By Brigitte L. Nacos
What are we to make of American politics and its supposed
transparency, when it takes the metamorphosis of a celebrity journalist to draw
intense national attention to decision-making based on wishful pseudo-reality
rather than on the reality with respect to Iraq? What are we to make of
American politics and its power sharing arrangement, when it takes a new
bestselling book to reveal what congressional committees and the 9/11
commission should have known a long time ago? Let me just mention the so far
most glaring revelation: According to the Washington Post, Bob Woodward reveals in “State of Denial” that “then-CIA Director George J. Tenet and his
counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, grew so concerned in the summer of 2001
about a possible al-Qaeda attack that they drove straight to the White House to
get high-level attention.” Although Tenet and Black managed to pay
then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice a “surprise visit” to make an
impression, “the meeting on July 10, 2001, left Tenet and Black frustrated and
feeling brushed off… Rice, they thought, did not seem to feel the same sense of
urgency about the threat and was content to wait for an ongoing policy review.”
Problem is that neither congressional committees nor the 9/11 Commission
learned of the July meeting as they investigated pre-9/11 counterterrorism
efforts and the lack thereof. Instead, the omission of the July meeting allowed
administration officials to stick to their claim that they had not ignored
warnings about Al Qaeda’s plans as expressed forcefully by Richard A. Clarke,
the White House counterterrorism advisor who had stayed on for part of the Bush
presidency.
After former President Bill Clinton defended his counterterrorism policy in
an interview with Fox News last weekend and implied that the Bush
administration had not paid enough attention to the threat of terrorism in its
first eight months, Secretary of State Rice defended the Bush administration’s record
on dealing with the threat of Islamic militants prior to the 2001 attacks at
least matched Clinton's. She said, “The notion that somehow for eight months
the Bush administration sat there and didn't do that is just flatly false."
The July 10, 2001 meeting indicates otherwise.
According to the Washington Post, “Jamie S. Gorelick, a member of the Sept.
11 commission, said she checked with commission staff members who told her
investigators were never told about a July 10 meeting. "We didn't know
about the meeting itself," she said. "I can assure you it would have
been in our report if we had known to ask about it."
Since White House and State Department officials confirmed yesterday that
the meeting on July 10th did take place, Ms. Rice’s version is not
persuasive. And the real question is, why nobody mentioned this meeting in the
first place during hearing held by the 9/11 commission and congressional
committees?
Why didn’t Mr. Tenet and Mr. Black provide the information in their several
appearances be? According to Woodward, Black "felt there were things the
commissions wanted to know about and things they didn't want to know about.”
Whatever the truth may be in this particular case and in the larger picture—there
has neither been transparency nor power sharing in the post-9/11 era.
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