The White House was facing a crisis in confidence on Wednesday over its handling of the al-Qaeda threat prior to September 11, as a public inquiry into the attacks demanded to question George Bush’s national security adviser.
The September 11 commission insisted that Condoleezza Rice appear at today’s session, even though the Bush administration has warned that a public grilling of a member of presidential staff would breach constitutional protocol.
The standoff with the inquiry could damage the White House’s popularity in a tightly contested presidential campaign, in which President Bush is concentrating on his reputation as a decisive wartime leader.
The commission is due to submit its final report on July 26, just before the Democratic party’s convention.
Rice has become a lightning rod for criticism of the administration after the publication of a White House memoir by the president’s former top counter-terrorism adviser, Richard Clarke.
Clarke portrayed Rice as ill-informed about the seriousness of the threat posed by al-Qaeda. He said she ”gave me the impression she had never heard the term before”.
He said that in an early meeting in January 2001, in which he tried to make her realise the extent of the danger, she changed the subject and later decided to exclude Clarke from top level meetings and downgrade his counter-terrorism security group.
The White House has launched a media counter offensive to rebut Clarke’s claims, with Rice appearing on five talkshows. In one interview, Rice said: ”Dick Clarke was counter-terrorism tsar for a long time with a lot of attacks on the United States.
”What he was doing was — what they were doing apparently was not working. We wanted to do something different.”
Speaking during a cabinet meeting, President Bush denied that he ignored the threat from al-Qaeda.
”The facts are these: [CIA director] George Tenet briefed me on a regular basis about the terrorist threats to the United States of America and had my administration had any information that terrorists were going to attack New York City on September 11, we would have acted,” he said.
However, members of the September 11 commission, formally known as the national commission on terrorist attacks upon the United States, were furious that Rice had taken such a high public profile after refusing to appear before a public session of the inquiry. Timothy Roemer, a Democratic commissioner, held up a copy of Clarke’s book at one point, saying: ”I would hope that this discussion would not be for the airwaves … but belongs in this hearing room tomorrow.”
Such demands were greeted by applause from relatives of victims of September 11. The White House is already under fire from relatives for using scenes from Ground Zero in its political campaign advertising.
It has also had a run-in with the commission before over sharing information.
The disputes have led to the commission issuing two subpoenas and threatening several more.
An initial offer by the president to spend an hour with senior members of the commission behind closed doors also provoked outrage and the White House has since signalled it might be flexible over the duration of the interview. The commission on Tuesday closely questioned officials from the Clinton and Bush administrations over their failure to take decisive measures against al-Qaeda after the 1998 bombing of US embassies in east Africa and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. – Guardian Unlimited Â