Damning editorial from the Minneapolis StarTribune:
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's testimony to the 9/11 commission Thursday allows for only one conclusion: The Bush administration was outrageously derelict in its duty to protect the American people as the Al-Qaida threat developed. Consider a few of the many issues on which Rice and the commission focused:
•Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright previously told the commission that during the millennium threat of 1999, key members of the Cabinet met almost daily at the White House to discuss the threat with counterterrorism director Richard Clarke. Clarke said those meetings ensured that Cabinet members would "shake the trees" in their departments and bring forward any information about the threat. It worked.
Rice testified Thursday that in the high-threat period during the summer of 2001, "I just believe that bringing the principals over to the White House every day and having their counterterrorism people have to come with them and be pulled away from what they were doing to disrupt was a good way to go about this." Moreover, Clarke wasn't allowed by the Bush administration to interact directly with the Cabinet.
Those differences were critically important because, as Rice said, longstanding "systemic" problems hampered coordination of efforts and proper sharing of information in and between the CIA and FBI. And that's just the point: In a high-threat period, getting the top-level people together and pushing them hard was the only way to break through the bureaucratic inertia. Rice's failure to do that meant the FBI, in particular, didn't learn of information about Al-Qaida operatives already in the United States or about suspicious men of Middle Eastern origins taking flight instruction....Link:
http://www.startribune.com/stories/561/4712842.html
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