Here is an insightful editorial about Dr. Rice's testimony last week and her performance as NSA. It is written Roger Morris, a former member of the NSCs under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.
The Lady Doth Protest too Much
Quote:
That the now-famous Aug. 6 presidential brief and other alarms forewarned the White House, which neglected to forearm the nation, has been well reported. Ms. Rice insisted the data were not precise enough to be "actionable," yet the warnings were chillingly prescient: The CIA and FBI knew, and told the White House, that Osama bin Laden was planning major attacks in the U.S., and al-Qaeda "sleeper cells" were awake. Intercepts in the summer of 2001 caught boasting of "a very, very, very, very big uproar..... in the near future."
History can only guess how many lives might have been saved had there been serious precautions, comparable to measures taken at the millennium on less justification. Ms. Rice's defence — to blame "structural" problems melding FBI and CIA reporting or lack of responsiveness to "tasking" added FBI surveillance — only begged the point commissioners seemed loath to make: It's well understood that U.S. national security policy is beset by bureaucratic inertia, relentless parochial bias and bitter departmental rivalries. Overcoming those problems and ensuring responsiveness was the very essence of the National Security Adviser's job.
|
He makes a good point about the terrorist warnings that were issued in the days before the Milennium celebrations. At that time, the domestic security forces in the U.S. thought the tips they got and chatter they were hearing were compelling enough to issue a warning for the public to forearm themselves and be vigilant. Why wasn't a similiar warning issued in the summer of 2001 when all intelligence was pointing to an attack against American interests? Whether or not such a warning would have stopped 9/11 is irrelevant. What is relevant is that someone in the Bush Administration had a serious lapse in judgement when presented with the intelligence analysis from that period. Given that one of Bush's main pillars, some might say the only pillar, of his re-election platform is his leadership in the 'war on terrorism', the PDB of August 6th, 2001, is a potentially damaging revelation.