> Transcript: Condoleezza Rice on '60 Minutes' - March 28, 2004

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Heck, she dodges the "apology" question 3 times

and Yah, no apology either .

surprize

Link to full Transcript

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32063-2004Mar28.html

She doesn't even have the timeline right.
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Rice

We were discussing the threat spike that took place between June and July, to try and figure out how to respond. Now, to be fair, the threat reporting was all about attacks that might take place abroad -- in the Persian Gulf, or perhaps something against Israel, or perhaps something against the G8 leader's summit that was going to take place in Genoa that summer. And we were responding to that. I called in, along with Andy Card, Dick Clarke on July 5 th and I said, you know, even though none of the threat reporting really is relating to the United States, perhaps you better get the domestic agencies together and see what we need to do to button down the country. And, in fact, the FAA issued warnings as a result of that; the FBI issued warnings; INS and Customs were informed about these threats. But everything pointed to an attack abroad.


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Clarke


MR. RUSSERT: We'll get to that particular debate, but let me go back to September 11 and what led up to it. The Washington Post captured this way: "On July 5 of 2001, the White House summoned officials of a dozen federal agencies to the Situation Room. `Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon,' the government's top counterterrorism official, Richard Clarke, told the assembled group, including the Federal Aviation Administration, Coast Guard, FBI, Secret Service, Immigration and Naturalization Service. Clarke directed every counterterrorist office to cancel vacations, defer non-vital travel, put off scheduled exercises, place domestic rapid-response teams on much shorter alert. For six weeks in the summer of 2001, at home and overseas, the U.S. government was at its highest possible state of readiness--and anxiety--against imminent terrorist attack."

Did Dr. Rice instruct you to organize that meeting?

MR. CLARKE: No. I told her I was going to do it. And I had already been doing it two weeks before, because on June 21, I believe it was, George Tenet called me and said, "I don't think we're getting the message through. These people aren't acting the way the Clinton people did under similar circumstances." And I suggested to Tenet that he come down and personally brief Condi Rice, that he bring his terrorism team with him. And we sat in the national security adviser's office. And I've used the phrase in the book to describe George Tenet's warnings as "He had his hair on fire." He was about as excited as I'd ever seen him. And he said, "Something is going to happen."

from http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/

Partly, I think the answer is the same as I gave in a column I wrote for The Hill a few weeks ago: "We’re looking at a White House that is increasingly insular and isolated. Most specifically, its missteps show how deeply out of touch it is with how much its public credibility has atrophied over the last eight months."

Clarke -- who was unflappable on the shows this morning -- and Hill Democrats seem to have immediately called First & Co.'s bluff. Not only have they welcomed the release of Clarke's materials, they've called for the release of more documents, correspondence and testimony from him and Rice. Selective declassification would be very difficult in the current context -- and could complicate efforts to keep so much other stuff out of the public's view.

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