask you directly, and you can just give me – keep it relatively short, but I wanted to get it on the record.

Since he was an expert on terrorism, did you ask Philip Zelikow any questions about terrorism during transition, since he was the second person carded in the national security office and had considerable expertise?

RICE: Philip and I had numerous conversations about the issues that we were facing. Philip, as you know, had worked in the campaign and helped with the transition plans, so yes.

KERREY: Yes, you did talk to him about terrorism?

RICE: We talked – Philip and I over a period of – you know, we had worked closely together as academics ...

KERREY: During the transition, did you instruct him to do anything on terrorism?

RICE: Oh, to do anything on terrorism?

Do we need a hearing aid, Condi?

KERREY: Yes.

RICE: To help us think about the structure of the terrorism – Dick Clarke's operations, yes.

KERREY: You've used the phrase a number of times, and I'm hoping with my question to disabuse you of using it in the future.

You said the president was tired of swatting flies.

Can you tell me one example where the president swatted a fly when it came to al-Qaida prior to 9-11?

RICE: I think what the president was speaking to was ...

KERREY: No, no. What fly had he swatted?

RICE: Well, the disruptions abroad was what he was really focusing on ...

KERREY: No, no ...

RICE: ... when the CIA would go after Abu Zubaydah ...

KERREY: He hadn't swatted ...

RICE: ... or go after this guy ...

KERREY: Dr. Rice, we didn't ...

RICE: That was what was meant.

KERREY: We only swatted a fly once on the 20th of August 1998. We didn't swat any flies afterwards. How the hell could he be tired?

Well, you know, all that tough-talking and boasting and grandstanding. It wears a guy out.

RICE: We swatted at – I think he felt that what the agency was doing was going after individual terrorists here and there, and that's what he meant by swatting flies. It was simply a figure of speech.

KERREY: Well, I think it's an unfortunate figure of speech because I think, especially after the attack on the Cole on the 12th of October, 2000, it would not have been swatting a fly. It would not have been – we did not need to wait to get a strategic plan.

Dick Clarke had in his memo on the 20th of January overt military operations. He turned that memo around in 24 hours, Dr. Clarke. There were a lot of plans in place in the Clinton administration – military plans in the Clinton administration.

In fact, since we're in the mood to declassify stuff, there was – he included in his January 25th memo two appendices – Appendix A: Strategy for the elimination of the jihadist threat of al-Qaida; Appendix B: Political military plan for al-Qaida.

So I just – why didn't we respond to the Cole?

RICE: Well, we ...

KERREY: Why didn't we swat that fly?

Condi was ready for this one; she responded:

RICE: I believe that there's a question of whether or not you respond in a tactical sense or whether you respond in a strategic sense; whether or not you decide that you're going to respond to every attack with minimal use of military force and go after every – on a kind of tit-for-tat basis.

By the way, in that memo, Dick Clarke talks about not doing this tit-for-tat, doing this on the time of our choosing.

I'm aware, Mr. Kerrey, of a speech that you gave at that time that said that perhaps the best thing that we could do to respond to the Cole and to the memories was to do something about the threat of Saddam Hussein.

That's a strategic view ...

APPLAUSE)

And we took a strategic view. We didn't take a tactical view. I mean, it was really – quite frankly, I was blown away when I read the speech, because it's a brilliant speech. It talks about really ...

LAUGHTER)

an asymmetric ...

KERREY: I presume you read it in the last few days?

RICE: Oh no, I read it quite a bit before that. It's an asymmetric approach.

Now, you can decide that every time al-Qaida ...

KERREY: So you're saying that you didn't have a military response against the Cole because of my speech?

Condi fell back on the Plan for the Plan:

RICE: We simply believed that the best approach was to put in place a plan that was going to eliminate this threat, not respond to an attack.

KERREY: Let me say, I think you would have come in there if you said, We screwed up. We made a lot of mistakes. You obviously don't want to use the M-word in here. And I would say fine, it's game, set, match. I understand that.

But this strategic and tactical, I mean, I just – it sounds like something from a seminar. It doesn't ...

RICE: I do not believe to this day that it would have been a good thing to respond to the Cole, given the kinds of options that we were going to have.

She's right that the U.S. needed a comprehensive strategy for combating terrorism. The problem is that the Bushies' "comprehensive strategy" was to invade Iraq.

You know what, Condi? We'd be in better shape today if we'd stuck with swatting flies. 

Sidney Blumenthal: Condi Screwed Middle East Peace

American-led international troops in Iraq were locked today in the fiercest fighting since the fall of Saddam Hussein a year ago, waging a two-front war against Sunni Muslim insurgents west of Baghdad and a ferocious and fast-spreading Shiite uprising in the south and center of the country.

American marines fired rockets at a wall surrounding a mosque in Falluja, west of Baghdad, killing more than two dozen people, news services reported, quoting witnesses. The American military would not confirm the accounts, which are certain to aggravate the violent opposition movement. [Kirk Semple, "U.S. Rockets Reportedly Kill Over 2 Dozen Iraqis in Fallujah," The New York Times (online), February 7, 2004]

Sometimes a looming crisis needs to be brought to a head. But if that's so, we seem to have done little to prepare for the reaction. Where's the White House's strategy? Where is it now, three days later?

All we seem to be hearing are hollow assertions of a vacant will.

From the White House's advocates we hear logic puzzles about appeasement in which the fall-out from the president's screw ups become the prime argument for continuing to support them.

President Bush, vacationing in Texas, conferred with his advisers today on the surge in bloodshed in Iraq and what to do or say about it. On Capitol Hill, several senators readily expressed a range of concerns at the events unfolding across Iraq.

There was no indication from the president's Crawford ranch that Mr. Bush planned to comment publicly on the worst violence in Iraq since Saddam Hussein was overthrown a year ago, claiming the lives of more than 20 Americans and scores of Iraqis since Sunday. But the very fact that a session was taking place, during what was supposed to be an Easter Week respite at the presidential retreat, illustrated the seriousness of the situation. [David Stout and Carl Hulse, "Bush, in Texas, Confers Long Distance on Fighting in Iraq," The New York Times (online), April 7, 2005]

The only unequivocally good policy option before the American people is to dump the president who got us into this mess, who had no trouble sending our young people to Iraq but who cannot steel himself to face the Sept. 11 commission alone.

White House-AP -- A spokesman says President Bush is mourning the life of each of the U-S troops killed in Iraq.

The president is vacationing at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, through the Easter holiday.

But spokesman Scott McClellan says Bush conducted a conference call on the Iraq situation with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and other top advisers. More such briefings are expected.