The White House sought an escape on Monday from a damaging row over its leadership in the war on terror, signalling that it may consider releasing transcripts from testimony by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to the commission investigating the September 11 attacks.
The White House’s refusal to allow Rice to testify in public before the commission has rapidly become an embarrassment to President George Bush and an unwelcome distraction from his re-election campaign.
By Monday morning, the administration’s concern that the White House be seen as accountable proved overwhelming, and negotiations were under way for Rice to make some gesture to the investigating commission.
News reports said that White House officials, while balking at a full public appearance by Rice before the commission, were discussing the limited release of transcripts from her previous session with the investigating team behind closed doors.
”That would show people that she is cooperating and make clear that her testimony is consistent with her public pronouncements,” a Republican official told the Washington Post. ”That would help our credibility.”
Rice has been at the centre of the week-long firestorm about the Bush administration’s security policy, triggered by the release of a scathing new book by a former adviser, Richard Clarke.
Clarke, who served under Rice, accuses the Bush administration of underestimating the threat posed by al-Qaeda and being obsessed with confronting Saddam Hussein.
His revelations, in his book and in testimony to the investigating commission, dominated the news agenda last week. Until Sunday night, however, the White House appeared reluctant to give ground to Clarke, or to pressure from the investigating commission for Rice to testify in public.
Administration officials led by Rice lined up to describe the veteran bureaucrat as a disgruntled employee seeking to flog his book. They also tried to dismiss his account of events inside the administration. However, much of his account has been verified by other sources.
On Sunday night, Rice was forced to give credence to a crucial scene described in the book between the president and Clarke that had earlier been dismissed as fiction by White House officials. In the passage, Clarke describes an impromptu meeting in the White House situations room on September 12 2001 in which Bush repeatedly pressed him to find a link between the terror attacks and Saddam.
But Rice was adamant that she would not testify in public, although she expressed her willingness to meet the families of those who died in the September 11 attacks, and to appear in private before the commission.
”Nothing would be better from my point of view than to be able to testify,” she told CBS television’s 60 Minutes programme. ”I would really like to do that. But there is an important principle involved here. It is a long-standing principle that sitting national security advisers do not testify before Congress.”
By Monday, however, her assertions that she had nothing to hide began to sound unconvincing even to leading Republicans, who called her refusal a ”political blunder”.
”We’ve been through the materials. There are no smoking guns. And we need this witness to help put the full picture together for the American people,” said John Lehman, a Republican member of the commission.
The compromise being worked out on Monday by the White House, however, represents a retreat. But that could also open up further avenues of inquiry about the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on terrorism. — Guardian Unlimited Â