NYT : Rice Dismisses Charge That She Ignored Qaeda Warning

Rice Dismisses Charge That She Ignored Qaeda Warning

By PHILIP SHENON | October 2, 2006

SHANNON, Ireland, Oct. 2 — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said it was “incomprehensible” that she could have ignored dire terrorist threats two months before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Her remarks were meant to rebut an account in a new book by Bob Woodward saying that she failed to act on warnings from George J. Tenet, who was then the director of central intelligence.

In her first direct comments about the book, Secretary Rice told reporters traveling with her to the Middle East on Sunday night that she did not believe there had ever been such an exchange with Mr. Tenet.

Nor, she said, did she remember if she even met with Mr. Tenet in the White House on July 10, 2001, the date identified in Mr. Woodward’s book, “State of Denial,” which went on sale last weekend. Ms. Rice was President Bush’s national security adviser at that time.

Mr. Woodward’s book reports that Mr. Tenet hurriedly arranged a White House meeting on to try to “shake Rice” into taking action on ominous intelligence reports warning of a potentially catastrophic attack by Al Qaeda, possibly within American borders.

The book says that Mr. Tenet and J. Cofer Black, who was then his counterterrorism chief, left the meeting in frustration, believing they had been given a “brush-off.”

Secretary Rice said Sunday night that there would have been no need for a “a kind of emergency meeting in which there was a need to shock me, given that every day we were meeting in the Oval Office going over the threat reporting” during the summer of 2001, when spy agencies were flooded with warnings of an imminent Al Qaeda attack.

“I don’t recall a so-called emergency meeting,” she continued, adding that “it was not unusual that George and I would meet, in a sense, unscheduled” in the White House, especially during such a tense period.

Ms. Rice said she had no specific recollection of meeting with Mr. Tenet and Mr. Black on July 10, 2001. Members of the commission that investigated the attacks of Sept. 11 and the events leading up to them have said they were never told of a special White House meeting held on that date, and have questioned in recent days whether information about such a meeting may have been intentionally withheld from the panel.

“We’ll have to go back to the records to see if there was a meeting” that day, Secretary Rice said.

“What I can be quite certain of is that I would remember if I was told, as this account apparently says, that there was about to be an attack in the United States,” she said. “The idea that I would have somehow ignored that, I find incomprehensible — especially given that in July, we’re getting a steady stream of quite alarmist reports of potential attacks.”

Mr. Woodward’s account says that Mr. Tenet and Mr. Black, who have refused to comment on the book but appear to have been important sources for Mr. Woodward, told Ms. Rice that “Al Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibility within the United States itself.”

The book says that after the meeting, both men “felt they were not getting through to Rice — she was polite, but they felt the brush-off.”

Ms. Rice also disputed other material in Mr. Woodward’s book, including his report that the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was so disdainful of Ms. Rice during President Bush’s first term that he refused to return her telephone calls from the White House.

“Secretary Rumsfeld has never refused to return my phone calls,” she said. “The idea that he wasn’t returning my phone calls was simply ludicrous.”

She also disputed Mr. Woodward’s suggestion that she had urged that Mr. Rumsfeld be replaced in President Bush’s second term. “I did not try to get the president to change his Secretary of Defense,” she said.

Secretary Rice said that one of her top aides — Philip D. Zelikow, who was the executive director of the Sept. 11 commission before joining the State Department last year — had remained behind in Washington this week, in part to deal with the swirling controversy over Mr. Woodward’s book.

“He does want to be able to help reconstruct, from the commission’s side, what happened,” Ms. Rice said.

In the wake of book’s publicaton, members of the Sept. 11 commission said that they were told nothing of any special July 10, 2001, meeting at the White House, although the panel questioned Ms. Rice, Mr. Tenet and Mr. Black in detail, sometimes under oath.

The dispute over Mr. Woodward’s book — and Ms. Rice’s depiction in it — threatened to overwhelm her scheduled week-long trip to the Middle East, where she is trying to encourage Arab leaders to bolster the beleaguered Palestinian leader, President Mahmoud Abbas, and is seeking their help in dealing with the turmoil in Iraq.

On her first stop, in Saudi Arabia today, Secretary Rice is scheduled to meet with King Abdullah and ask him to “do more” to assist Mr. Abbas, who has attempted to press the radical Islamic group Hamas to work towards a peace settlement with Israel.