Dh B7 Planes As Weapons 2 Of 2 Fdr- Entire Contents- Media Transcripts And Reports- 1st Pgs For Ref

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I"] Content and programming Copyright 2002 Cable News Network Transcribed under license by FDCH e-Media, Inc. (f/k/a Federal Document Clearing House, Inc.). Formatting Copyright 2002 FDCH e-Media, Inc. (f/k/a Federal Document Clearing House, Inc.). All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to Cable News Network. This transcript may not be copied or resold in any media. CNN

SHOW: CNN SATURDAY EDITION 10:00 May 18, 2002 Saturday Transcript # 051800CN.V86 SECTION: News; Domestic LENGTH: 8414 words HEADLINE: What Did Bush Know of Warnings Before 9-11? GUESTS: Ron Wyden, Pat Roberts, Alison Mitchell, Mike Allen, Douglas Brinkley, Deborah Shapley, Robert Dallek BYLINE: Jonathan Karl, Kelly Wallace, Kate Snow HIGHLIGHT:

An old refrain echoes through Washington, What did he know and when did he know it, and why was it kept secret for so long? The U.S. Congress wants answers about the terror attack warnings before September 11. BODY: THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power to protect the American people. (END VIDEO CLIP) JONATHAN KARL, HOST: An old refrain echoes through Washington, What did he know and when did he know it, and why was it kept secret for so long? Congress wants answers about the terror attack warnings before September 11. We'll talk to members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, and Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas and to reporters who cover the White House and the Hill about the political fall out. Also, as another wartime president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, becomes a national obsession with a best selling book and a new made- for-TV movie, we'll talk to historians about the lessons of LBJ, overwhelmed by fighting a far and a credibility gap.

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Copyright 2002 Newsweek Newsweek May 27, 2002, U.S. Edition SECTION: NATIONAL AFFAIRS; Pg. 28 LENGTH: 3374 words HEADLINE: What Went Wrong BYLINE: By Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff; With Daniel Klaidman, Mark Hosenball, Eleanor Clift, John Barry, Colin Soloway and Tamara Lipper in Washington, Andy Murr in Phoenix, Jamie Reno in San Diego and Christopher Dickey in Paris HIGHLIGHT: The inside story of the missed signals and intelligence failures that raise a chilling question: did September 11 have to happen? BODY: Forget James Bond. Intelligence gathering is more like taking a metal detector to the city dump. So much comes in, rumor, hearsay, disinformation, so little of it more than trash: once in a blue moon an agent-prospector may get lucky. But even then an agent's warning is likely to be dismissed as what Condoleezza Rice last week called "chatter." "There's always TMI~too much information," says former agent Milt Bearden. Often agents poke fun at the sometimes obsessive quirks of their colleagues. "If a confidential memorandum comes from a guy out in, say, Phoenix, the first thing that goes up the line is, 'That's Harry again. He's like a broken clock twice a day'," one ex-agent says. Even today, long after 9-11, streams of new threats pass unnoticed through Washington. In recent weeks, for instance, the FBI has gotten specific threats about a car- or truck-bomb attack on an "all-glass" building near the U.S. Capitol, and another threat against a Celebrity cruise ship off Florida. Neither was corroborated, or publicized. Yet every now and then, amid the piles of dross, a nugget of pure gold turns up in intel files. The key for American national security—now and into the future—is to know it when we see it. Back in July 2001, Bill Kurtz and his team hit pay dirt, and no one seemed to care. A hard-driven supervisor in the FBI's Phoenix office, Kurtz was overseeing an investigation of suspected Islamic terrorists last July when a member of his team, a sharp, 41-year-old counterterrorism agent named Kenneth Williams, noticed something odd: a large number of suspects were signing up to take courses in how to fly airplanes. The agent's suspicions were further fueled when he heard that some of the men at the local Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University were asking a lot of questions about airport security. Kurtz, who had previously worked on the Osama bin Laden unit of the FBI's international terrorism section, was convinced he and his colleagues might have stumbled on to something bigger. Kurtz's team fired off a lengthy memo raising the possibility that bin Laden might be using U.S. flight schools to infiltrate the country's civil-aviation system. "He thinks of everything in terms of bin Laden," one colleague recalled. The memo outlined a proposal for the FBI to monitor "civil aviation colleges/universities around the country." Williams, the agent who sniffed out the link, was described by one former colleague as a "superstar," a former SWAT sniper and family man who coaches Little League and, in 1995, helped track down Michael Fortier, Timothy McVeigh's former Army buddy. "Anything he says you can take to the bank,"

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Copyright 2002 Associated Press All Rights Reserved The Associated Press These materials may not be republished without the express written consent of The Associated Press September 18, 2002, Wednesday, BC cycle SECTION: Washington Dateline LENGTH: 935 words HEADLINE: Intelligence agencies received hints of looming attacks before 9/11, investigators report BYLINE: By KEN GUGGENHEIM, Associated Press Writer DATELINE: WASHINGTON BODY: American intelligence agencies received far more reports of terrorist plotting to use planes as weapons before Sept. 11 than the U.S. government has previously acknowledged, congressional investigators said Wednesday. While it was unclear whether any of the reports were in fact signs of the impending attacks on the World ^*$. Trade Center and Pentagon, investigators said the agencies never looked closely at the potential threat of hijacked airliners flying into buildings. Those assertions came in a 30-page statement by Eleanor Hill, staff director for the House and Senate intelligence inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks. Hill's statement was being presented to committee members Wednesday at the inquiry's first public hearings. Lawmakers have been meeting behind closed doors since June, looking into intelligence failures leading up to the attacks and how they can be corrected. "These public hearings are part of our search for the truth - not to point fingers or pin blame, but with the goal of identifying and correcting whatever systemic problems might have prevented our government from detecting and disrupting al Qaida's plot," said Sen. Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Hill outlined 12 examples of intelligence information on the possible terrorist use of airplanes as weapons, dating back to 1994. The last example occurred a month before the attacks, when intelligence agencies were told of a possible bin Laden plot to bomb the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, or crash a plane into it. But it contained no specifics pointing to the impending Sept. 11 attacks. In August 1998, U.S. intelligence learned that a "group of unidentified Arabs planned to fly an explosive-laden plane from a foreign country into the World Trade Center," says the report. The report was given to the Federal Aviation Administration and FBI, which took little action on it. The group may now be linked to bin Laden, the report says. Other intelligence suggested that bin Laden supporters might crash a plane into a U.S. airport, or conduct a plot involving aircraft at New York and Washington, the report said. While generally aware of the possibility of this method of attack, "the Intelligence Community did not

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Online NewsHour: Rice on Iraq, War and Politics — September 25, 2002

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RICE ON IRAQ, WAR AND POLITICS September 25, 2002

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice talks with Margaret Warner about Iraq, the United Nations, the United States' new pre-emptive strike doctrine and recent criticism from Democratic leaders. Click Iwra to witch (Ms Mgmfll M str«anm| vidto QIC* h«n M fata* to tWs

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MARGARET WARNER: Welcome, Ms. Rice, thanks for joining us.

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Sept. 24, 2002: Intelligence experts discuss the dossier outlining Iraq's weapons program, released by the British government.

CONDOLEEZZA RICE: Thank you. It's nice to be with you.

MARGARET WARNER: As I'm sure you know, the Senate Majority Leader, Tom Daschle, went angrily to the Senate floor today and accused the president of politicizing this debate about going to war. What's your response to that? Sept. 24, 2002:

Update: Blair Warns Iraq's Weapons Program Is Growing Sept. 23, 2002: A discussion of U.S.-German tensions over policies with Iraq. Sept. 20, 2002: The Russian defense minister discusses his country's stance on Iraq. Sept. 17,2002: Two experts assess Iraq's latest offer to

Sen. Daschle's comments CONDOLEEZZA RICE: The president has never politicized this concern about war and the national security of the American people. The president believes that this is a time for unity of the American people's representatives and it's Executive Branch, which is why he made the decision to go to Congress for the resolution to support American activities to deal with the threat of Saddam Hussein - and the article in question or the comments in question that the president made were in the context of homeland security and if you actually read those comments, the president said that some Senators had had a tendency to put special interests ahead of national security and he went on to praise Democrats and Republicans who were pulling together on the security issues that face the American people.

http ://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/international/july-dec02/rice_9-25 .html

I think there has bee* some frustration that there hasn't been •oveflwat forward on tbe homeland security bill in the Senate, but it's the body, MI the partisan matter of De*oc rats and Republicans about which the president was speaking. CONDOLEEZZA RICt. Nations Security

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Condi and the 9/11 Commission National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice is apparently not keen on going under oath for the Kean 9/11 commission. By TIMOTHY J. BURGER WASHINGTON

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Poised to convene its first hard-hitting hearings in January, the federal commission investigating the 9/11 attacks continues to be at odds with the White House over access to key information and witnesses. Two government sources tell TIME that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice is arguing over ground rules for her appearance in part because she does not want to testify under oath or, according to one source, in public. While national security advisers are presidential staff and generally don't have to appear before Congress, the commission argues that its jurisdiction is broader—and it's been requiring fact witnesses in its massive investigation to testify under oath. The exception: it may not seek to swear in President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Bill Clinton or Al Gore in the increasingly likely event they will be asked to speak to the commission. "I think that it is in their interest to meet with us," says GOP commission member John Lehman, saying that they should be invited, not subpoenaed, and be allowed to appear behind closed doors. With such high-profile testimony in the offing, it's no wonder the commission chairman, Republican Tom Kean, was telling reporters last week to expect major revelations from the investigative hearings expected to begin in late January. He also suggested that the 9/11 attacks might have been prevented if mid-level government officials at various government agencies had done their jobs. As for senior officials like Rice or her predecessor, Clinton NSA Sandy Berger, and their bosses, Kean said the commission was still studying whether they share the blame. Rice could face tough questioning. One Republican commissioner says a comment by Rice last year— that no one "could have predicted that they would try to use a.. .hijacked airplane as a missile"—was "an unfortunate comment... that was, of course, a wrong-footed statement on its face," given that there was years of intelligence about Al Qaeda's interest in airplane attacks. Whether she signs up willingly to testify now is still an open question. But the commission wants to hear from her. Said Democratic commissioner Tim Roemer: "The Presidents and Vice Presidents and national security advisers in both administrations should appear." Spokesmen for Rice and the commission had no comment on the talks but a senior Rice aide insisted that "Dr. Rice and the White House continue to work amiably with the commission, consistent with the President's desire to make staff available in accordance with his ability to fight the war on terrorism."

' u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt I Two Loud Words

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There have always been 'third-rail' issues in American politics, subjects that, if touched upon, will lead to certain political death. For a long while, and until very recently, Social Security was one of these issues. A new one, surrounding the attacks of September 11, has been born in this political season. If September 11 is discussed, the only allowable sub-topic to be broached is whether or not the Bush administration is capable of keeping us safe from another onslaught. Friday's edition of the Boston Globe had a case in point on the front page. An article titled 'For Bush, Readiness is Key Issue' stated that, "In speech after speech, President Bush has emphasized his administration's pledge never to forget the lessons of Sept. 11. He says the top goal of his administration is to prevent another attack." The Globe article contained, in the next paragraph, the standardized rejoinder: "And while Democratic opponents of the administration are unanimous in their hope that that vulnerability is not exposed with deadly results, they have also argued that Bush has done far too little to protect the country from another attack. He has refused to adequately reimburse state and local officials for homeland security costs, they argue, and has ignored dangerous gaps in air cargo and port security."

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Thus, the 'preparedness-gap' becomes the whittled-down talking point du jour. This is a whiff of colossal proportions, the implications of which will echo down the halls of history unless someone develops enough spine to speak the truth into a large microphone. The talking point is not difficult to manage. It was splashed in gaudy multi-point font across the front page of the New York Post in May of 2002. Two words: 'Bush Knew.' It is, frankly, amazing that this has fallen down the memory hole. Recall two headlines from that period. The first, from the UK Guardian on May 19, 2002, was titled 'Bush Knew of Terrorist Plot to Hijack US Planes.' The first three paragraphs of this story read: "George Bush received specific warnings in the weeks before 11 September that an attack inside the United States was being planned by Osama bin Laden's alQaeda network, US government sources said yesterday. In a top-secret intelligence memo headlined 'Bin Laden determined to strike in the US', the President was told on 6 August that the Saudi-born terrorist hoped to 'bring the fight to America' in retaliation for missile strikes on al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan in 1998. Bush and his aides, who are facing withering criticism for failing to act on a series of warnings, have previously said intelligence experts had not advised them

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Copyright 2002 CNBC, Inc. CNBC News Transcripts SHOW: Tim Russert (10:00 PM ET) - CNBC March 16, 2002 Saturday LENGTH: 7726 words HEADLINE: Dr. Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser, discusses issues the Bush administration is currently dealing with BODY: HOST: Tim Russert TIM RUSSERT: Good evening, and welcome again. Six months ago this weekend, America attacked on September llth like never before. At the president's side that day and every foreign policy challenge that he confronts is our guest, the national security adviser, Dr. Condoleezza Rice. Welcome, Dr. Rice. Dr. CONDOLEEZZA RICE (National Security Adviser): Thank you, Tim. Nice to be with you. RUSSERT: Go back to September llth for us. Tell us about that day. Dr. RICE: It was an incredible day. I was standing at my desk when my executive assistant came in and said a plane had hit the World Trade Center. And I first had thought, 'What a terrible accident.' And then when I learned later that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center, I thought, This is a terrorist attack.' And I was, with the vice president, taken down to the bunker, where, with the president on Air Force One and then later at Offutt Air Force Base, we began to try, first of all, to deal with the situation of bringing airplanes down, of— of trying to secure the skies. But the, really, very interesting thing about that was that, very early on, the president was already pretty focused on the fact that we were going to get these people who had done this to us; that the United States was going to respond decisively. And he was very convinced already that this was a global issue; that this was not just an issue of American interests, but rather an attack upon freedom, an attack upon civilization. And those—those words were there in the very first meetings that we held. RUSSERT: We all were shocked on the morning of September llth, but you weren't surprised that the terrorists tried something, were you? Dr. RICE: We were not surprised because we knew of al-Qaida. From the time that we entered office, we had been told about this network—global terrorist network that had begun to spread through the world, that had a very strong base of operations in Afghanistan. We knew that they were implicated in the Cole bombing; that they had been blamed for the bombing of America's embassies in Kenya and Tanzania back in 1998, and that, in fact, they were probably involved even as early as the World Trade Center. So we knew that this was a dangerous terrorist organization. We also knew that there was a possibility that the United States was vulnerable, but with all of that knowledge, it's still not possible to know when something is going to happen and how it's going to happen. And that they would use our openness against us, use the fact that we

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Copyright 2001 Newsweek Newsweek December 31, 2001, U.S. Edition SECTION: THE STORY OF SEPTEMBER 11 LENGTH: 16136 words BYLINE: By Evan Thomas; This story was reported by T. Trent Gegax, Arian Campo-Flores, Alan Zarembo and Gretel C. Kovach. It was written by Evan Thomas HIGHLIGHT:

September 11 dawned bright and clear, but was soon darkened by terror. The story of a survivor, a killer and the vice president whose lives collided in hours of horror and heroism BODY: Virginia DiChiara did have a premonition that something wicked was on the way. DiChiara, whose office was on the 101st floor of the North Tower, had worried that the terrorists might come back to finish off the World Trade Center. She had been a block away, working at Bankers Trust at 130 Liberty Street, when terrorists bombed the WTC in 1993. But in 2000, when she got a big job as director of audit for Cantor Fitzgerald, a bond-trading firm at the top of the North Tower, she tried to put her fears out of her mind. Her corner office looked out on the Statue of Liberty far below, at the brilliant sunsets and, in the distance, to the Jersey shore, where she liked to go boating in the summer. Once a carefree sun worshiper, DiChiara will never soak up the rays in the same way again; on September 11 she sustained third-degree burns on much of her body. She had gone to hell and then, slowly, painfully, come back. Denial is an ordinary and understandable response to calculated mass murder. Americans, like most people, don't want to see what they don't wish to know. Warning about "grand terrorism"—terror with weapons of mass destruction—and calling for "homeland defense" has been an academic subspecialty for years. Foundation and government reports warned that it was only a matter of time before the terrorists struck America in a way that could claim thousands of lives. Yet at the White House, homeland defense was not the first job Vice President Dick Cheney got when the new administration took office last January. Cheney spent several months running a task force to solve an energy crisis that, it turns out, was probably exaggerated. His staff was just formally turning to the subject of homeland defense on September 11, when the terrorists hit. To be sure, few could have guessed at the brazenness and resourcefulness of Atta or Al Qaeda, the terrorist network that backed him and the 18 other suicide attackers. The September 11 plots had been methodically thought out and meticulously planned over at least two years. And yet a reconstruction of Atta's movements in the months leading up to the attacks shows that the terror ringleader, for all his careful planning, made numerous small blunders. His trip-ups could have been tipoffs—if only Americans had been watching. The fog of war, a term now much in vogue, was thick around the first battle in the new terror war. As FDNY First Deputy Commissioner Bill Feehan mustered his troops to combat the blazes at the Twin Towers, there appears, in perfect hindsight, to have been an almost willful blindness toward the risk that the towers might collapse. Likewise, in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), the bunker buried far below the White House where Vice President Cheney commanded the initial U.S. response, misinformation overwhelmed the facts. At one point, NEWSWEEK has learned, Cheney gave an order to shoot down a hijacked civilian airliner that didn't exist—a phantom created by panic and garbled communications. That is not to say that Feehan and Cheney were anything but cool and steady in crisis. Indeed, they showed true sangfroid at some very frightening moments. We celebrate many such tales of courage on September 11— perhaps the most moving of which is the passenger revolt on the hijacked United Flight 93 that may have saved the U.S. Capitol or the White House from destruction (NEWSWEEK,

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t r u t h o u t - Probe: U.S. Knew of Jet Terror Plots

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Probe: U.S. Knew of Jet Terror Plots By Ken Guggenheim Associated Press Writer Wednesday, 18 September, 2002

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WASHINGTON (AP) - American intelligence agencies received far more reports of terrorist plotting to use planes as weapons before Sept. 1 1 than the U.S. government has previously acknowledged, congressional investigators said Wednesday. While it was unclear whether any of the reports were in fact signs of the impending attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, investigators said the agencies never looked closely at the potential threat of hijacked airliners flying into buildings. Those assertions came in a 30-page statement by Eleanor Hill, staff director for the House and Senate intelligence inquiry into the Sept. 1 1 attacks. Hill's statement was being presented to committee members Wednesday at the inquiry's first public hearings. Lawmakers have been meeting behind closed doors since June, looking into intelligence failures leading up to the attacks and how they can be corrected. "These public hearings are part of our search for the truth -- not to point fingers or pin blame, but with the goal of identifying and correcting whatever systemic problems might have prevented our government from detecting and disrupting al Qaida's plot," said Sen. Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Hill outlined 12 examples of intelligence information on the possible terrorist use of airplanes as weapons, dating back to 1994. The last example occurred a month before the attacks, when intelligence agencies were told of a possible bin Laden plot to bomb the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, or crash a plane into it. But it contained no specifics pointing to the impending Sept. 1 1 attacks. In August 1998, U.S. intelligence learned that a "group of unidentified Arabs planned to fly an explosive-laden plane from a foreign country into the World Trade Center," says the report. The report was given to the Federal Aviation Administration and FBI, which took little action on it. The group may now be linked to bin Laden, the report says. Other intelligence suggested that bin Laden supporters might crash a plane into a U.S. airport, or conduct a plot involving aircraft at New York and Washington, the report said. While generally aware of the possibility of this method of attack, "the Intelligence Community did not produce any specific assessments of the likelihood that terrorists would use airplanes as weapons," the report said.

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Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company The New York Times September 16, 2001, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section 1; Page 1; Column 5; National Desk LENGTH: 2933 words HEADLINE: AFTER THE ATTACKS: THE EVENTS; In Four Days, a National Crisis Changes Bush's Presidency BYLINE: By DAVID E. SANGER and DON VAN NATTA Jr. DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 BODY: President Bush was sitting in a second-grade classroom in Sarasota, Fla., on Tuesday morning, his eyes and his smile fixed on 7-year-olds showing off their reading skills. But his mind was clearly fixed on the news he had heard just moments before: a passenger jet had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers. At 9:05 a.m., the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., stepped into the classroom and whispered into the president's right ear, "A second plane hit the other tower, and America's under >, attack." The president blanched. But he stayed put, occasionally arching his eyebrows at the children. "Really good readers, whew," he said. "This must be sixth grade." Minutes later, 900 miles to the north, a squad of Secret Service agents burst into the West Wing office of Vice President Dick Cheney, grabbing his arms, his shoulders and his belt. "They literally propelled him out of his office," one witness said. The agents all but carried Mr. Cheney down to the White House's deepest sanctum, the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, a tubelike structure designed to withstand a nuclear blast. Another hijacked plane was bearing down on Washington, the agents said, and the White House was almost certainly its target. In the course of the next four days, George W. Bush was transformed into a president at the helm of a White House, and a nation, in crisis. On Monday night, he was laughing over dinner with his brother Jeb at a seaside Florida resort, posing for pictures with the restaurant staff and dodging questions from reporters about looming battles over the vanishing budget surplus. By this morning, with downtown Washington locked down by the military, he was conducting a war council at Camp David and demanding that countries around the world, starting with the Arab world, declare whether they were allies in the war on terrorism. As he rode Marine One from Andrews Air Force Base to the White House on Tuesday evening, Mr. Bush watched the smoke billowing from the jagged gash in the Pentagon and seemed to recognize how profoundly his young presidency had been transformed. "The mightiest building in the world is on the floor," he told an aide riding with him. "That's the 21stcentury war you just witnessed."

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Dr. Condoleezza Rice Speaks at Los Angeles Town Hall

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Remarks by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice at Town Hall Los Angeles Breakfas The Westin Bonaventure Hotel Los Angeles, California g In Focus: The Road Map to Peace DR. RICE: Well, thank you very much for that warm welcome. It's so great to be here at the" Los Angeles. I want to thank Liam McGee for that terrific introduction and for his work as via Town Hall Los Angeles. Adrienne Medawar, the president of Town Hall Los Angeles, thank y hard work. And to all of the board members and staff members who make this great organize function, thank you very much. I see a lot of familiar faces here - friends from the academy, a family member, a number of I friends from California. It's just great to be home - thank you very much for welcoming me hi (Applause.) My time as Stanford - as professor and provost - provided some of the fondest memories o And, like Stanford, Town Hall Los Angeles thrives on debate and discussion about the great day. I want to spend a few minutes speaking with you today about an issue that is clearly vitj - promoting peace and progress and change in the Middle East. The events of the last few months make clear that the Middle East is living through a time of change. And despite the tragic events of the past few days, it is also a time of great hope. Pr believes that the region is at a true turning point. He believes that the people of the Middle E; real chance to build a future of peace and freedom and opportunity. In Iraq, a murderous tyrant and a supporter of terror has been defeated, and a free society is (Applause.) Coalition troops in Iraq still face great dangers each and every day. Iraq's transit dictatorship to democracy is proving every bit as challenging as we had imagined. Three dec tyranny left Iraq worse off than we had imagined. Saddam's palaces were in very good repair. And years of intelligence and U.N. reports tell us weapons of mass destruction programs were robust and well-funded. But Iraq's water and s« and power grids and hospitals and schools all suffer from decades of malign neglect. The ps impact of decades of murderous totalitarianism on generations of Iraqis is even worse. Truth with thousands of Iraqis in mass graves that are still being discovered. Trust was imprisoned jailed on the capricious whims of a brutal regime. We are working with the Iraqi people to stabilize their country, to improve security and to mal services better than they were before the war. But much hard work remains. America and ou partners and determined to do the work that we came to do, and then we will leave. President Bush has stated many times that the battle of Iraq was about moving a great dang about building a better future for all of the people of the region. Iraq's people, for sure, will be

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1/8/2004

National Review: 'Power and Values': A conversation with Condoleezza Rice. (Interview)

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'Power and Values': A conversation with Condoleezza Rice.(Interview) National Review, August 12, 2002, by Jay Nordlinger Toward the end of the day on July 16, Jay Nordlinger sat down with Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, in her West Wing office. They had last talked for NR in the summer of 1999, resulting in the piece "Star-in-Waiting: Meet George W.'s Foreign- Policy Czarina" (August 30, 1999). By now, obviously, Condi Rice needs no introduction. The recent conversation was, in part, a follow-up to the earlier discussion. Below are excerpts. JN: Such a simple-minded question, but one asks it. What have you learned? What's been surprising? CR: There's no major surprise. I certainly knew what to expect in the job. JN: You'd been on staff [in the administration of the first Bush]. CR: I'd been on the staff. I'd watched Brent Scowcroft do this job. So in terms of the daily operations . . . it all looks familiar to me. None of us thought we would be dealing with the war on terrorism as a kind of central organizing principle . . . But the one thing that has been affirmed for me in the strongest possible terms is the tremendous legitimacy of democracy vis-a-vis any other system of governance. It is very, very powerful to watch this great democracy respond to 9/1 1 and to see its inherent strengths. Because when you look at democracy from the outside, I'm sure it must look chaotic and cacophonous, and there are all these different voices, and we fuss and we fight. And I keep thinking to myself, "The terrorists must have looked at us and thought: easy prey." But when our values were attacked, [the country] came together. And I contrast that with, I think, the difficulty of governments that do not have that link to their people . . . JN: Do you still consider yourself a Realpolitiker, or has that been tempered somewhat? CR: We had this talk, as you know [back in 1999] — the balance of power, realism versus ideals, power and values. And I said then, and I still believe, that they're inseparable. Clearly, the balance of power mattered when we defeated the Soviet Union . . . But you should never forget how powerful [our] ideals are. And every time, we tend to underestimate them. When we were getting ready to go into Afghanistan, the number of people who said, "Well, you know, a Muslim society, no history of democracy, no history of freedom, they won't care about those things" . . . And then the first thing that happens when Kabul is liberated is people go into the streets for simple freedoms, like the ability to play music or to send their girls to school. And you just forget how very powerful human dignity is as a principle of human behavior and how much it's supported by democracy. . . . JN: We used to hear about "Asian values" — the idea that democracy just wasn't right for those people. And the experience of Taiwan sort of put the lie to that. A lot of people now say that the Arab world and democracy are simply incompatible. "Arab values" - is that like saying "Asian values"? CR: We don't think there's anything incompatible about Islam and democratic values. And the President has said in a number of speeches, these values are universal — they're not our values, they're not Western, they're universal.

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1/8/2004