The Washington Post had a tremendous scoop last week, having obtained portions of a speech Condi Rice was scheduled to deliver Sept. 11, 2001. In it, Rice was prepared to explain that the real threats against the United States were not terrorists, but missiles. The NSA believed, at the time, that the Clinton administration had overemphasized the terrorist threat and that Bush’s team would push missile defense as the foremost national security priority of our time.
On Sept. 11, 2001, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to outline a Bush administration policy that would address “the threats and problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday” — but the focus was largely on missile defense, not terrorism from Islamic radicals.
The speech provides telling insight into the administration’s thinking on the very day that the United States suffered the most devastating attack since the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor. The address was designed to promote missile defense as the cornerstone of a new national security strategy, and contained no mention of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or Islamic extremist groups, according to former U.S. officials who have seen the text.
The 9/11 Commission, which was unaware of the planned speech, has asked the White House for a copy of the prepared remarks so as to better understand the administration’s national security priorities during the first nine months in office.
Dropping any pretense of cooperation, the White House is refusing to oblige.
The White House has refused to provide the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks with a speech that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was to have delivered on the night of the attacks touting missile defense as a priority rather than al-Qaida, sources close to the commission said Tuesday.
With Rice scheduled to publicly testify Thursday before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, the commission submitted a last-minute request for Rice’s aborted Sept. 11 address, the sources told Reuters on condition of anonymity. But the White House has so far refused on the grounds that draft documents are confidential, the sources said.
Simply breathtaking.
A draft of an unused speech, much of which has already been published in the Washington Post, is “confidential”? Is this some kind of joke?
The Commission already has security clearance. Its members have already reviewed classified materials spanning two presidential administrations. Maybe White House officials can come up with some defense for why Rice’s speech is “confidential,” but I suspect they’d have a hard time saying it with a straight face.
Besides, as Arnold P. California mentioned this morning, “[H]ow confidential can the draft that existed on 9/11 be when Rice was going to read it in public that very day?”
There is no great mystery here. The Rice speech is fairly-concrete proof of the Bush White House’s mistaken priorities before the attacks of 9/11. The administration didn’t take the terrorist threat seriously, they were preoccupied with a missile-defense system (that doesn’t work), and they’d prefer to hide Rice’s speech because it makes all of this abundantly clear.
Once again, the White House is acting like a defendant on trial, viewing the 9/11 Commission as an adversary from whom information must be hidden. The Commission wants to search for the truth and the White House prefers to keep the truth from the Commission and the public. It’s scandalous.
As usual, Josh Marshall had some terrific analysis on this.
Finally we have an example of White House stonewalling of the 9/11 Commission in which all the dross of bogus national security flimflam and the impurities of dishonest classification mumbojumbo have been burned away to reveal the pure, hard nugget of political scamliness and antipathy toward letting the public know the truth.
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Unless the argument is that we can’t let our enemies know the depth of the poor judgment displayed by the president’s national security team it is searchingly hard to fathom what possible national security issue could be implicated by handing over the speech since it was — do we have to say it? — a speech! A speech for public consumption.
Like almost all the other restrictions the White House has placed on the Commission, this is just so they won’t be embarrassed politically. They don’t like the Commission. Again and again they display open contempt for its work. They didn’t want it created in the first place. And they’ve tried to obstruct its work at almost every turn.
All that’s different here is that the political nature of the obstruction is undeniable.