WP/Milbank/Pincus: Rice Defends Refusal to Testify [View All]

Compromise Sought With 9/11 Commission

Monday, March 29, 2004; Page A01

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, at the center of a controversy over her refusal to testify before the Sept. 11 commission, yesterday renewed her determination not to give public testimony and said she could not list anything she wished she had done differently in the months before the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Administration officials were searching for a compromise last night with the commission that would limit the political damage from her refusal to testify. But a defiant Rice gave no hint of that as she defended the Bush administration's counterterrorism performance on CBS's "60 Minutes" -- the same venue used a week earlier by former White House counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke to launch his criticism that the Bush administration did too little on terrorism before Sept. 11, 2001, and wound up strengthening al Qaeda by pursuing war in Iraq.

Rice's appearance, and that of three other top Bush officials on the airwaves yesterday, came at the end of a week in which the Bush administration labored to discredit Clarke, who challenged the White House yesterday to release more classified counterterrorism documents.

Rice, the top foreign-policy official in President Bush's White House, brushed aside the notion that the U.S. government should apologize to Sept. 11 victims' families for not stopping the attacks, saying, "It's important that we keep focused on who did this to us." Rice asserted that "we are safer today than we were on September 10," and, asked whether there were any mistakes or misjudgments before the attacks, replied: "I think we did what we knew how to do."

more…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31904-2004Mar28.html