wid.ap.org/transcripts/rice.html
As we understand it, when you first came into office, you just been through a very difficult campaign. In that campaign, neither the president nor the opponent, to the best of my knowledge, ever mentioned al-Qaida. There had been almost no congressional action or hearings about al-Qaida, very little bit in the newspapers. And yet, you walk in and Dick Clarke is talking about al-Qaida should be our number-one priority. Sandy Berger tells you youll be spending more time on that than anything else. What did you think, and what did you tell the president, as you get that kind of, I suppose, new information for you? We knew that there was speculation that the 2000 Cole attack was al-Qaida. I, myself, had written for an introduction to a volume on bioterrorism done at Sanford that I thought that we wanted not to wake up one day and find that Osama bin Laden had succeeded on our soil. It was on the radar screen of any person who studied or worked in the international security field. But there is no doubt that I think the briefing by Dick Clarke, the earlier briefing during the transition by Director Tenet, and of course what we talked with about Sandy Berger, it gave you a heightened sense of the problem and a sense that this was something that the United States had to deal with. And indeed, in the briefings with the Clinton administration, they emphasized other priorities: North Korea, the Middle East, the Balkans. One doesnt have the luxury of dealing only with one issue if you are the United States of America. And the decision that we made was to, first of all, have no drop- off in what the Clinton administration was doing, because clearly they had done a lot of work to deal with this very important priority. And then we set out _ I talked to Dick Clarke almost immediately after his _ or, I should say, shortly after his memo to me saying that al-Qaida was a major threat, we set out to try and craft a better strategy. But we were quite cognizant of this group, of the fact that something had to be done. I do think, early on in these discussions, we asked a lot of questions about whether Osama bin Laden himself ought to be so much the target of interest, or whether what was that going to do to the organization if, in fact, he was put out of commission. And I remember very well the director saying to President Bush, Well, it would help, but it would not stop attacks by al-Qaida, nor destroy the network. Did you ever see or hear from the FBI, from the CIA, from any other intelligence agency, any memos or discussions or anything else between the time you got into office and 9-11 that talked about using planes as bombs? RICE: Let me address this question because it has been on the table. I think that concern about what I might have known or we might have known was provoked by some statements that I made in a press conference. I was in a press conference to try and describe the August 6th memo, which Ive talked about here in my opening remarks and which I talked about with you in the private session. And I said, at one point, that this was a historical memo, that it was _ it was not based on new threat information. And I said, No one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon _ Im paraphrasing now _ into the World Trade Center, using planes as a missile. As I said to you in the private session, I probably should have said, I could not have imagined, because within two days, people started to come to me and say, Oh, but there were these reports in 1998 and 1999. Chairman, this kind of analysis about the use of airplanes as weapons actually was never briefed to us. I cannot tell you that there might not have been a report here or a report there that reached somebody in our midst. RICE: And I can only assume or believe that perhaps the intelligence agencies thought that the sourcing was speculative. All that I can tell you is that it was not in the August 6th memo, using planes as a weapon. And I do not remember any reports to us, a kind of strategic warning, that planes might be used as weapons. KEAN: Some Americans have wondered whether you or the president worried too much about Iraq in the days after the 9-11 attack and perhaps not enough about the fight ahead against al-Qaida. We know that at the Camp David meeting on the weekend of September 15th and 16th, the president rejected the idea of immediate action against Iraq. Others have told that the president decided Afghanistan had to come first. We also know that, even after those Camp David meetings, the administration was still readying plans for possible action against Iraq. So can you help us understand where, in those early days after 9-11, the administration placed Iraq in the strategy for responding to the attack? Let me start with the period in which youre trying to figure out who did this to you. And I think, given our exceedingly hostile relationship with Iraq at the time _ this is, after all, a place that tried to assassinate an American president, was still shooting at our planes in the no-fly zone _ it was a reasonable question to ask whether, indeed, Iraq might have been behind this. I remember, later on, in a conversation with Prime Minister Blair, President Bush also said that he wondered could it have been Iran, because the attack was so sophisticated, was this really just a network that had done this. When we got to Camp David _ and let me just be very clear: In the days between September 11th and getting to Camp David, I was with the president a lot. What was on his mind was follow-on attacks, trying to reassure the American people. He virtually badgered poor Larry Lindsey about when could we get Wall Street back up and running, because he didnt want them to have succeeded against our financial system. We were concerned about air security, and he worked very hard on trying to get particularly Reagan reopened. But by the time that we got to Camp David and began to plan for what we would do in response, what was rolled out on the table was Afghanistan _ a map of Afghanistan. And I will tell you, that was a daunting enough task to figure out how to avoid some of the pitfalls that great powers had in Afghanistan, mostly recently the Soviet Union and, of course, the British before that. Given that this was a global war on terror, should we look not just at Afghanistan but should we look at doing something against Iraq? I can tell you that when he went around the table and asked his advisers what he should do, not a single one of his principal advisers advised doing anything against Iraq. When I got back to the White House with the president, he laid out for me what he wanted to do. And one of the points, after a long list of things about Afghanistan, a long list of things about protecting the homeland, the president said that he wanted contingency plans against Iraq should Iraq act against our interests. There was a kind of concern that they might try and take advantage of us in that period. And there was also, he said, in case we find that they were behind 9-11, we should have contingency plans. But this was not along the lines of what later was discussed about Iraq, which was how to deal with Iraq on a grand scale. This was really about _ we went to planning Afghanistan, you can look at what we did. Clarke writes that the president pushed him to find a link between Iraq and the attack, is that right? Was the president trying to twist the facts for an Iraqi war, or was he just puzzled about what was behind this attack? Initially, he said that the president was wandering the situation room _ this is in the book, I gather _ looking for something to do, and they had a conversation. But its not surprising that the president would say, What about Iraq, given our hostile relationship with Iraq. And Im quite certain that the president never pushed anybody to twist the facts. Rice, youve given us a very strong statement, with regard to the actions taken by the administration in this pre-9-11 period, and we appreciate that very much for the record. I want to call to your attention some comments and some events on the other side of that question and give you an...
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