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THE WHITE HOUSEOffice of the Press Secretary ________________________________________________________________EMBARGOED FOR RELEASEUNTIL DELIVERYTHURSDAY, APRIL 8, 2004As Prepared for DeliveryNATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR DR. CONDOLEEZZA RICEOPENING REMARKSTHE NATIONAL COMMISSION ON TERRORIST ATTACKSUPON THE UNITED STATESHart Senate Office BuildingWashington, DCApril 8, 2004I thank the Commission for arranging this special session.Thank you for helping to find a way to meet the Nation’s need tolearn all we can about the September 11
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attacks, whilepreserving important Constitutional principles.This Commission, and those who appear before it, have avital charge. We owe it to those we lost, and to their lovedones, and to our country, to learn all we can about that tragicday, and the events that led to it. Many families of thevictims are here today, and I thank them for their contributionsto the Commission’s work.The terrorist threat to our Nation did not emerge onSeptember 11
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, 2001. Long before that day, radical, freedom-hating terrorists declared war on America and on the civilizedworld. The attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983,the hijacking of the Achille Lauro in 1985, the rise of al-Qaidaand the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the attackson American installations in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996, theEast Africa embassy bombings of 1998, the attack on the USS Colein 2000, these and other atrocities were part of a sustained,systematic campaign to spread devastation and chaos and tomurder innocent Americans.
 
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The terrorists were at war with us, but we were not yet atwar with them. For more than 20 years, the terrorist threatgathered, and America’s response across several administrationsof both parties was insufficient. Historically, democraticsocieties have been slow to react to gathering threats, tendinginstead to wait to confront threats until they are too dangerousto ignore or until it is too late. Despite the sinking of theLusitania in 1915 and continued German harassment of Americanshipping, the United States did not enter the First World Waruntil two years later. Despite Nazi Germany’s repeatedviolations of the Versailles Treaty and its string ofprovocations throughout the mid-1930s, the Western democraciesdid not take action until 1939. The U.S. Government did not actagainst the growing threat from Imperial Japan until the threatbecame all too evident at Pearl Harbor. And, tragically, forall the language of war spoken before September 11
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, thiscountry simply was not on a war footing.Since then, America has been at war. And under PresidentBush’s leadership, we will remain at war until the terroristthreat to our Nation is ended. The world has changed so muchthat it is hard to remember what our lives were like before thatday. But I do want to describe the actions this Administrationwas taking to fight terrorism before September 11
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, 2001.After President Bush was elected, we were briefed by theClinton Administration on many national security issues duringthe transition. The President-elect and I were briefed byGeorge Tenet on terrorism and on the al-Qaida network. Membersof Sandy Berger’s NSC staff briefed me, along with other membersof the new national security team, on counterterrorism andal-Qaida. This briefing lasted about one hour, and it reviewedthe Clinton Administration’s counterterrorism approach and thevarious counterterrorism activities then underway. Sandy and Ipersonally discussed a variety of other topics, including NorthKorea, Iraq, the Middle East, and the Balkans.Because of these briefings and because we had watched therise of al-Qaida over the years, we understood that the networkposed a serious threat to the United States. We wanted toensure there was no respite in the fight against al-Qaida. Onan operational level, we decided immediately to continuepursuing the Clinton Administration’s covert action authoritiesand other efforts to fight the network. President Bush retainedGeorge Tenet as Director of Central Intelligence, and LouisFreeh remained the Director of the FBI. I took the unusual stepof retaining Dick Clarke and the entire Clinton Administration’scounterterrorism team on the NSC staff. I knew Dick to be an
 
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expert in his field, as well as an experienced crisis manager.Our goal was to ensure continuity of operations while wedeveloped new and more aggressive policies.At the beginning of the Administration, President Bushrevived the practice of meeting with the Director of CentralIntelligence almost every day in the Oval Office -– meetingswhich I attended, along with the Vice President and the Chief ofStaff. At these meetings, the President received up-to-dateintelligence and asked questions of his most senior intelligenceofficials. From January 20 through September 10, the Presidentreceived at these daily meetings more than 40 briefing items onal-Qaida, and 13 of these were in response to questions he orhis top advisers had posed. In addition to seeing DCI Tenetalmost every morning, I generally spoke by telephone everymorning at 7:15 with Secretaries Powell and Rumsfeld. I alsomet and spoke regularly with the DCI about al-Qaida andterrorism.Of course, we also had other responsibilities. PresidentBush had set a broad foreign policy agenda. We were determinedto confront the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.We were improving America’s relations with the world’s greatpowers. We had to change an Iraq policy that was making noprogress against a hostile regime which regularly shot at U.S.planes enforcing U.N. Security Council Resolutions. And we hadto deal with the occasional crisis, for instance, when the crewof a Navy plane was detained in China for 11 days.We also moved to develop a new and comprehensive strategyto eliminate the al-Qaida terrorist network. President Bushunderstood the threat, and he understood its importance. Hemade clear to us that he did not want to respond to al-Qaida oneattack at a time. He told me he was “tired of swatting flies.”This new strategy was developed over the Spring and Summerof 2001, and was approved by the President’s senior nationalsecurity officials on September 4. It was the very first majornational security policy directive of the Bush Administration -–not Russia, not missile defense, not Iraq, but the eliminationof al-Qaida.Although this National Security Presidential Directive wasoriginally a highly classified document, we arranged forportions to be declassified to help the Commission in its work,and I will describe some of those today. The strategy set asits goal the elimination of the al-Qaida network. It orderedthe leadership of relevant U.S. departments and agencies to make
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