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American Morning

Condoleezza Rice Confirmation Hearing

Aired January 19, 2005 - 09:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning. Condoleezza Rice back for day two. Second day of testimony set to begin any moment now live in the Senate Foreign Relation Committee on Capitol Hill.
Good morning. Welcome back, everybody, as AMERICAN MORNING continues right now.

As we come back here in the 9:00 hour, we anticipate the question-and-answer session to begin any moment now. As we watch Richard Lugar there, it looks like the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee now takes his seat.

Haven't seen a wide picture or a wide angle of the room. Not sure how many senators are seated yet. But any minute now, we expect day two to begin.

Nine hours of testimony yesterday, Soledad. Sometimes rather heated between the Democratic senators and Condoleezza Rice. We'll see which direction we go today.

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Yes. Senator Lugar just calling the folks to order. Of course it seemed like John Kerry had lengthy questioning for Condoleezza rice. Also yesterday, as we heard earlier today, Barbara Boxer really pretty contentious back and forth with Condoleezza Rice, as Jack point out earlier. Not one question in her allotted time, where she essentially lectured the national security adviser, now nominee, about sort of moral failings on the part of the administration, which some of our viewers took objections with.

We're listening to them call the meeting to order. And, of course, soon Condoleezza Rice will pick up on her testimony again.

HEMMER: Let's set the table. Ed Henry is in the room as well, back in his same location as yesterday.

Ed, good morning there. What do you anticipate?

ED HENRY, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Bill.

You know, everyone is waiting. Obviously, this has dragged on a little bit longer than was expected. A lot of people expected it to wrap up last night, including outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell.

His staff had put together a farewell bash for him today. That's now on standby. They're waiting, of course. They don't want to preempt Condoleezza Rice's testimony. We're expecting probably it will fizzle out just a little bit today. A lot of the sharp attacks from Senator Boxer, from Senator John Kerry came yesterday. As the evening wore on last night, they were kind of going over a lot of the same ground, mostly on Iraq, with less than two weeks now before the elections, of course, in Iraq.

That is the hottest issue of all. But they also covered Iran, North Korea, the Mideast peace process. Also HIV-AIDS in Africa, something that Condoleezza Rice said will be a focus for the Bush administration in the second term.

I think yesterday played out a lot like her testimony before the 9/11 Commission last April. A lot of pre-game hype there that there was going to be a lot of fireworks. But she really swatted away a lot of the questions. She shows herself to be very skillful in this setting -- Bill.

HEMMER: Ed, in a word, will be there -- will there be a vote at the end of today?

HENRY: Yes, we're expecting only about an hour or maybe two hours max of questions today. Again, as you know, senators can filibuster like they did a little bit yesterday. So it could go on. But we're expecting only an hour or two today.

At the end of that, Condoleezza Rice will leave, and then the committee will come in to for committee business. And there will be a voting committee. She will pass that vote today.

Then it goes to the full Senate. We're expecting action in the full Senate as early as tomorrow morning, when the Senate comes into session 10:00 a.m., two hours before the swearing in ceremony for President Bush.

HEMMER: Thank you, Ed. Ed Henry there in the room.

Let's take you into the room now. Christopher Dodd, Democratic senator from Connecticut, now with the microphone.

(JOINED IN PROGRESS)

SEN. CHRISTOPHER DODD (D), CONNECTICUT: And the intelligence agency admits to practicing it since the early 1990s.

In this report, there are several accounts of prisoners being transferred by the U.S. to certain countries and then allegedly being tortured during those interrogations.

Last year, I introduced an amendment to the defense authorization bill, part of which would have prevented the Department of Defense from transferring persons to third countries without keeping a record of the transfer and the reasons for it.

I wonder if you might comment on this, if you're familiar enough with the practice, and whether or not we might be willing at least to -- one, at least either preventing these renditions from occurring, or if not, at least keeping some record so we have some way of determining how these people are being treated.

Are you familiar with the subject matter?

CONDOLEEZZA RICE, NOMINATED TO BE SECY. OF STATE: Thank you, Senator.

May I just take one moment before I answer any question just to also thank the members of the committee for yesterday? I think it was an extensive, some would say even exhaustive, look at the questions that we face in American foreign policy. But I think it was an important day.

I appreciate very much the spirit in which the questions were asked. And I look forward -- and I really meant what I said and want to underscore -- I look forward to working with each and every member of the committee in a bipartisan fashion so that we can fashion an American foreign policy for the 21st century that takes advantage of the substantial opportunities before us, recognizing that these are also difficult times for the country.

RICE: And I want to thank you, especially, Mr. Chairman, for your leadership of yesterday and to tell you that I look forward to many other sessions of that kind.

SEN. RICHARD LUGAR (R), INDIANA: Great.

RICE: Now let me turn to Senator Dodd's question.

The United States is not permitted to transfer anyone if we think that they are going to be tortured. And, in fact, we make efforts to ascertain from any party that this will not happen. And you can be certain that we will continue to do so.

I want to be careful on commenting on intelligence matters, particularly in open session. But to say that we do -- anything that is done is done within the limits of the law. It is done with a recognition that the United States is special and has special responsibilities, and that we will continue to do that.

As to keeping a record, I would have to demure for now. I don't have enough information...

DODD: If you'd look at that for me and get back.

RICE: I will. And I'd be happy to talk with you about it at some point when we're not in open session.

DODD: And this may be the last, Mr. Chairman, (inaudible) make sure we have enough time for others, as well.

Mentioned earlier Senator Nelson, Senator Chafee and I made this trip into South America. And one of the issues (inaudible) is the contraband issues and the narcotrafficking issues. It's very, very common. The economic issue is important, as well.

I don't know if you had a comment on this. I'd ask you to pay particular attention to that tri-border area that Senator Chafee, Senator Nelson and I spent some time in that Brazilian-Argentinian- Paraguayan corner where it is termed the Wild West, in terms of contraband issues and money flowing back and forth and some very, very important questions. And there needs to be some specific attention, I think, paid there -- more attention than we are now.

The narcotrafficking issue -- there's a great concern about the ballooning affect we've seen over the years. And that is, we've put a lot of attention as we have over $3 billion in Colombia over the last few years. And there's concerns now of this problem reemerging again in Peru and Bolivia where it was in the past, even parts of Brazil.

DODD: The issues of Venezuela obviously get affected by these decisions as well. And there really is a need, I think, for a more comprehensive approach to this.

When we had the certification process here, which the chairman and those who remember, it was a rather difficult process we went through year in and year out declaring which countries were complying or not complying with our anti-narcotics efforts. It caused a lot of acrimony between countries that would be labeled not being supportive.

And so we changed that. We dropped that. But we promised when we did it that we were going to replace it with something. Just doing nothing about it was not the answer.

And part of what we talked about was developing a more comprehensive approach, where, as a consuming country, we'd work more closely with the producing, transferring, money-laundering nations as well.

I would urge you to see if we can't revitalize that. There is a growing concern with the great disparity of resources we're applying to these countries as they battle with these issues. And it's something that really deserves more attention. And we're going to find this problem just moving from nation to nation in these countries without really addressing it more thoroughly.

And if you want to comment on that at all or not, but I'd ask you to really pay attention to that if you could.

RICE: Thank you, Senator. I will take a hard look at it.

We had in concept, when we had the Andean initiative, exactly this in mind, of course which was that if you stop the spread of narco-trafficking in one place, it would find a home in another. And it was intended to be comprehensive in terms of alternative livelihoods and in terms of economic development to forestall that.

But it's a very good point, and I'll take a hard look at it.

DODD: Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

LUGAR: Well, thank you very much, Senator Dodd. Many senators have come in since the beginning of the hearing. Let me mention we're going to have five-minute round. Senators are not obligated to use their five minutes, some will want to pass.

But in any event, at 10 o'clock, Senators, then we'll gather for a business meeting on the nomination.

Senator Chafee?

SEN. LINCOLN CHAFEE (R), RHODE ISLAND: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

And good morning, Dr. Rice.

I see you're fourth in line for succession to the presidency, and so this is an important hearing we're having, and also in that line of succession the only one that hasn't appeared before the public in any kind of capacity in the electoral process.

CHAFEE: This is an important process.

Going back to my questions from yesterday of finding common ground. And as I look back in history -- and you're an historian -- and the success we had with the thaw with the People's Republic of China had a lot to do with the exchange of ping-pong teams, of all things.

And I always admired the architects of that doctrine in that we knew that the Chinese ping-pong players were probably beat us it 21 to 2 or something, but that wasn't what was important. It was the start of finding common ground.

And I was wondering -- in some of my questions, you seemed to reject that doctrine of finding common ground.

RICE: Thank you, Senator, for giving me an opportunity to answer that, because obviously with need to look for common ground.

There is no reason that the United States has to have permanent enemies. We have had circumstances in which there have been major changes in the world.

And, you know, the Libyan experience shows that if there are countries that are prepared to forswear behavior that is dangerous to the international system, that we can start down a different path.

And I'm glad that you mentioned the ping-pong diplomacy because obviously in almost every circumstance, the exchange of people of civil society, of nongovernmental actors, is often an important tool in thawing difficult relations. And so I don't want to leave the impression that I would be by any means opposed to looking for those opportunities. And I will look for them.

CHAFEE: Can we specifically go back to Venezuela again? Where can we find common ground?

RICE: Well, we have -- obviously, we talked about the economic relationship yesterday. And there's common ground there. We sit together in the OAS. We sit together in the Summit of the Americas.

The point is that we don't have a problem with finding common ground. We have, right now, a government in Venezuela that has been unconstructive in important ways.

RICE: And I would just urge that the entire neighborhood, as well as the Venezuelan government, look at what's happening in terms of democracy in Venezuela, in terms of Venezuela's relations with its neighbors.

But this is a matter of sadness, not of anger.

CHAFEE: And with Iran, is there any potential for finding common ground with Iran?

RICE: Well, I think the problems with Iran are well known. And we've tried to make them known to the Iranian government, often through third parties, sometimes when we've been in -- or together.

This is just a regime that has a really very different view of the Middle East and where the world is going than we do. It's really hard to find common ground with a government that thinks Israel should be extinguished. It's difficult to find common ground with a government that is supporting Hezbollah and terrorist organizations that are determined to undermine the Middle East peace that we seek.

So I would hope that the nuclear issues will be resolved. It's extremely important to the world that Iran not acquire a nuclear weapon. And we are working closely with the European Union on that.

I would hope that the Iranian government does something to make clear to the world that they're not going to support terrorists who are determined to undermine the two-state solution in the Palestinian -- in the Holy Land.

And those are barriers to relations.

RICE: And we just have to be honest about it.

It's a very different view. Not to mention, by the way, that a theocratic government that has a view that the mullahs ought to rule, that has no rights -- or has a human rights record that is really appalling and that treats its citizens, its women in that way, is not a regime with which I think we have very much common ground, particularly given the way that we would like to see the Middle East develop.

CHAFEE: It seems to me, going back into history, the same occurrences were with the People's Republic of China at the time. They were arming the -- in the middle of the Vietnam war, arming our opponents in that war.

I mean, there was every opportunity to accentuate our differences and everything wrong with them. But nonetheless, through this thawing, this process of exchange and ping-pong diplomacy, now the two countries are not killing each other. And interestingly, on Iran, I went to a conference in Bahrain earlier in December, and the Iranians were there. I looked up out of curiosity, who are these delegates from Iran. And each of the three delegates from Iran had been educated at the United States, one at the University of Houston, one at the University of Cincinnati and one at Michigan State.

And I wasn't surprised. There is common ground.

But given every opportunity to express even the slightest finding of that common ground, I find that you've instead fallen to accentuating and magnifying our differences.

RICE: Well, Senator, let me make just make the following point.

You know, when the Forum for the Future was held, the very important meeting that was held to talk about reform in the Middle East, the Iranians were invited. The Moroccans wanted to invite them. We said we had no objection. And they didn't come.

And I think there's a reason they didn't come, which was that that was a gathering of civil society and business leaders and people in the country who wanted to talk about reform.

RICE: That's an opportunity for Iran to interact with the world.

We showed, I think, our respect for and our humanitarian impulse to the Iranian people with our response to the Bam earthquake. And it was a very great moment in the history of American compassion and generosity. And I hope we'll have other opportunities that are not linked to disaster to let the Iranian people know that we have no desire to isolate them from the international system or from others.

And so, I understand your question. It's a complex problem when you're dealing with a regime that really has views that we consider illegitimate. But from the point of view of the Iranian people, this is a people who should be in contact with the rest of the world.

CHAFEE: Well, thank you very much.

I know my time is up. I'll just say, I thank you for your time.

And yesterday, we talked about Martin Luther King Day and I recommended you read his great treatise, "Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community."

RICE: Thank you.

LUGAR: Thank you, Senator Chafee.

Senator Biden?

SEN. JOSEPH BIDEN (D), DELAWARE: Madam Secretary, you had a long day yesterday but you've got many long days ahead of you as secretary of state. But I'd like to cut right to it. Yesterday as -- and I'm going to make it clear, I intend to vote for you because I believe strongly, the president is entitled to his Cabinet unless the person he taps is so far out of the mainstream -- and you are clearly not -- or is not intellectually capable to handle the job -- you're clearly capable. And he obviously values you very, very much as his counsel.

BIDEN: So I'm going to vote for you. But I must tell you it's with a little bit of frustration and some reservation.

The questions we asked you in writing, and then yesterday at the hearing, I thought gave you an opportunity to acknowledge some of the mistakes and misjudgments of the past four years.

And I want to make it clear, and I made it clear time and again, no matter who is president -- no matter who is president -- could have been the Lord Almighty, it could have been Al Gore, it could have been John Kerry, could have been anyone, it could have been John Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan -- after 9/11, they would have made mistakes. There's no way in which we could have undertaken this effort without some mistakes being made.

So the point we're -- at least I, and I don't think anyone else here is different -- was trying to get to you with you yesterday is not to play, "I got you" or embarrass the president, but about what we've learned, what we'd do different, how we'd proceed differently given the opportunity again or given a similar circumstance, which we may face.

We may face a God-awful choice in Korea. We may face a God-awful choice in Iran. And we may face an awful choice with regard to Syria.

And so we're trying to get some insight into how a second term, a second chance, a second round might be different, not even because anybody else would have done it better, not because -- that Al Gore, had he been president, would have done it better.

But instead of seizing the opportunity, it seems to me, Dr. Rice, you have danced around it and, sort of, stuck to the party line, which seems pretty consistent: You're always right, you never made any mistakes, you're never wrong.

And it's almost like, "If I acknowledge any misjudgments on the part of me or the president or anybody in the team, it's a sign of weakness."

But I personally don't think it is. I think it's a sign of some degree of maturation, strength.

Yesterday, you claimed my colleague Barbara Boxer was impugning your integrity when she asked you about the changing rationale for the war in Iraq.

I wish, instead, you had acknowledged the facts: The administration secured the support of the American people and of the Congress for going to war based overwhelmingly on the notion that they believed and it was portrayed, in my view, by the administration -- understandably from your perspective -- that Iraq was an imminent threat because it possessed or was about to possess weapons of mass destruction.

BIDEN: Now, when it turns out there are no such weapons, you claim the war was based on removing a dictator.

Now, my recollection -- I've asked my staff to go back and check this, and before the hearing is over this morning they'll have statements -- my recollection it was explicitly stated it was not about regime change, that's not why we were going to war; that would be the effect, but that wasn't the rationale for going to war when we went to war.

Now, I'm glad Saddam's gone. He deserves a special place in Hell -- a special place in Hell.

I, like others -- Chuck Hagel and I, we went up into Irbil. We got smuggled in before the war into northern Iraq. We rode on a seven-hour ride through the mountains -- I understand why the Kurds now say "the mountains are our only friends." And three or four hours before that in Turkey. And we met with the widows of those people who were gassed. We saw the pictures of little kids' eyes bulging out. And, you know, we saw what "Chemical Ali" actually did to those people. So he deserves a special place in Hell.

But if you read the resolution Congress passed giving the president authority to use force if necessary, it was about disarming Saddam. It was about disarming.

And reread the words of the president and other senior officials in speech after speech, TV appearance after TV appearance, you left the American people the impression that Iraq was on the verge of reconstituting nuclear weapons.

I don't doubt you believed that. But to pretend we didn't leave them that impression and leave the Congress the impression -- in fact, I'm not positive of this, but I think I was on "Face the Nation" the day that the vice president was on "Meet the Press." And he got asked about nuclear weapons -- the vice president said, "They have reconstituted their nuclear weapons."

And I got on -- asked on either "Late Edition" or one of the -- the same day, on Sunday I said -- they said, "Is that true?" And I looked at the camera and said, "Absolutely not."

One of two things, either the vice president is deliberately misleading the American people and the Congress, or you all are not telling the Congress the truth -- and at that time, I was the ranking member and just prior to that, the chairman -- telling us the truth about what we had in terms of intelligence. Because as I said, I have seen nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing up to that date to indicate they had reconstituted their nuclear capability.

And so, the -- back then, as I said, we were all left with the impression, as Senator Boxer suggested, that this was about weapons of mass destruction and an imminent threat.

BIDEN: Now, when I said about -- I don't know, six, eight months, maybe longer -- I said the administration claimed that there was an imminent threat, it was pointed out to me that the phrase "imminent threat" was not used by the president.

But here's what other senior officials said, "immediate threat," quote. "Moral threat," quote. "Urgent threat," quote. "Grave threat," quote. "Serious and mounting threat," quote. "Unique threat."

Now, it would almost be funny if it wasn't so, so serious that we are, sort of, dancing on the head of a pin here whether "imminent" was stated.

Now, you say that. I was corrected by other administration officials for saying that the president said "imminent."

But here's my point: Especially on matters of war and peace, we've got to level with the American people if we want, not only their support -- if we want to sustain that support.

My greatest worry -- and it genuinely is a worry -- if that if we're going to get the job done in Iraq, you're going to have to come back here for another at least $100 billion before it's over, probably close to $200 billion before it's all over.

And I'm worried your friends on that side of the aisle are going to say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute, Jack, y'all didn't tell me that."

Now, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they'll all today pledge publicly that if you asked for $200 billion, they'll belly up to the bar and do it. I can tell you, I will. I can tell you, I will.

But you're going to have a little problem here -- you, the administration -- with this outfit, Democrats and Republicans, because I don't think they know what's in store here.

We've all got to be honest, also, with the world, otherwise, we'll do terrible damage beyond what we've already done to our credibility which is, in my travels around the world, at least in question, in many places.

You've heard a thousand times the analogy that was given about, you know, when Acheson went to de Galle and said, "You know, Mr. President, here I want to show you the pictures of the Cubans -- that the fact that the Cubans have put in Russian missile sites, et cetera, et cetera. And de Galle raised his hand and said, "No, no. I don't need to see that" -- I'm paraphrasing. He said, "I know President Kennedy would never mislead me in a matter of war and peace."

Well, we both know, because the world has changed, that even if Kerry had been elected, nobody out there is likely to believe the president of the United States on matters of intelligence just saying, "I know he'd never mislead me. You don't have to show me anything." Those days are gone, unfortunately, for awhile.

After Iraq, it's much harder for the world to rally to our side if we have to face a truly imminent threat in Korea or Iran.

BIDEN: The same goes for the way you answered my questions, in my view, about training Iraqi security forces. It is true: There's probably 120,000 people in uniform. But the question really is -- and I'll end, Mr. Chairman, I know my -- I'm going over my time.

The question really is, how many of those forces could supplant American forces? How many of them we could trade off for an American soldier? Because that's ultimately, again, the exit strategy: Get enough Iraqis there so we don't need American troops there.

Time and again, this administration has tried to leave the American people with the impression that Iraq has well over 100,000 fully trained, fully competent military police and personnel, and that is simply not true. You and I know that. We're months, probably years, away from reaching our target goal.

When the chairman and I were in Iraq with Senator Hagel, right after Saddam's statue went down, we asked the military as well as the police trainers, "How long would it take you to train a military force that's necessary?" They talked about 40,000. And they said, at least two, maybe three years.

"How long would it take you to train a police force capable of policing the country to replace the 79,000 thugs that were called police before?" They said, three to five years.

That was our people. Our people told us that.

And all of a sudden, Rumsfeld announces, "Hey, we've got this done. Don't worry, be happy." That calypso song should be the theme song of the Defense Department, the military of the Defense Department -- I mean, the civilians.

So, yesterday, I think you had a chance to help wipe the slate clean for the American people and our allies, tell them flat-out how hard it was going to be, how much more time it was going to take and why we needed to do it. It's not about revisiting the past, Dr. Rice, it's about how you're going to meet the challenges of the future.

BIDEN: And I must tell you, for the first time in the last four years, I have doubts about it either because you're not telling us, the president doesn't know, or you all don't have a plan. Because that's -- and I'm telling you honestly, that's what I walk away from this hearing worried about.

I'm going to vote for you. But I'm telling you, because of the standard I have about the president having intelligent, bright people, honorable -- and you're all of those things. He gets to choose who he wants.

But I just -- I left the hearing yesterday and got on the train somewhat perplexed. And I'll end with this -- it's like the issue I asked you about Iran. If in fact, the Lord Almighty came down and said, "Look, we guarantee we can monitor, whether they're keeping the commitment, no nukes, no missiles, would we make a deal with them?" Doesn't mean we don't still fight about their support of Hezbollah, terror, human rights.

And my impression from you -- and maybe you can clarify it now -- is you said, no, we wouldn't make a deal if it were just those two things -- no nukes, no missiles, period, would we make a deal with them?

That's my question. Would we? Or do we have to have it all settled all at once with them?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

RICE: Senator, I'll be brief.

The question about Iran, I think, is a question of looking at the totality of the relationship.

Obviously, the pressing issue right now is to deal with Iran's nuclear program. And I think that we will see what becomes of the E.U.-3 efforts.

RICE: We'll work with them. We will see what we can do in the IAEA.

(CROSSTALK)

BIDEN: If we got that deal, would we sign it?

RICE: If the Iranians are prepared to verifiably and irreversibly get rid of their nuclear program, then that will be a very good day, and I think it would certainly change the circumstances that we are looking at.

BIDEN: I wish we had a court reporter who could play back what you just said.

What's the answer? Would you make the deal or not?

RICE: The answer is, Senator, is I'm not going to get into hypotheticals until I know what I'm looking at. That's the answer.

BIDEN: Well, you're in a hypothetical with China. You make a lot of deals with China. Their human rights program is horrible.

RICE: I understand those...

(CROSSTALK)

BIDEN: Their support is horrible. Their problems with us are serious. I mean, I don't get it. Why can't you just say, if that worked -- wouldn't that be a nice message to send to the Iranians: "Hey, guarantee us no missiles, guarantee us no nukes, we can make a deal."

Is that a good idea?

RICE: Senator, what we have said to the Iranians is, look at the Libyan example. The United States doesn't have permanent enemies.

BIDEN: And look at the Libyan example and look at Gadhafi's role in human rights now in his country.

RICE: But what we've done with the Libyan example is that the Libyans made an irreversible -- we believe -- decision about their weapons of mass destruction. They made it, by the way, without a promise of specific deals. We told them that there could be a path to better relations, and they're now on a path to better relations.

BIDEN: That's not what Gadhafi told me. I asked him why he made the deal -- straight up. The State Department was in there.

He said, "It was simple." He said, "I knew if I had used nuclear," -- well, first of all, he said, "Nuclear weapons didn't help you much," -- through a translator -- "nuclear weapons didn't help you much in Vietnam and in Iraq."

BIDEN: That was his comment.

Secondly, he said, "You know, if I used them," I forget exactly the phrase, "you'd blow me away."

And thirdly, he said, "They weren't much value to me." And guess -- and then he went on to say, "And now I can have American oil companies in here pumping the oil out of the ground."

I asked why (inaudible) why he wanted American oil companies. And he made an analogy to the French, he said, "You make a deal with the French, they say 90-10 and they take 95." He said, "The Americans, you say 50-50, they only take 50." Most candid guy I ever spoke with.

RICE: Well, the Libyan example is a good example.

Let me turn very briefly to the question of lessons learned.

I said yesterday, Senator, we've made a lot of decisions in this period of time, some of them have been good, some of them have not been good. Some of them have been bad decisions, I'm sure.

I know enough about history to stand back and to recognize that you judge decisions not at the moment, but in how it all adds up. And I -- that's just strongly the way that I feel about big historical changes.

I'm being as straightforward with you as I possibly can.

BIDEN: I appreciate that.

RICE: And that's how I see it.

BIDEN: It's a little bit like I told my daughter, I have no doubt -- when she was 18 -- I have no doubt -- 16 -- I have no doubt by the time she was 30 years old, she would be a beautiful, intelligent, well-educated, happy lady. I just wondered how much pain there was going to be between then and 30.

(LAUGHTER)

RICE: I understand that.

BIDEN: I'm talking about pain here.

RICE: Well, I'm afraid in difficult historical circumstances, there's going to be a lot of it and a lot of sacrifice.

I don't have a 16-year-old daughter to refer to, but I will tell you that I think the analogy is apt because it's how Iraq turns out that really ultimately matters.

If I could just say one thing, though, about lessons learned. And that is, I spoke yesterday about the important work that we've been doing on the Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization -- I think that's a lesson learned.

We didn't have the right skills, the right capacity to deal with a reconstruction effort of this kind. And we are going to face these again even if it's not after war, and I certainly hope that it will not be.

RICE: We're going to face it in places like Liberia, places like Sudan.

BIDEN: All we want to know is how are you going to face it with the $15 billion that's sitting out there now you haven't spent and, you know, you don't know what to do with it?

RICE: We do know what to do with it, Senator. And that's...

BIDEN: You want to tell us? It'd be good. Tell us.

RICE: That spending is accelerating and I'll be glad to give you a full accounting of it the next time I see you.

BIDEN: God bless you.

And by the way, my daughter's 23. She thinks I'm handsome and smart again. All is well.

RICE: All is well.

(LAUGHTER)

(UNKNOWN): And she's right. (UNKNOWN): You better straighten her out.

BIDEN: Thanks, pal.

(UNKNOWN): Now, I've got one at 27 and I'm still going through a lot of pain.

COLEMAN: Two comments, Dr. Rice, one, with all the talk about the foreign policy goals, the things that impact my constituents most and I was surprised my first years as a senator. I probably spent more time on immigration issues and child adoption than any other issue in my state office. So I just want to raise that.

And probably, by the way, the most satisfying portion of what I do to unite families. You have a program called Adjudicate Orphan Status First. It's a pilot project.

I would just urge you to take a look at expanding it. We do wonderful things to bring families together and it's really important stuff that we don't talk about much.

And I just have to join in the conversation here. I am sympathetic to some of my colleagues' concern about finding common ground. I join with some of my colleagues believing that we need to find more common ground with Venezuela. I think we have to figure out a way to do that.

But I have to agree with you and appreciate your response in separating Venezuela from Iran, a country that's calling for the destruction of Israel, that's supporting terrorism, that no freedom of religion, abysmal human rights record, pursuit of nuclear weapons.

COLEMAN: Just in Iraq, talking to Allawi, concern about interfering with what's going on in Iraq.

And I will say, Dr. Rice, for this senator, the idea of finding common ground with Iran and the mullahs makes me sick. There is a separation there, and I believe it's important for some of us to keep our eye on that difference between Iran and Venezuela.

RICE: Thank you.

LUGAR: Thank you very much, Senator Coleman.

Senator Feingold?

SEN. RUSS FEINGOLD (D), WISCONSIN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Dr. Rice, thanks for this further opportunity to speak with you.

I'm struck by the conversation you just had with Senator Biden with regard to Iraq, in part because I think if people are watching this hearing they would think that we've been in great disagreement about foreign policy ever since 9/11.

That's not what really happened. We were all quite unified with regard to the fight against terrorism, trying to figure out this challenge, up until the time that serious disagreements occurred with regard to whether Iraq really was part of that effort or to what extent it was.

So I want to return, in that spirit, to the item that I started with yesterday: Secretary Rumsfeld's interesting comments in his memo that there was no consensus within the national security community of the United States about how to even measure success in the fight against terrorism.

You and I had an exchange about this yesterday, where you talked about some of the places, geographically, where it's much harder for the terrorist network to operate. I talked about my concern that I think they actually are able to operate in other places, North Africa. And we went back and forth on that.

But, fundamentally, I'd like to have you say a little bit about how do we measure success. Not a list of things we've done, but how do we measure how well the terrorists are doing? How do we know whether they're picking up steam in terms of picking up recruits and gathering more help around the world or not? How do we measure this thing?

I think that's one of the most important things that perhaps we could come together on and start discussing again once we get through this serious disagreement on Iraq.

RICE: It's a very interesting question, Senator, and it's a hard question.

As you know, when you're measuring any social phenomenon, you are usually without hard tools to do it. That's one of the lessons of social science. If you're measuring scientific phenomena, you have hard tools to do it. If you're measuring human phenomena, how do you measure how well a young person is developing? These are human phenomena, they are hard to measure.

One of the hardest things about this is this is a very shadowy network whose numbers are hard to count. It's important and difficult to know what is a hardcore terrorist who is committed to the jihad and would never be reformable in any way, versus somebody who might just be attracted to the philosophy because they're jobless or hopeless or whatever and might be brought back into the fold.

RICE: That's the kind of important question for which we, frankly, don't have a measurement, and I don't think we're going to. I think we're going to see this in broader strokes.

We can measure with good intelligence issues like how well we think they're doing on funding. We can measure something like that -- imperfectly because we're dependent on what intelligence we can learn about that.

We can measure imperfectly when we take down some of their leadership, whether they seem to be able to replace that leadership. We can measure imperfection whether we think they are able to carry through on threats that we believe they have issued. But again, imperfectly.

What we're going to be able to measure -- and I would resist trying to measure -- is how we're doing in empowering moderate Islam against radical Islam because that is an historical process that is going to have its ups and downs.

But in time, when you have a Pakistan coming back from the brink of extremism or you have an Indonesia carrying out a democratic election in which the role of terrorism and Islam was actually a fairly minor issue, you have to say we are making some progress.

How much? I can't tell you. But we're making some progress.

What I keep my eye on is how is moderate Islam doing. When I'm asked, what future am I looking for, I'm looking for a future in which the regions of the world that we're concerned about, whether it is North Africa or East Africa or the Middle East or Southeast Asia, that moderate Islam is winning. It's winning in governments. It's winning in rhetoric. It's winning in educational programs.

But the impact of that is going to be a while before we see it.

FEINGOLD: I appreciate that answer. I recognize how imperfect it is. And I do think a lot of it has to do with how moderate Islam is doing.

FEINGOLD: But let me just give you an example from Algeria, where, of course, they've gone through this horrendous period of terrorism and they're coming out of it. And we had a dinner with civil society people last week in Algeria, said, "Now, what about the young people here? Are they likely to return, to be attracted to a radical, violent Islam or not?"

And the sense was that they probably wouldn't because it was so horrible, but perhaps if economic opportunity didn't improve, that it could happen.

I'm not so sure that it can't be measured more than we're doing. I'm not so sure that we can't identify these trends in a more serious way than we are. And I think it would be very valuable information.

Let me turn to one other question. I'd like you to explain how, if you could, the president's emergency plan for AIDS relief will help build infrastructural capacity in Africa, particularly in the area of training health care practitioners, especially community health workers, and discouraging the medical brain drain?

In the course of the work I have done in this committee, you have a lot of wonderful conversations with people in countries, especially Africa, and some heartbreaking ones. And I find one of the most heartbreaking to be my conversation to Botswana, with the president of that country, President Mogae, who was acknowledging that they had a 40 percent AIDS rate and that they were trying to deal with it, but whenever they'd get some local health care workers trained, they were poached by American health care entities or European health care entities, and they couldn't keep the very people that were trying to deal with this situation.

So while implementing partners all adhere to a set of principles regarding hiring local staff to ensure that we don't siphon resources away from the domestic health care infrastructure, making our efforts, in the end, unsustainable if we don't do that.

RICE: Again, a very important point.

And the whole concept, especially of the part of the emergency plan that is for the 15 most affected, is to focus not just on the delivery of services -- which is important in itself, the cure -- the treatments, 2 million, preventing 7 million, giving access to information and care for 10 million, those are all very important goals. But the design of the program has also been to worry about the delivery mechanism for that care, to use a tiered approach so that you have clinics in the cities that can do that, or hospitals in the cities.

RICE: But that you also build capacity in the village in some of these places even using motorcycle riders to get the care out, people who've been trained to administer or help administer the drugs so that you're improving the health care delivery system as well.

And that really was the innovation that came about through studying and working with, for instance, the Ugandans, who have a very effective system of delivery.

It is also the case, of course, that if you improve the delivery system for AIDS, you improve the health care system delivery for other things as well: malaria, tuberculosis are part of the program, but others as well. If you improve mother-to-child transmission delivery, you improve OB/GYN care. You improve neonatal care and so forth.

And so I think it's really -- probably one of the most important aspects of the emergency plan, would be not just to focus on the treatment itself, although that's extremely important, but what we're doing for the health care delivery system.

I hadn't thought much about the problem of well-trained health care workers being siphoned off but we'll go back and give that some thought.

FEINGOLD: I would appreciate that.

LUGAR: Thank you very much, Senator Feingold.

Senator Hagel?

SEN. CHUCK HAGEL (R), NEBRASKA: No questions.

LUGAR: Senator Hagel passes.

Senator Boxer? SEN. BARBARA BOXER (D), CALIFORNIA: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for being so fair.

Thank you, Dr. Rice, for answering our questions.

Mr. Chairman, and my ranking member, I'm going to use my time this morning to lay out the rest of my concerns.

BOXER: And then, when we get a chance to vote, I'm going to put all my concerns back into context again.

Dr. Rice, clearing the air and, as Senator Biden said, starting from a fresh page here would have been wonderful. We haven't had that.

And the reason I think it is so important to place into the record some of your past statements is because your administration has named several countries in the axis of evil. We don't know what your plans are. We haven't been able to flesh them out.

I think Senator Biden has been trying to push you on the Iran situation.

We don't have an exit strategy for Iraq that we can tell because you insist there's 120,000 in the Iraqi forces. But yet, being pressed by several senators here yesterday, you still won't say how many of them really are trained.

So we've got problems here. At least, I have problems here. So forgive me if I continue along the lines of yesterday.

Now, Dr. Rice and colleagues, our country is united in waging war on those responsible for 9/11 and eliminating the Al Qaeda network. That is why I find it so troubling that the Bush administration used the fear of terror to make the war against Iraq appear to be part of the response to 9/11.

And, Dr. Rice, as I said, you were involved in that effort. You were the face on television, as was pointed out yesterday.

You tell us that you were giving the president confidential advice, but you didn't shrink from talking straight to the American people.

Now, I don't know one American who wants Saddam Hussein to see the light of day. So that's not the point. I don't know of one American who wanted Slobodan Milosevic to see the light of day.

BOXER: And guess what? And you know this: 1,300-plus American soldiers didn't have to die to get rid of Slobodan Milosevic and 10,000 didn't have to get wounded. So there are issues surrounding this.

Now, on September 25th, '02, you said in an interview with Margaret Warner on PBS, "We clearly know that there were in the past and have been contacts between senior Iraqi officials and members of Al Qaeda going back for actually quite a long time." And you went on to say, "And there are some Al Qaeda personnel who found refuge in Baghdad."

Now, that statement and others by administration officials assert there was a long-standing operational alliance between Iraq and Al Qaeda. We know the truth is otherwise. We know it. And I'll show you again the State Department document signed off by President Bush in October 2001, one month after 9/11, showing absolutely no operational cells in Saddam Hussein-controlled Iraq.

And second, most experts agree that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were far from being allies. In an interview on CNBC with Maria Bartiromo on March 24th, '03, Peter Bergen was asked if he saw any direct connection between Saddam and Osama. Mr. Bergen said, "Well, you know, I met bin Laden in '97 and I asked him at the end of the interview his opinion of Saddam, and he said, 'Well, Saddam is a bad Muslim and he took Kuwait for his own self-aggrandizement.'"

In November '01, the former head of the Saudi intelligence said, quote, "Iraq doesn't come very high in estimation of Osama bin Laden. He thinks of Hussein as an apostate, an infidel, or someone who is not worthy of being a fellow Muslim."

Third, you were contradicted by the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, which stated in its report last summer that there was, quote, "no collaborative relation between Iraq and Al Qaeda."

In fact, the 9/11 Commission report states that you received a memo on September 18th, '01, detailing what was known about the links between Al Qaeda and Iraq. Let me read the 9/11 Commission's description of the memo you received.

They write: "The memo pointed out that bin Laden resented the secularism of Saddam Hussein's regime. Finally," the memo said, "there was no confirmed reporting on Saddam cooperating with bin Laden."

BOXER: So, you received a memo on September '01 clearly stating there was no link. The president himself was part of a State Department publication which said there were no Al Qaeda in Iraq prior to 9/11. There's documented history of bin Laden's loathing of Saddam.

And in spite of this, you went on TV and told the American people there was a clear connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Even the State Department was very clear that there were no such contacts.

So, it is very disturbing to think that in spite of everything, and all the information that you had, you continued to go out there and claim this contact and make the people feel that somehow going to war against Iraq was our response to 9/11.

Now, on the aluminum tubes, I'm not going to get into the back and forth with you on the aluminum tubes. But I'm going to lay this into the record because I think it's essential. On September 8th -- first, I believe you tried to convince the American people that Iraq's purchase of aluminum tubes proved positively that they were going to build nuclear weapons. That's your statement about the mushroom cloud, which scared the heck out of every American.

On September 8th, '02, you were on CNN's "Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer" and you made this statement: "We do know there have been shipments of going into Iraq, for instance, of aluminum tubes that are really only suited to -- high-quality aluminum tubes that are only" -- I am reiterating what you said -- "really suited for a nuclear weapons program, centrifuge programs."

That unequivocal statement was wrong. You never mentioned to the American people that there was a major dispute about the tubes, even though our nation's leading nuclear experts in the Department of Energy in 2001 said the tubes were for small artillery rockets, not for nuclear weapons.

It is reported that one Energy Department analyst summed up this issue for the Senate Intelligence Committee saying, quote, "The tubes were so poorly suited for centrifuges that if Iraq truly wanted to use them this way, we should just give them the tubes," unquote.

This dispute among the CIA, the DIA, the Department of Energy, Department of State over the likely use of tubes was played out in front of this committee. And, Mr. Chairman, I remember it. I was there in that meeting. It was very contentious and we saw all sides of the issue.

This dispute was so well known that the Australian intelligence service wrote in a July 2002 assessment that the tubes evidence was, quote, "patchy and inconclusive."

Third, the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, reported on January 8th, '03, that the tubes were, quote, "not directly suitable for uranium enrichment and were consistent with making ordinary artillery rockets."

So, given the concerns raised by Department of Energy, Department of State, the Australians, the IAEA, you still failed to level with the American people on the subject of the aluminum tubes.

Even as recently as a few months ago, October 3rd, 2004, you had the opportunity to finally set the record straight.

BOXER: And as Senator Biden says, it's good to set the record straight. We've got to move on.

But when you we were asked by "This Week's" George Stephanopoulos about the tube controversy, you said, "There was dispute by only one agency, that's the State Department."

Now, that is not the truth. It's not the facts. And it is very, very troubling to me. As Senator Biden said, we all make mistakes. God knows, I've made mine and I will make more. I apologize in advance to my constituents for the mistakes that I'll make.

But once all of the facts are out there, can't we just make sure that the truth is finally embedded into history without turning our backs on what the truth is?

So that's another area.

Now, I know my time is up. I can either wait till one more round or I can just finish up my last area of concern.

Can I just finish it up?

LUGAR: Proceed.

BOXER: OK.

When you were making the case for the war in Iraq, one of the things that you said that, frankly, stunned me was that a reason to go was the Iranians were gassed by the Iraqis.

Now this is truly a horrific fact. That is right.

But, Dr. Rice, we all know the Iran-Iraq War took place between 1980 and 1988, and the United States knew -- they knew that Saddam Hussein was using chemical weapons against the Iranians. And it was appalling.

BOXER: Despite this fact -- despite this fact, I'm sure you're aware who traveled to Iraq to meet with Saddam Hussein one month after we became aware of this. It was Donald Rumsfeld. And Donald Rumsfeld tried to increase diplomatic relations with Saddam Hussein.

Iraq was a charter member of the terrorism list in 1979, put on there by Jimmy Carter. Do you know, and I'm sure you knew at the time you said this, that it was the United States who removed Iraq from our list of state sponsors of terrorism? And they didn't get put back on until 1990.

So, let's review. While Saddam was gassing the Iranians, a despicable act, Donald Rumsfeld and the Reagan administration reestablished U.S. relations with Iraq and refused to put Iran back on the terrorism list.

So, in '03, when you told the American people that Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons against Iran was a justification for war, one of them that you gave, why didn't you tell them the full story?

Why didn't you mention that it was Rumsfeld who favored the normalization of relations with Iraq during a time when Saddam was using chemical weapons against Iran?

So, a reason you gave the American people for the war in Iraq, and the reason you believed it was worth American lives was the heinous gassing of the Iranians by Saddam in the '80s. This gassing was known to the American government at the time. The gassing did nothing to dissuade the American government from launching full diplomatic relations with Saddam. And America gave its seal of approval to Saddam Hussein by sending Special Envoy Donald Rumsfeld to Iraq when we had zero relations with Iran at that time.

So, to me, it's telling a half-truth to the American people. It's gaming the American people. And as someone who believes that we, again, owe the full story, it was very upsetting to me that you didn't put it into context.

Now, had you said, "You know, we were wrong. We were fooled," maybe it would have been better.

BOXER: But there's no mention anywhere.

So, I guess what I am saying, Mr. Chairman, these are my areas of deep concern. I've gone back through the records exhaustively because I knew, Dr. Rice -- and you saw it yesterday, you know, we can get into a give and take, and she's a very good debater and I'm a pretty good debater. And that's interesting.

But I think we need to see what the facts are and why I'm disturbed about this particular nomination. It isn't based on qualifications or intelligence or all the rest, because that's obvious. Wonderful, breaking the glass ceiling and all those beautiful things, which I am proud of. It's not about that.

It's about candor. It's about telling the full story. It's about seemingly not being willing to go with us, both sides of the aisle, because it was the same answer to Senator Chafee when he pressed you.

It seems to me a rigidness here, a lack of flexibility, which is so troubling to me. And most of all, going back into recent history, an unwillingness to give the American people the full story, because the mission, the zeal of selling the war was so important to Dr. Rice. That was her job.

And yet I feel -- and again, I know not everyone agrees with me at all in the country, but many do -- that this war and all of these horrific deaths and the wounded and all of that, is a direct result of not leveling with the American people.

Thank you.

LUGAR: Thank you very much, Senator Boxer.

RICE: Thank you.

I'll just -- I'll be brief.

Senator Boxer, let me respond to a couple of specific points very briefly and then to an overall point.

RICE: But I, first, need to go back to yesterday.

Senator Boxer, you mentioned the letter that we wrote concerning -- I just want to note, and I will want to note for the record, that you put up one provision, not all of the provisions.

BOXER: Yes, that's correct.

RICE: And it was a provision, of course, with which we would have had no difficulty, which was one that is enshrined in law, which is that we should not torture and so forth and so on.

But there were other provisions that you did not put up that was not fully in context what you presented yesterday.

BOXER: Dr. Rice, I agree with you completely. But your letter didn't say...

RICE: No, I understand that.

(CROSSTALK)

BOXER: The conferees could have kept that one provision.

RICE: Yes. We decided -- you're right -- not to try and parse.

But I just want to be clear that you did not put up the entire set of provisions.

BOXER: Of course, I didn't.

RICE: Yes.

BOXER: Because the conferees could have kept that. You didn't tell them to keep it.

RICE: Yes, but the impression was left that what we objected to was that one provision when...

BOXER: Well, you did.

RICE: ... in fact, there were several.

BOXER: Well, you did yesterday object to it. You said it was duplicative.

RICE: No, I said it was in the defense authorization bill.

But I just want, for the record, it to be noted that the Bush administration was objecting not to something to do with the law of the land, but to other provisions. And I'll provide that to you.

So the context here was extremely important.

Secondly, let me just respond very briefly, Senator Boxer, to a few points. First of all, I really just can't agree that Milosevic and Saddam Hussein were the same problem. And we do have to recognize that different tools have to be taken against different dictators.

It was a remarkable set of events with Milosevic. But he was in the center of Europe. We had all kinds of pressure on Milosevic that we had failed to be able to bring about with Saddam Hussein. And so I just reject the analogy between the two.

Secondly, as to the question of Al Qaeda and its presence in Iraq, I think we did say that there was never an issue of operational control, that Al Qaeda -- that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 as far as we know or could tell.

RICE: It wasn't a question of operational alliance. It was a question of an attitude about terrorism that allowed Zarqawi to be in Baghdad and to operate out of Baghdad.

There were contacts going back to the early '90s and those are, indeed, detailed in the 9/11 report.

Third, on the question of aluminum tubes. We didn't go to war because of aluminum tubes. This was a debate about whether this issue, this particular piece of evidence, was evidence of reconstitution of the nuclear program. And there was one agency that disagreed that he was reconstituting his nuclear program and that was the State Department, the INR.

BIDEN: Didn't the Department of Energy also?

RICE: No. The Department of Energy said that they did not believe that the tubes were evidence of reconstitution, but that he was indeed, they believed, reconstituting his program. And that's an important distinction, though.

But I said, "reconstituting his program." I was not talking about the tubes.

The Department of Energy, in fact, I learned when the process unfolded, did have reservations or did believe the tubes were not for nuclear weapons. The majority of agencies in the intelligence community did.

I was representing, Senator -- and I've made this available for the record -- the views of that majority. And the view on reconstitution was one that all but the State Department held.

Now, I just have to put this into context. When you're dealing with intelligence matters, you are not dealing with perfect information.

RICE: And you do have to put that information into a context of someone's history. This was someone who was very close to a nuclear weapon in 1991, much closer than we thought.

Of his present, the intelligence community's belief was that he was reconstituting his program, that there was evidence of this in his procurement activities and keeping the nuclear scientists together.

And that the shadow of future, according to that national intelligence estimate, was that left unchecked, he would have a nuclear device by the end of the decade.

I just don't think that the president of the United States and I were going to give him the benefit of the doubt.

And as to the mushroom cloud statement, one that I've heard repeated many, many times, it was simply a statement about uncertainty; that you didn't want the first evidence that he had nuclear weapons to be the kind of evidence that we learned when we found out that the Soviet Union had a nuclear weapon five years ahead of schedule.

On the Iranians and Iraq, I'll say it right now: The United States government has often, as the president said, supported regimes in the hope that they would bring stability. And we've been, in the Middle East, sometimes blind to the freedom deficit. We're not going to do that anymore. And what happened with Saddam Hussein was probably evidence that that policy was not a very wise policy.

In general, Senator, let me just say again, we did go to the American people with a case for war. It was a case that, yes, said that the threat that this horrible dictator sitting in the Middle East, in the world's most dangerous region, with whom we had gone to war twice before, who had used weapons of mass destruction, who was shooting at our aircraft, that it was not acceptable to have him with weapons of mass destruction.

And we believed, like most of the intelligence agencies in the world, like the United Nations -- and much of the information was from the United Nations -- that he had weapons of mass destruction. He refused to account for them. Even with coalition forces sitting on his doorstep, he refused to account for them.

We weren't prepared to give Saddam Hussein the benefit of the doubt given his history and given the shadow of the future. We also had a situation, now rectified, of a Middle East out of which the terror threat, the jihadist threat comes with a factor in Saddam Hussein, who was going to make it impossible to change the nature of the Middle East.

I don't think anybody can see a different kind of Middle East with Saddam Hussein in the middle of it.

So we can disagree about the course that we took.

RICE: We can certainly have, I think, a healthy debate about the course that we should take going forward. I would be the first, again, to say we've had to make a lot of decisions, some of them good, some of them bad.

But I would hope that what we will do now is to focus on where we go from here. I can assure you, I will be candid. My assessments may not always be ones that you want to hear. They may not always be ones with which you agree. But I will tell you what I think. And that's a promise that I make to you today.

Thank you.

LUGAR: Thank you very much.

BOXER: If I could -- and I know I'm taking a lot of time. I just don't want to have to speak again. But I would like to finish my comments here.

The fact is that the reconstituting were based on the yellow cake and aluminum tubes, both of which proved to be false. And when I asked you about...

RICE: And balancing equipment and the accounts out of which these came and his keeping nuclear scientists together. Let's have the entire picture.

BOXER: OK. Yes. Exactly my point. Let's have the entire picture.

And when I asked you about aluminum tubes, you talked about the larger picture.

The fact is when you go on television and you say the aluminum tubes can only be used for nuclear weapons -- you want to turn it to a different subject, that's OK, but that's what you said, and the facts proved otherwise.

And we knew that at the time that four or five agencies were having a giant battle over that. No one could have possibly said that they could only be used because the intelligence community was split.

My last point has to do with Milosevic.

You said you can't compare the two dictators. You know, you're right. No two tyrants are alike.

But the fact is Milosevic started wars that killed 200,000 in Bosnia, 10,000 in Kosovo and thousands in Croatia. And he was nabbed and he's out, without an American dying for it. That's the fact.

BOXER: Now, I suppose we could have gone in there and people could have killed to get him. The fact is not one person wants either of those two to see the light of day again. And in one case, we did it without Americans dying; in the other case, we did it with Americans dying.

And I think if you ask the average American, you know, "Was Saddam worth one life, one American life?" they'd say no. He's the bottom of the barrel, and the fact is we've lost so many lives over it. So if we do get a little testy on the point -- and I admit to be so -- it's because it continues day in and day out and 25 percent of the dead are from California. We cannot forget -- we cannot forget that.

RICE: May I just close by saying, Senator Boxer, I, probably more than most, because I did have a role in the president's decision to go to war, mourn every day the people that are lost? I look at their pictures. I think about their families. I've been to Walter Reed. I see the pain and suffering. I believe that their service and their sacrifice was needed for our security.

I don't think there's anyone who believes that you could have gone into Iraq and nabbed Saddam Hussein. It wasn't that kind of regime.

LUGAR: Members of the committee, let me just say we tried...

BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: Day 2, well under way. More than an hour of testimony so far in the books for Condoleezza Rice, following up nine hours of testimony yesterday. Despite the disagreements, we anticipate approval by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee possibly late in the morning, sometime early in the afternoon, then full approval tomorrow on inauguration day.

We're going to hand it off now. Are we not?

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN CO-ANCHOR: Yes, we are. We should remind folks before we go inauguration day in Washington, D.C., AMERICAN MORNING will be coming to you live starting at 7:00 a.m. Eastern Time. We will look at the pre-ceremony, what they are doing to set up for the inauguration that happens that afternoon.

With that, we are out of here. But we hand it down to CNN in Atlanta where Daryn and are -- Daryn and Rick are standing by this morning.

Good morning, guys.

DARYN KAGAN, CNN CO-ANCHOR: Thank you. You guys have a safe trip to Washington, D.C. We'll look forward to seeing you there tomorrow morning.

Meanwhile, plenty going on in Washington, D.C. with that confirmation hearing that's going on.

RICK SANCHEZ, CNN CO-ANCHOR: Yes. You might say just as it is getting good in the confirmation hearing. Certainly some verbal sparring going on. Two interesting points being made by two very powerful women. Senator Barbara Boxer of California, as you heard questioning Condoleezza Rice on several issues related to Iraq. Specifically, whether the American people were told the truth heading into the war. It is certainly something we're going to be delving into as well.

I'm Rick Sanchez. KAGAN: And hello, and I'm Daryn Kagan.

Condoleezza Rice saying you might not agree with her but she says she will always tell exactly what she believes.

For more on this, let's bring in our Ed Henry who is on Capitol Hill. He is following the hearings as well.

Good morning.

ED HENRY, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Daryn. That's right, fireworks once again. We thought this might be a slightly more tame session, the second day. Maybe fizzle out a little bit. But Democratic -- the ranking member of this committee, Joe Biden really came out strong as well as Barbara Boxer, who was on the attack yesterday. Once again, you just heard her on the attack again. Zeroing in especially on Iraq, the reasons for going to war, whether or not the administration has a plan.

It was really summed up by Joe Biden in sort of the Democratic thinking on this panel. He came out and said he is going to support this nomination, but he said he has deep concerns. In particular, Biden charged that yesterday in her testimony, after he reviewed it last night, he feels that Dr. Rice did not level with the American people about an exit strategy in Iraq, about how many actual Iraqi officers were trained. She maintains it's over 120,000. Senator Biden and others say it's only about 4,000. Obviously a deep divide there.

Also, Senator Biden coming out and saying that he believes that the Congress is going to have to appropriate probably somewhere around another $200 billion to continue to fight the ongoing effort in Iraq and the reconstruction efforts, et cetera. And Senator Biden also said that he feels again, that the Bush administration really has to level with the Congress and the American people.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. JOE BIDEN (D), DELAWARE: It's not about revisiting the past, Dr. Rice. It's about how you will meet the challenges of the future. And I must tell you, for the first time in the last four years, I have doubts about it. Either because you are not telling us, the president doesn't know, or y'all don't have a plan. Because that's -- and I'm telling you honestly, that's what I walk away from this hearing worried about.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HENRY: Now, both Joe Biden and Barbara Boxer are saying that they feel yesterday Condoleezza Rice did not acknowledge any mistakes in Iraq. And they feel that's a problem as well. After questioning from Barbara Boxer, here's how Dr. Rice responded.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CONDOLEEZZA RICE, NOMINEE, SECRETARY OF STATE: I disagree about the course that we took. We can certainly have, I think, a healthy debate about the course that we should take going forward. I would be the first again to say we had to make a lot of decisions, some of them good, some of them bad. But I would hope what we will do now is to focus on where we go from here.

I can assure you, I will be candid. My assessments may not always be ones that you want to hear. They may not always be ones with which you agree. But I will tell you what I think. And that's a promise I make to you today.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HENRY: Now, Joe Biden also lashed out at Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, saying that Secretary Rumsfeld has also been insisting that 120 Iraqi officers have been trained by the American troops. And in fact, Joe Biden cracked -- he believes the calypso song "Don't Worry be Happy" should be the theme song at the Pentagon. So you can imagine it's getting tough, the rhetoric, a little tense in that committee room.

But when all is said and done, after a few more senators get to speak this morning, Condoleezza Rice is easily going to get a vote, a positive vote out of this Senate Foreign Relations Committee this morning, maybe early afternoon. And then head to the full Senate for easy confirmation by the full Senate tomorrow.

But you are just hearing Democrats expressing concerns. But in the end most of them will vote for her, Daryn.

KAGAN: Interesting to hear Democrats actually sound like Democrats, which is a change since the election. Ed Henry on Capitol Hill, thank you for that.

HENRY: Thank you.

KAGAN: And we'll have a lot more ahead on what's happening with Condoleezza Rice on Capitol Hill.

SANCHEZ: Some people said it was going be boring. Well, not only that but we're also going to have the latest on the inauguration as well.

KAGAN: We'll do that.

SANCHEZ: We'll bring you all of that. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SANCHEZ: And welcome back to CNN LIVE TODAY.

It's now 11 days until the Iraqi national elections. And despite heightened security leading up to the January 30 voting, insurgents continued to launch deadly attacks. Today was particularly bloody in the capitol. There were four separate car bombings in and around Baghdad.

CNN's Jeff Koinange is there with the details.

JEFF KOINANGE, CNN LAGOS BUREAU CHIEF: Hello there, Rick. And it seemed like it was wave after wave of attacks on this Wednesday across Baghdad and beyond. The first, right outside the Australian Embassy, where a suicide bomber detonated himself killing a bystander, wounding up to five others. And we understand there were two Australian soldiers among the wounded.

Less than A half hour later, an even more powerful car bomb. This one right outside the Iraqi Emergency Police Headquarters; 18 people were killed in that including 13 Iraqi policemen, up to 30 people wounded in that incident.

And yet another car bomb, this one right outside an Iraqi military base, two soldiers killed in that. And a fourth one on the southern outskirts of Baghdad at an Iraqi National Guard checkpoint, four people killed in that, including two Iraqi soldiers. And one U.S. soldier was wounded in that incident.

So, yes, one of the bloodiest days in Baghdad in a long time with just 11 days to go before that crucial January 30 poll -- Rick.

SANCHEZ: And no indications at this point that it's going to be letting up. Even military officials seem to be saying that to us.

Jeff Koinange, following things there for us. We thank you Jeff -- Daryn.

KAGAN: Looking at the inauguration taking place tomorrow, there are more events leading up to that today. President Bush is swearing in for a second term.

Our Dana Bash has a look from the White House.

Dana, good morning.

DANA BASH, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Daryn. Well, as you can probably see, it just started to snow here in Washington. The forecast does not show that for tomorrow for inauguration day. As you mentioned, just 26 hours away, the president is going to be sworn in. At this point, as of this morning, he is 16 drafts into the speech. It's running about 17 minutes long. He's going to have a practice session later today here at the White House.

And of course throughout all of today and tomorrow, in addition to the speech, you will have a lot of hoopla. Now, the president, the White House is trying to balance the partying with acknowledgment of the fact that he is president at a time of war. Last night, he paid tribute to those who served in the military. At this hour, Mr. Bush is going to go to the National Archives, view things like the Bible that George Washington used at his inaugural address. Later today, he's going to go to the very cold Ellipse, just next to the White House for some -- for a concert and some fireworks. Then three private candlelight dinners that would be to honor some of those who contributed to the more than about $40 million it is costing to put all of this on. Three of those dinners. And the president throughout all of this, Daryn, is also doing some interviews including one with CNN. He did one with John King yesterday. During that interview he conceded that there are some, in terms of terrorism, that think that this White House is simply crying wolf when it talks about the terrorist threats. But he insisted that since 9/11 this administration is having success at dismantling terror networks.

But when asked if he could fix one thing about the nation's intelligence, he said it's a problem that's been apparent since 9/11.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH (R), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Human intelligence, the ability to get inside somebody's mind, the ability to read somebody's mail. The ability to listen to somebody's phone call, that somebody being the enemy. We've got a commission up and running that will determine why things -- why we didn't find any stockpiles in Iraq.

And out of that commission, coupled with the new national director of intelligence, hopefully this president, and future presidents, will get the best possible intelligence, both human and of course, you know, signal intelligence.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: And Daryn, while the president did not give any ground on the issue of the pre-war planning, whether or not there were mistakes, not only in WMD. But also in whether or not he had enough troops in Iraq. And whether or not they were prepared for not to be greeted as liberators, as we, of course, did end up seeing. He gave no ground on that.

He did talk about as he has in other interviews, the fact that he does feel he was perhaps a bit too blunt with some of his words in the first term. He said he will be more careful in the second term but he's not going to change his plainspoken nature, as he said. He is going to still be very blunt when it comes to how he sees the United States versus countries that perhaps harbor terrorists -- Daryn.

KAGAN: Dana Bash from live from the White House. We will let you get inside out of the snow flurries so you can warm up to be back outside to cover tomorrow's inauguration. Thank you.

Well, security is already tight for the inauguration. It was put to the test yesterday. A van pulled up to the corner of the White House grounds. The driver told Secret Service he had something inside, which could detonate or ignite. Authorities boxed the van in. After a four-hour standoff, the driver surrendered. He was arraigned this morning. Police say the incident was family related and it was not terrorism.

From the swearing in, to the parade, to the parties, CNN will bring you live special coverage of all the inaugural events tomorrow. That is all day tomorrow. SANCHEZ: And we will continue to follow what is going on at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where the confirmation of Condoleezza Rice continues. So does the questioning from -- but weird to tell in these pictures. They should have some kind of headcount coming up pretty soon.

KAGAN: Yes. They are calling it a business meeting.

SANCHEZ: A business meeting. OK.

KAGAN: And then there will be a vote and then, of course, the vote in the full Senate tomorrow.

Right now, we take a quick break here on CNN.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KAGAN: An Amber Alert is now in its fifth day for two North Carolina children. The two-year-old boy and his 11-month-old sister were abducted from their foster home by their natural parents. That couple has been accused of running a meth lab in their home.

CNN's Randy Kaye sat down with the foster mother for an exclusive interview. The foster mother did not want her name or her face seen because of concern for her own safety.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I had just sat down for a cup of coffee. I heard the car come up and I got up to look out the window. I heard the footsteps. Saw people coming up. I went to the door and I opened it, and said, "Hey what are you up to? What do you need?" Not really thinking anything was wrong.

RANDY KAYE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (on camera): And this was James Canter and Alicia Chambers at the door.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It was.

KAYE: And what were they doing? Did they try and come inside...

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Well, in answering my question, they said we are here for the kids. We want the kids. And I started to say no, and to push them back because they were pushing forward. And James pulled out a gun.

They're part of our family. They're my babies. I mean Brianna was just 3 months old when she came to us. And she's all -- I'm all she knows as a mom. I've been there for her new teeth, and her learning to stand up.

KAYE: So how do you go to bed at night wondering where they are? Today is now Day 3 of the manhunt.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I don't want to go to bed. And I don't want to wake up. I want them home safely. They came out of a meth lab situation.

KAYE: When you see a baby bottle in the sink, and a sippy cup next to the remains of meth that was made, what does that do to you?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's scary to think about what those children have been exposed to.

KAYE: What would you want to say tonight to their biological parents?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: That what they're offering those children is not adequate for anybody to grow up to live a normal, healthy life. They might love those children, but they're not giving them what they need. And if they can't make the choice for the children, then let somebody else, who will love them and support them, have them to love and to be a part of their family.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KAYE: That was Brianna and Paul Chambers' foster mom speaking with me last night in her first television interview.

We want to show you once again the children's biological parents who authorities are looking for. That is James Lee Canter, 29 years old. The father in this case. And Alicia Chambers, his girlfriend, the children's mother. She is 18 years old.

Today tips are continuing to roll in. And investigators here in Boone, North Carolina have the added challenge, Daryn, of trying to make sense of these tips. Yesterday, they got one false alarm. There were some reports that the couple and kids had shown up at a convenience store in Tennessee. That was wrong. They also got one report that the couple had been seen in the audience on the "Dr. Phil Show." That clearly was not the case.

So now Day 5, the manhunt underway, Daryn.

KAGAN: Any tips that they might be getting help from their family?

KAYE: They do still believe -- we spoke with the sheriff a short time ago. They still do believe that the family and friends of this couple are helping them avoid capture. The sheriff has been on the phone this morning already with some relatives, and some folks who know this couple. And they're going to keep going until they find them.

KAGAN: All right. Randy Kaye from North Carolina, Thank you.

SANCHEZ: Interesting as we follow the Senate confirmation hearings of Condoleezza Rice. She is being questioned right now by Barack Oropa -- Obama. Interesting enough, his first national platform in a setting like this. He's talking about what perhaps she and others in the administration can do to sometimes disagree with whatever the administration's policies are. We'll continue to follow this. We'll be right back. (STOCK REPORT)

KAGAN: We'll be back after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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Aired January 19, 2005 - 09:00   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning. Condoleezza Rice back for day two. Second day of testimony set to begin any moment now live in the Senate Foreign Relation Committee on Capitol Hill.
Good morning. Welcome back, everybody, as AMERICAN MORNING continues right now.

As we come back here in the 9:00 hour, we anticipate the question-and-answer session to begin any moment now. As we watch Richard Lugar there, it looks like the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee now takes his seat.

Haven't seen a wide picture or a wide angle of the room. Not sure how many senators are seated yet. But any minute now, we expect day two to begin.

Nine hours of testimony yesterday, Soledad. Sometimes rather heated between the Democratic senators and Condoleezza Rice. We'll see which direction we go today.

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Yes. Senator Lugar just calling the folks to order. Of course it seemed like John Kerry had lengthy questioning for Condoleezza rice. Also yesterday, as we heard earlier today, Barbara Boxer really pretty contentious back and forth with Condoleezza Rice, as Jack point out earlier. Not one question in her allotted time, where she essentially lectured the national security adviser, now nominee, about sort of moral failings on the part of the administration, which some of our viewers took objections with.

We're listening to them call the meeting to order. And, of course, soon Condoleezza Rice will pick up on her testimony again.

HEMMER: Let's set the table. Ed Henry is in the room as well, back in his same location as yesterday.

Ed, good morning there. What do you anticipate?

ED HENRY, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Bill.

You know, everyone is waiting. Obviously, this has dragged on a little bit longer than was expected. A lot of people expected it to wrap up last night, including outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell.

His staff had put together a farewell bash for him today. That's now on standby. They're waiting, of course. They don't want to preempt Condoleezza Rice's testimony. We're expecting probably it will fizzle out just a little bit today. A lot of the sharp attacks from Senator Boxer, from Senator John Kerry came yesterday. As the evening wore on last night, they were kind of going over a lot of the same ground, mostly on Iraq, with less than two weeks now before the elections, of course, in Iraq.

That is the hottest issue of all. But they also covered Iran, North Korea, the Mideast peace process. Also HIV-AIDS in Africa, something that Condoleezza Rice said will be a focus for the Bush administration in the second term.

I think yesterday played out a lot like her testimony before the 9/11 Commission last April. A lot of pre-game hype there that there was going to be a lot of fireworks. But she really swatted away a lot of the questions. She shows herself to be very skillful in this setting -- Bill.

HEMMER: Ed, in a word, will be there -- will there be a vote at the end of today?

HENRY: Yes, we're expecting only about an hour or maybe two hours max of questions today. Again, as you know, senators can filibuster like they did a little bit yesterday. So it could go on. But we're expecting only an hour or two today.

At the end of that, Condoleezza Rice will leave, and then the committee will come in to for committee business. And there will be a voting committee. She will pass that vote today.

Then it goes to the full Senate. We're expecting action in the full Senate as early as tomorrow morning, when the Senate comes into session 10:00 a.m., two hours before the swearing in ceremony for President Bush.

HEMMER: Thank you, Ed. Ed Henry there in the room.

Let's take you into the room now. Christopher Dodd, Democratic senator from Connecticut, now with the microphone.

(JOINED IN PROGRESS)

SEN. CHRISTOPHER DODD (D), CONNECTICUT: And the intelligence agency admits to practicing it since the early 1990s.

In this report, there are several accounts of prisoners being transferred by the U.S. to certain countries and then allegedly being tortured during those interrogations.

Last year, I introduced an amendment to the defense authorization bill, part of which would have prevented the Department of Defense from transferring persons to third countries without keeping a record of the transfer and the reasons for it.

I wonder if you might comment on this, if you're familiar enough with the practice, and whether or not we might be willing at least to -- one, at least either preventing these renditions from occurring, or if not, at least keeping some record so we have some way of determining how these people are being treated.

Are you familiar with the subject matter?

CONDOLEEZZA RICE, NOMINATED TO BE SECY. OF STATE: Thank you, Senator.

May I just take one moment before I answer any question just to also thank the members of the committee for yesterday? I think it was an extensive, some would say even exhaustive, look at the questions that we face in American foreign policy. But I think it was an important day.

I appreciate very much the spirit in which the questions were asked. And I look forward -- and I really meant what I said and want to underscore -- I look forward to working with each and every member of the committee in a bipartisan fashion so that we can fashion an American foreign policy for the 21st century that takes advantage of the substantial opportunities before us, recognizing that these are also difficult times for the country.

RICE: And I want to thank you, especially, Mr. Chairman, for your leadership of yesterday and to tell you that I look forward to many other sessions of that kind.

SEN. RICHARD LUGAR (R), INDIANA: Great.

RICE: Now let me turn to Senator Dodd's question.

The United States is not permitted to transfer anyone if we think that they are going to be tortured. And, in fact, we make efforts to ascertain from any party that this will not happen. And you can be certain that we will continue to do so.

I want to be careful on commenting on intelligence matters, particularly in open session. But to say that we do -- anything that is done is done within the limits of the law. It is done with a recognition that the United States is special and has special responsibilities, and that we will continue to do that.

As to keeping a record, I would have to demure for now. I don't have enough information...

DODD: If you'd look at that for me and get back.

RICE: I will. And I'd be happy to talk with you about it at some point when we're not in open session.

DODD: And this may be the last, Mr. Chairman, (inaudible) make sure we have enough time for others, as well.

Mentioned earlier Senator Nelson, Senator Chafee and I made this trip into South America. And one of the issues (inaudible) is the contraband issues and the narcotrafficking issues. It's very, very common. The economic issue is important, as well.

I don't know if you had a comment on this. I'd ask you to pay particular attention to that tri-border area that Senator Chafee, Senator Nelson and I spent some time in that Brazilian-Argentinian- Paraguayan corner where it is termed the Wild West, in terms of contraband issues and money flowing back and forth and some very, very important questions. And there needs to be some specific attention, I think, paid there -- more attention than we are now.

The narcotrafficking issue -- there's a great concern about the ballooning affect we've seen over the years. And that is, we've put a lot of attention as we have over $3 billion in Colombia over the last few years. And there's concerns now of this problem reemerging again in Peru and Bolivia where it was in the past, even parts of Brazil.

DODD: The issues of Venezuela obviously get affected by these decisions as well. And there really is a need, I think, for a more comprehensive approach to this.

When we had the certification process here, which the chairman and those who remember, it was a rather difficult process we went through year in and year out declaring which countries were complying or not complying with our anti-narcotics efforts. It caused a lot of acrimony between countries that would be labeled not being supportive.

And so we changed that. We dropped that. But we promised when we did it that we were going to replace it with something. Just doing nothing about it was not the answer.

And part of what we talked about was developing a more comprehensive approach, where, as a consuming country, we'd work more closely with the producing, transferring, money-laundering nations as well.

I would urge you to see if we can't revitalize that. There is a growing concern with the great disparity of resources we're applying to these countries as they battle with these issues. And it's something that really deserves more attention. And we're going to find this problem just moving from nation to nation in these countries without really addressing it more thoroughly.

And if you want to comment on that at all or not, but I'd ask you to really pay attention to that if you could.

RICE: Thank you, Senator. I will take a hard look at it.

We had in concept, when we had the Andean initiative, exactly this in mind, of course which was that if you stop the spread of narco-trafficking in one place, it would find a home in another. And it was intended to be comprehensive in terms of alternative livelihoods and in terms of economic development to forestall that.

But it's a very good point, and I'll take a hard look at it.

DODD: Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

LUGAR: Well, thank you very much, Senator Dodd. Many senators have come in since the beginning of the hearing. Let me mention we're going to have five-minute round. Senators are not obligated to use their five minutes, some will want to pass.

But in any event, at 10 o'clock, Senators, then we'll gather for a business meeting on the nomination.

Senator Chafee?

SEN. LINCOLN CHAFEE (R), RHODE ISLAND: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

And good morning, Dr. Rice.

I see you're fourth in line for succession to the presidency, and so this is an important hearing we're having, and also in that line of succession the only one that hasn't appeared before the public in any kind of capacity in the electoral process.

CHAFEE: This is an important process.

Going back to my questions from yesterday of finding common ground. And as I look back in history -- and you're an historian -- and the success we had with the thaw with the People's Republic of China had a lot to do with the exchange of ping-pong teams, of all things.

And I always admired the architects of that doctrine in that we knew that the Chinese ping-pong players were probably beat us it 21 to 2 or something, but that wasn't what was important. It was the start of finding common ground.

And I was wondering -- in some of my questions, you seemed to reject that doctrine of finding common ground.

RICE: Thank you, Senator, for giving me an opportunity to answer that, because obviously with need to look for common ground.

There is no reason that the United States has to have permanent enemies. We have had circumstances in which there have been major changes in the world.

And, you know, the Libyan experience shows that if there are countries that are prepared to forswear behavior that is dangerous to the international system, that we can start down a different path.

And I'm glad that you mentioned the ping-pong diplomacy because obviously in almost every circumstance, the exchange of people of civil society, of nongovernmental actors, is often an important tool in thawing difficult relations. And so I don't want to leave the impression that I would be by any means opposed to looking for those opportunities. And I will look for them.

CHAFEE: Can we specifically go back to Venezuela again? Where can we find common ground?

RICE: Well, we have -- obviously, we talked about the economic relationship yesterday. And there's common ground there. We sit together in the OAS. We sit together in the Summit of the Americas.

The point is that we don't have a problem with finding common ground. We have, right now, a government in Venezuela that has been unconstructive in important ways.

RICE: And I would just urge that the entire neighborhood, as well as the Venezuelan government, look at what's happening in terms of democracy in Venezuela, in terms of Venezuela's relations with its neighbors.

But this is a matter of sadness, not of anger.

CHAFEE: And with Iran, is there any potential for finding common ground with Iran?

RICE: Well, I think the problems with Iran are well known. And we've tried to make them known to the Iranian government, often through third parties, sometimes when we've been in -- or together.

This is just a regime that has a really very different view of the Middle East and where the world is going than we do. It's really hard to find common ground with a government that thinks Israel should be extinguished. It's difficult to find common ground with a government that is supporting Hezbollah and terrorist organizations that are determined to undermine the Middle East peace that we seek.

So I would hope that the nuclear issues will be resolved. It's extremely important to the world that Iran not acquire a nuclear weapon. And we are working closely with the European Union on that.

I would hope that the Iranian government does something to make clear to the world that they're not going to support terrorists who are determined to undermine the two-state solution in the Palestinian -- in the Holy Land.

And those are barriers to relations.

RICE: And we just have to be honest about it.

It's a very different view. Not to mention, by the way, that a theocratic government that has a view that the mullahs ought to rule, that has no rights -- or has a human rights record that is really appalling and that treats its citizens, its women in that way, is not a regime with which I think we have very much common ground, particularly given the way that we would like to see the Middle East develop.

CHAFEE: It seems to me, going back into history, the same occurrences were with the People's Republic of China at the time. They were arming the -- in the middle of the Vietnam war, arming our opponents in that war.

I mean, there was every opportunity to accentuate our differences and everything wrong with them. But nonetheless, through this thawing, this process of exchange and ping-pong diplomacy, now the two countries are not killing each other. And interestingly, on Iran, I went to a conference in Bahrain earlier in December, and the Iranians were there. I looked up out of curiosity, who are these delegates from Iran. And each of the three delegates from Iran had been educated at the United States, one at the University of Houston, one at the University of Cincinnati and one at Michigan State.

And I wasn't surprised. There is common ground.

But given every opportunity to express even the slightest finding of that common ground, I find that you've instead fallen to accentuating and magnifying our differences.

RICE: Well, Senator, let me make just make the following point.

You know, when the Forum for the Future was held, the very important meeting that was held to talk about reform in the Middle East, the Iranians were invited. The Moroccans wanted to invite them. We said we had no objection. And they didn't come.

And I think there's a reason they didn't come, which was that that was a gathering of civil society and business leaders and people in the country who wanted to talk about reform.

RICE: That's an opportunity for Iran to interact with the world.

We showed, I think, our respect for and our humanitarian impulse to the Iranian people with our response to the Bam earthquake. And it was a very great moment in the history of American compassion and generosity. And I hope we'll have other opportunities that are not linked to disaster to let the Iranian people know that we have no desire to isolate them from the international system or from others.

And so, I understand your question. It's a complex problem when you're dealing with a regime that really has views that we consider illegitimate. But from the point of view of the Iranian people, this is a people who should be in contact with the rest of the world.

CHAFEE: Well, thank you very much.

I know my time is up. I'll just say, I thank you for your time.

And yesterday, we talked about Martin Luther King Day and I recommended you read his great treatise, "Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community."

RICE: Thank you.

LUGAR: Thank you, Senator Chafee.

Senator Biden?

SEN. JOSEPH BIDEN (D), DELAWARE: Madam Secretary, you had a long day yesterday but you've got many long days ahead of you as secretary of state. But I'd like to cut right to it. Yesterday as -- and I'm going to make it clear, I intend to vote for you because I believe strongly, the president is entitled to his Cabinet unless the person he taps is so far out of the mainstream -- and you are clearly not -- or is not intellectually capable to handle the job -- you're clearly capable. And he obviously values you very, very much as his counsel.

BIDEN: So I'm going to vote for you. But I must tell you it's with a little bit of frustration and some reservation.

The questions we asked you in writing, and then yesterday at the hearing, I thought gave you an opportunity to acknowledge some of the mistakes and misjudgments of the past four years.

And I want to make it clear, and I made it clear time and again, no matter who is president -- no matter who is president -- could have been the Lord Almighty, it could have been Al Gore, it could have been John Kerry, could have been anyone, it could have been John Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan -- after 9/11, they would have made mistakes. There's no way in which we could have undertaken this effort without some mistakes being made.

So the point we're -- at least I, and I don't think anyone else here is different -- was trying to get to you with you yesterday is not to play, "I got you" or embarrass the president, but about what we've learned, what we'd do different, how we'd proceed differently given the opportunity again or given a similar circumstance, which we may face.

We may face a God-awful choice in Korea. We may face a God-awful choice in Iran. And we may face an awful choice with regard to Syria.

And so we're trying to get some insight into how a second term, a second chance, a second round might be different, not even because anybody else would have done it better, not because -- that Al Gore, had he been president, would have done it better.

But instead of seizing the opportunity, it seems to me, Dr. Rice, you have danced around it and, sort of, stuck to the party line, which seems pretty consistent: You're always right, you never made any mistakes, you're never wrong.

And it's almost like, "If I acknowledge any misjudgments on the part of me or the president or anybody in the team, it's a sign of weakness."

But I personally don't think it is. I think it's a sign of some degree of maturation, strength.

Yesterday, you claimed my colleague Barbara Boxer was impugning your integrity when she asked you about the changing rationale for the war in Iraq.

I wish, instead, you had acknowledged the facts: The administration secured the support of the American people and of the Congress for going to war based overwhelmingly on the notion that they believed and it was portrayed, in my view, by the administration -- understandably from your perspective -- that Iraq was an imminent threat because it possessed or was about to possess weapons of mass destruction.

BIDEN: Now, when it turns out there are no such weapons, you claim the war was based on removing a dictator.

Now, my recollection -- I've asked my staff to go back and check this, and before the hearing is over this morning they'll have statements -- my recollection it was explicitly stated it was not about regime change, that's not why we were going to war; that would be the effect, but that wasn't the rationale for going to war when we went to war.

Now, I'm glad Saddam's gone. He deserves a special place in Hell -- a special place in Hell.

I, like others -- Chuck Hagel and I, we went up into Irbil. We got smuggled in before the war into northern Iraq. We rode on a seven-hour ride through the mountains -- I understand why the Kurds now say "the mountains are our only friends." And three or four hours before that in Turkey. And we met with the widows of those people who were gassed. We saw the pictures of little kids' eyes bulging out. And, you know, we saw what "Chemical Ali" actually did to those people. So he deserves a special place in Hell.

But if you read the resolution Congress passed giving the president authority to use force if necessary, it was about disarming Saddam. It was about disarming.

And reread the words of the president and other senior officials in speech after speech, TV appearance after TV appearance, you left the American people the impression that Iraq was on the verge of reconstituting nuclear weapons.

I don't doubt you believed that. But to pretend we didn't leave them that impression and leave the Congress the impression -- in fact, I'm not positive of this, but I think I was on "Face the Nation" the day that the vice president was on "Meet the Press." And he got asked about nuclear weapons -- the vice president said, "They have reconstituted their nuclear weapons."

And I got on -- asked on either "Late Edition" or one of the -- the same day, on Sunday I said -- they said, "Is that true?" And I looked at the camera and said, "Absolutely not."

One of two things, either the vice president is deliberately misleading the American people and the Congress, or you all are not telling the Congress the truth -- and at that time, I was the ranking member and just prior to that, the chairman -- telling us the truth about what we had in terms of intelligence. Because as I said, I have seen nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing up to that date to indicate they had reconstituted their nuclear capability.

And so, the -- back then, as I said, we were all left with the impression, as Senator Boxer suggested, that this was about weapons of mass destruction and an imminent threat.

BIDEN: Now, when I said about -- I don't know, six, eight months, maybe longer -- I said the administration claimed that there was an imminent threat, it was pointed out to me that the phrase "imminent threat" was not used by the president.

But here's what other senior officials said, "immediate threat," quote. "Moral threat," quote. "Urgent threat," quote. "Grave threat," quote. "Serious and mounting threat," quote. "Unique threat."

Now, it would almost be funny if it wasn't so, so serious that we are, sort of, dancing on the head of a pin here whether "imminent" was stated.

Now, you say that. I was corrected by other administration officials for saying that the president said "imminent."

But here's my point: Especially on matters of war and peace, we've got to level with the American people if we want, not only their support -- if we want to sustain that support.

My greatest worry -- and it genuinely is a worry -- if that if we're going to get the job done in Iraq, you're going to have to come back here for another at least $100 billion before it's over, probably close to $200 billion before it's all over.

And I'm worried your friends on that side of the aisle are going to say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute, Jack, y'all didn't tell me that."

Now, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they'll all today pledge publicly that if you asked for $200 billion, they'll belly up to the bar and do it. I can tell you, I will. I can tell you, I will.

But you're going to have a little problem here -- you, the administration -- with this outfit, Democrats and Republicans, because I don't think they know what's in store here.

We've all got to be honest, also, with the world, otherwise, we'll do terrible damage beyond what we've already done to our credibility which is, in my travels around the world, at least in question, in many places.

You've heard a thousand times the analogy that was given about, you know, when Acheson went to de Galle and said, "You know, Mr. President, here I want to show you the pictures of the Cubans -- that the fact that the Cubans have put in Russian missile sites, et cetera, et cetera. And de Galle raised his hand and said, "No, no. I don't need to see that" -- I'm paraphrasing. He said, "I know President Kennedy would never mislead me in a matter of war and peace."

Well, we both know, because the world has changed, that even if Kerry had been elected, nobody out there is likely to believe the president of the United States on matters of intelligence just saying, "I know he'd never mislead me. You don't have to show me anything." Those days are gone, unfortunately, for awhile.

After Iraq, it's much harder for the world to rally to our side if we have to face a truly imminent threat in Korea or Iran.

BIDEN: The same goes for the way you answered my questions, in my view, about training Iraqi security forces. It is true: There's probably 120,000 people in uniform. But the question really is -- and I'll end, Mr. Chairman, I know my -- I'm going over my time.

The question really is, how many of those forces could supplant American forces? How many of them we could trade off for an American soldier? Because that's ultimately, again, the exit strategy: Get enough Iraqis there so we don't need American troops there.

Time and again, this administration has tried to leave the American people with the impression that Iraq has well over 100,000 fully trained, fully competent military police and personnel, and that is simply not true. You and I know that. We're months, probably years, away from reaching our target goal.

When the chairman and I were in Iraq with Senator Hagel, right after Saddam's statue went down, we asked the military as well as the police trainers, "How long would it take you to train a military force that's necessary?" They talked about 40,000. And they said, at least two, maybe three years.

"How long would it take you to train a police force capable of policing the country to replace the 79,000 thugs that were called police before?" They said, three to five years.

That was our people. Our people told us that.

And all of a sudden, Rumsfeld announces, "Hey, we've got this done. Don't worry, be happy." That calypso song should be the theme song of the Defense Department, the military of the Defense Department -- I mean, the civilians.

So, yesterday, I think you had a chance to help wipe the slate clean for the American people and our allies, tell them flat-out how hard it was going to be, how much more time it was going to take and why we needed to do it. It's not about revisiting the past, Dr. Rice, it's about how you're going to meet the challenges of the future.

BIDEN: And I must tell you, for the first time in the last four years, I have doubts about it either because you're not telling us, the president doesn't know, or you all don't have a plan. Because that's -- and I'm telling you honestly, that's what I walk away from this hearing worried about.

I'm going to vote for you. But I'm telling you, because of the standard I have about the president having intelligent, bright people, honorable -- and you're all of those things. He gets to choose who he wants.

But I just -- I left the hearing yesterday and got on the train somewhat perplexed. And I'll end with this -- it's like the issue I asked you about Iran. If in fact, the Lord Almighty came down and said, "Look, we guarantee we can monitor, whether they're keeping the commitment, no nukes, no missiles, would we make a deal with them?" Doesn't mean we don't still fight about their support of Hezbollah, terror, human rights.

And my impression from you -- and maybe you can clarify it now -- is you said, no, we wouldn't make a deal if it were just those two things -- no nukes, no missiles, period, would we make a deal with them?

That's my question. Would we? Or do we have to have it all settled all at once with them?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

RICE: Senator, I'll be brief.

The question about Iran, I think, is a question of looking at the totality of the relationship.

Obviously, the pressing issue right now is to deal with Iran's nuclear program. And I think that we will see what becomes of the E.U.-3 efforts.

RICE: We'll work with them. We will see what we can do in the IAEA.

(CROSSTALK)

BIDEN: If we got that deal, would we sign it?

RICE: If the Iranians are prepared to verifiably and irreversibly get rid of their nuclear program, then that will be a very good day, and I think it would certainly change the circumstances that we are looking at.

BIDEN: I wish we had a court reporter who could play back what you just said.

What's the answer? Would you make the deal or not?

RICE: The answer is, Senator, is I'm not going to get into hypotheticals until I know what I'm looking at. That's the answer.

BIDEN: Well, you're in a hypothetical with China. You make a lot of deals with China. Their human rights program is horrible.

RICE: I understand those...

(CROSSTALK)

BIDEN: Their support is horrible. Their problems with us are serious. I mean, I don't get it. Why can't you just say, if that worked -- wouldn't that be a nice message to send to the Iranians: "Hey, guarantee us no missiles, guarantee us no nukes, we can make a deal."

Is that a good idea?

RICE: Senator, what we have said to the Iranians is, look at the Libyan example. The United States doesn't have permanent enemies.

BIDEN: And look at the Libyan example and look at Gadhafi's role in human rights now in his country.

RICE: But what we've done with the Libyan example is that the Libyans made an irreversible -- we believe -- decision about their weapons of mass destruction. They made it, by the way, without a promise of specific deals. We told them that there could be a path to better relations, and they're now on a path to better relations.

BIDEN: That's not what Gadhafi told me. I asked him why he made the deal -- straight up. The State Department was in there.

He said, "It was simple." He said, "I knew if I had used nuclear," -- well, first of all, he said, "Nuclear weapons didn't help you much," -- through a translator -- "nuclear weapons didn't help you much in Vietnam and in Iraq."

BIDEN: That was his comment.

Secondly, he said, "You know, if I used them," I forget exactly the phrase, "you'd blow me away."

And thirdly, he said, "They weren't much value to me." And guess -- and then he went on to say, "And now I can have American oil companies in here pumping the oil out of the ground."

I asked why (inaudible) why he wanted American oil companies. And he made an analogy to the French, he said, "You make a deal with the French, they say 90-10 and they take 95." He said, "The Americans, you say 50-50, they only take 50." Most candid guy I ever spoke with.

RICE: Well, the Libyan example is a good example.

Let me turn very briefly to the question of lessons learned.

I said yesterday, Senator, we've made a lot of decisions in this period of time, some of them have been good, some of them have not been good. Some of them have been bad decisions, I'm sure.

I know enough about history to stand back and to recognize that you judge decisions not at the moment, but in how it all adds up. And I -- that's just strongly the way that I feel about big historical changes.

I'm being as straightforward with you as I possibly can.

BIDEN: I appreciate that.

RICE: And that's how I see it.

BIDEN: It's a little bit like I told my daughter, I have no doubt -- when she was 18 -- I have no doubt -- 16 -- I have no doubt by the time she was 30 years old, she would be a beautiful, intelligent, well-educated, happy lady. I just wondered how much pain there was going to be between then and 30.

(LAUGHTER)

RICE: I understand that.

BIDEN: I'm talking about pain here.

RICE: Well, I'm afraid in difficult historical circumstances, there's going to be a lot of it and a lot of sacrifice.

I don't have a 16-year-old daughter to refer to, but I will tell you that I think the analogy is apt because it's how Iraq turns out that really ultimately matters.

If I could just say one thing, though, about lessons learned. And that is, I spoke yesterday about the important work that we've been doing on the Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization -- I think that's a lesson learned.

We didn't have the right skills, the right capacity to deal with a reconstruction effort of this kind. And we are going to face these again even if it's not after war, and I certainly hope that it will not be.

RICE: We're going to face it in places like Liberia, places like Sudan.

BIDEN: All we want to know is how are you going to face it with the $15 billion that's sitting out there now you haven't spent and, you know, you don't know what to do with it?

RICE: We do know what to do with it, Senator. And that's...

BIDEN: You want to tell us? It'd be good. Tell us.

RICE: That spending is accelerating and I'll be glad to give you a full accounting of it the next time I see you.

BIDEN: God bless you.

And by the way, my daughter's 23. She thinks I'm handsome and smart again. All is well.

RICE: All is well.

(LAUGHTER)

(UNKNOWN): And she's right. (UNKNOWN): You better straighten her out.

BIDEN: Thanks, pal.

(UNKNOWN): Now, I've got one at 27 and I'm still going through a lot of pain.

COLEMAN: Two comments, Dr. Rice, one, with all the talk about the foreign policy goals, the things that impact my constituents most and I was surprised my first years as a senator. I probably spent more time on immigration issues and child adoption than any other issue in my state office. So I just want to raise that.

And probably, by the way, the most satisfying portion of what I do to unite families. You have a program called Adjudicate Orphan Status First. It's a pilot project.

I would just urge you to take a look at expanding it. We do wonderful things to bring families together and it's really important stuff that we don't talk about much.

And I just have to join in the conversation here. I am sympathetic to some of my colleagues' concern about finding common ground. I join with some of my colleagues believing that we need to find more common ground with Venezuela. I think we have to figure out a way to do that.

But I have to agree with you and appreciate your response in separating Venezuela from Iran, a country that's calling for the destruction of Israel, that's supporting terrorism, that no freedom of religion, abysmal human rights record, pursuit of nuclear weapons.

COLEMAN: Just in Iraq, talking to Allawi, concern about interfering with what's going on in Iraq.

And I will say, Dr. Rice, for this senator, the idea of finding common ground with Iran and the mullahs makes me sick. There is a separation there, and I believe it's important for some of us to keep our eye on that difference between Iran and Venezuela.

RICE: Thank you.

LUGAR: Thank you very much, Senator Coleman.

Senator Feingold?

SEN. RUSS FEINGOLD (D), WISCONSIN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Dr. Rice, thanks for this further opportunity to speak with you.

I'm struck by the conversation you just had with Senator Biden with regard to Iraq, in part because I think if people are watching this hearing they would think that we've been in great disagreement about foreign policy ever since 9/11.

That's not what really happened. We were all quite unified with regard to the fight against terrorism, trying to figure out this challenge, up until the time that serious disagreements occurred with regard to whether Iraq really was part of that effort or to what extent it was.

So I want to return, in that spirit, to the item that I started with yesterday: Secretary Rumsfeld's interesting comments in his memo that there was no consensus within the national security community of the United States about how to even measure success in the fight against terrorism.

You and I had an exchange about this yesterday, where you talked about some of the places, geographically, where it's much harder for the terrorist network to operate. I talked about my concern that I think they actually are able to operate in other places, North Africa. And we went back and forth on that.

But, fundamentally, I'd like to have you say a little bit about how do we measure success. Not a list of things we've done, but how do we measure how well the terrorists are doing? How do we know whether they're picking up steam in terms of picking up recruits and gathering more help around the world or not? How do we measure this thing?

I think that's one of the most important things that perhaps we could come together on and start discussing again once we get through this serious disagreement on Iraq.

RICE: It's a very interesting question, Senator, and it's a hard question.

As you know, when you're measuring any social phenomenon, you are usually without hard tools to do it. That's one of the lessons of social science. If you're measuring scientific phenomena, you have hard tools to do it. If you're measuring human phenomena, how do you measure how well a young person is developing? These are human phenomena, they are hard to measure.

One of the hardest things about this is this is a very shadowy network whose numbers are hard to count. It's important and difficult to know what is a hardcore terrorist who is committed to the jihad and would never be reformable in any way, versus somebody who might just be attracted to the philosophy because they're jobless or hopeless or whatever and might be brought back into the fold.

RICE: That's the kind of important question for which we, frankly, don't have a measurement, and I don't think we're going to. I think we're going to see this in broader strokes.

We can measure with good intelligence issues like how well we think they're doing on funding. We can measure something like that -- imperfectly because we're dependent on what intelligence we can learn about that.

We can measure imperfectly when we take down some of their leadership, whether they seem to be able to replace that leadership. We can measure imperfection whether we think they are able to carry through on threats that we believe they have issued. But again, imperfectly.

What we're going to be able to measure -- and I would resist trying to measure -- is how we're doing in empowering moderate Islam against radical Islam because that is an historical process that is going to have its ups and downs.

But in time, when you have a Pakistan coming back from the brink of extremism or you have an Indonesia carrying out a democratic election in which the role of terrorism and Islam was actually a fairly minor issue, you have to say we are making some progress.

How much? I can't tell you. But we're making some progress.

What I keep my eye on is how is moderate Islam doing. When I'm asked, what future am I looking for, I'm looking for a future in which the regions of the world that we're concerned about, whether it is North Africa or East Africa or the Middle East or Southeast Asia, that moderate Islam is winning. It's winning in governments. It's winning in rhetoric. It's winning in educational programs.

But the impact of that is going to be a while before we see it.

FEINGOLD: I appreciate that answer. I recognize how imperfect it is. And I do think a lot of it has to do with how moderate Islam is doing.

FEINGOLD: But let me just give you an example from Algeria, where, of course, they've gone through this horrendous period of terrorism and they're coming out of it. And we had a dinner with civil society people last week in Algeria, said, "Now, what about the young people here? Are they likely to return, to be attracted to a radical, violent Islam or not?"

And the sense was that they probably wouldn't because it was so horrible, but perhaps if economic opportunity didn't improve, that it could happen.

I'm not so sure that it can't be measured more than we're doing. I'm not so sure that we can't identify these trends in a more serious way than we are. And I think it would be very valuable information.

Let me turn to one other question. I'd like you to explain how, if you could, the president's emergency plan for AIDS relief will help build infrastructural capacity in Africa, particularly in the area of training health care practitioners, especially community health workers, and discouraging the medical brain drain?

In the course of the work I have done in this committee, you have a lot of wonderful conversations with people in countries, especially Africa, and some heartbreaking ones. And I find one of the most heartbreaking to be my conversation to Botswana, with the president of that country, President Mogae, who was acknowledging that they had a 40 percent AIDS rate and that they were trying to deal with it, but whenever they'd get some local health care workers trained, they were poached by American health care entities or European health care entities, and they couldn't keep the very people that were trying to deal with this situation.

So while implementing partners all adhere to a set of principles regarding hiring local staff to ensure that we don't siphon resources away from the domestic health care infrastructure, making our efforts, in the end, unsustainable if we don't do that.

RICE: Again, a very important point.

And the whole concept, especially of the part of the emergency plan that is for the 15 most affected, is to focus not just on the delivery of services -- which is important in itself, the cure -- the treatments, 2 million, preventing 7 million, giving access to information and care for 10 million, those are all very important goals. But the design of the program has also been to worry about the delivery mechanism for that care, to use a tiered approach so that you have clinics in the cities that can do that, or hospitals in the cities.

RICE: But that you also build capacity in the village in some of these places even using motorcycle riders to get the care out, people who've been trained to administer or help administer the drugs so that you're improving the health care delivery system as well.

And that really was the innovation that came about through studying and working with, for instance, the Ugandans, who have a very effective system of delivery.

It is also the case, of course, that if you improve the delivery system for AIDS, you improve the health care system delivery for other things as well: malaria, tuberculosis are part of the program, but others as well. If you improve mother-to-child transmission delivery, you improve OB/GYN care. You improve neonatal care and so forth.

And so I think it's really -- probably one of the most important aspects of the emergency plan, would be not just to focus on the treatment itself, although that's extremely important, but what we're doing for the health care delivery system.

I hadn't thought much about the problem of well-trained health care workers being siphoned off but we'll go back and give that some thought.

FEINGOLD: I would appreciate that.

LUGAR: Thank you very much, Senator Feingold.

Senator Hagel?

SEN. CHUCK HAGEL (R), NEBRASKA: No questions.

LUGAR: Senator Hagel passes.

Senator Boxer? SEN. BARBARA BOXER (D), CALIFORNIA: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for being so fair.

Thank you, Dr. Rice, for answering our questions.

Mr. Chairman, and my ranking member, I'm going to use my time this morning to lay out the rest of my concerns.

BOXER: And then, when we get a chance to vote, I'm going to put all my concerns back into context again.

Dr. Rice, clearing the air and, as Senator Biden said, starting from a fresh page here would have been wonderful. We haven't had that.

And the reason I think it is so important to place into the record some of your past statements is because your administration has named several countries in the axis of evil. We don't know what your plans are. We haven't been able to flesh them out.

I think Senator Biden has been trying to push you on the Iran situation.

We don't have an exit strategy for Iraq that we can tell because you insist there's 120,000 in the Iraqi forces. But yet, being pressed by several senators here yesterday, you still won't say how many of them really are trained.

So we've got problems here. At least, I have problems here. So forgive me if I continue along the lines of yesterday.

Now, Dr. Rice and colleagues, our country is united in waging war on those responsible for 9/11 and eliminating the Al Qaeda network. That is why I find it so troubling that the Bush administration used the fear of terror to make the war against Iraq appear to be part of the response to 9/11.

And, Dr. Rice, as I said, you were involved in that effort. You were the face on television, as was pointed out yesterday.

You tell us that you were giving the president confidential advice, but you didn't shrink from talking straight to the American people.

Now, I don't know one American who wants Saddam Hussein to see the light of day. So that's not the point. I don't know of one American who wanted Slobodan Milosevic to see the light of day.

BOXER: And guess what? And you know this: 1,300-plus American soldiers didn't have to die to get rid of Slobodan Milosevic and 10,000 didn't have to get wounded. So there are issues surrounding this.

Now, on September 25th, '02, you said in an interview with Margaret Warner on PBS, "We clearly know that there were in the past and have been contacts between senior Iraqi officials and members of Al Qaeda going back for actually quite a long time." And you went on to say, "And there are some Al Qaeda personnel who found refuge in Baghdad."

Now, that statement and others by administration officials assert there was a long-standing operational alliance between Iraq and Al Qaeda. We know the truth is otherwise. We know it. And I'll show you again the State Department document signed off by President Bush in October 2001, one month after 9/11, showing absolutely no operational cells in Saddam Hussein-controlled Iraq.

And second, most experts agree that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were far from being allies. In an interview on CNBC with Maria Bartiromo on March 24th, '03, Peter Bergen was asked if he saw any direct connection between Saddam and Osama. Mr. Bergen said, "Well, you know, I met bin Laden in '97 and I asked him at the end of the interview his opinion of Saddam, and he said, 'Well, Saddam is a bad Muslim and he took Kuwait for his own self-aggrandizement.'"

In November '01, the former head of the Saudi intelligence said, quote, "Iraq doesn't come very high in estimation of Osama bin Laden. He thinks of Hussein as an apostate, an infidel, or someone who is not worthy of being a fellow Muslim."

Third, you were contradicted by the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, which stated in its report last summer that there was, quote, "no collaborative relation between Iraq and Al Qaeda."

In fact, the 9/11 Commission report states that you received a memo on September 18th, '01, detailing what was known about the links between Al Qaeda and Iraq. Let me read the 9/11 Commission's description of the memo you received.

They write: "The memo pointed out that bin Laden resented the secularism of Saddam Hussein's regime. Finally," the memo said, "there was no confirmed reporting on Saddam cooperating with bin Laden."

BOXER: So, you received a memo on September '01 clearly stating there was no link. The president himself was part of a State Department publication which said there were no Al Qaeda in Iraq prior to 9/11. There's documented history of bin Laden's loathing of Saddam.

And in spite of this, you went on TV and told the American people there was a clear connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Even the State Department was very clear that there were no such contacts.

So, it is very disturbing to think that in spite of everything, and all the information that you had, you continued to go out there and claim this contact and make the people feel that somehow going to war against Iraq was our response to 9/11.

Now, on the aluminum tubes, I'm not going to get into the back and forth with you on the aluminum tubes. But I'm going to lay this into the record because I think it's essential. On September 8th -- first, I believe you tried to convince the American people that Iraq's purchase of aluminum tubes proved positively that they were going to build nuclear weapons. That's your statement about the mushroom cloud, which scared the heck out of every American.

On September 8th, '02, you were on CNN's "Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer" and you made this statement: "We do know there have been shipments of going into Iraq, for instance, of aluminum tubes that are really only suited to -- high-quality aluminum tubes that are only" -- I am reiterating what you said -- "really suited for a nuclear weapons program, centrifuge programs."

That unequivocal statement was wrong. You never mentioned to the American people that there was a major dispute about the tubes, even though our nation's leading nuclear experts in the Department of Energy in 2001 said the tubes were for small artillery rockets, not for nuclear weapons.

It is reported that one Energy Department analyst summed up this issue for the Senate Intelligence Committee saying, quote, "The tubes were so poorly suited for centrifuges that if Iraq truly wanted to use them this way, we should just give them the tubes," unquote.

This dispute among the CIA, the DIA, the Department of Energy, Department of State over the likely use of tubes was played out in front of this committee. And, Mr. Chairman, I remember it. I was there in that meeting. It was very contentious and we saw all sides of the issue.

This dispute was so well known that the Australian intelligence service wrote in a July 2002 assessment that the tubes evidence was, quote, "patchy and inconclusive."

Third, the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, reported on January 8th, '03, that the tubes were, quote, "not directly suitable for uranium enrichment and were consistent with making ordinary artillery rockets."

So, given the concerns raised by Department of Energy, Department of State, the Australians, the IAEA, you still failed to level with the American people on the subject of the aluminum tubes.

Even as recently as a few months ago, October 3rd, 2004, you had the opportunity to finally set the record straight.

BOXER: And as Senator Biden says, it's good to set the record straight. We've got to move on.

But when you we were asked by "This Week's" George Stephanopoulos about the tube controversy, you said, "There was dispute by only one agency, that's the State Department."

Now, that is not the truth. It's not the facts. And it is very, very troubling to me. As Senator Biden said, we all make mistakes. God knows, I've made mine and I will make more. I apologize in advance to my constituents for the mistakes that I'll make.

But once all of the facts are out there, can't we just make sure that the truth is finally embedded into history without turning our backs on what the truth is?

So that's another area.

Now, I know my time is up. I can either wait till one more round or I can just finish up my last area of concern.

Can I just finish it up?

LUGAR: Proceed.

BOXER: OK.

When you were making the case for the war in Iraq, one of the things that you said that, frankly, stunned me was that a reason to go was the Iranians were gassed by the Iraqis.

Now this is truly a horrific fact. That is right.

But, Dr. Rice, we all know the Iran-Iraq War took place between 1980 and 1988, and the United States knew -- they knew that Saddam Hussein was using chemical weapons against the Iranians. And it was appalling.

BOXER: Despite this fact -- despite this fact, I'm sure you're aware who traveled to Iraq to meet with Saddam Hussein one month after we became aware of this. It was Donald Rumsfeld. And Donald Rumsfeld tried to increase diplomatic relations with Saddam Hussein.

Iraq was a charter member of the terrorism list in 1979, put on there by Jimmy Carter. Do you know, and I'm sure you knew at the time you said this, that it was the United States who removed Iraq from our list of state sponsors of terrorism? And they didn't get put back on until 1990.

So, let's review. While Saddam was gassing the Iranians, a despicable act, Donald Rumsfeld and the Reagan administration reestablished U.S. relations with Iraq and refused to put Iran back on the terrorism list.

So, in '03, when you told the American people that Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons against Iran was a justification for war, one of them that you gave, why didn't you tell them the full story?

Why didn't you mention that it was Rumsfeld who favored the normalization of relations with Iraq during a time when Saddam was using chemical weapons against Iran?

So, a reason you gave the American people for the war in Iraq, and the reason you believed it was worth American lives was the heinous gassing of the Iranians by Saddam in the '80s. This gassing was known to the American government at the time. The gassing did nothing to dissuade the American government from launching full diplomatic relations with Saddam. And America gave its seal of approval to Saddam Hussein by sending Special Envoy Donald Rumsfeld to Iraq when we had zero relations with Iran at that time.

So, to me, it's telling a half-truth to the American people. It's gaming the American people. And as someone who believes that we, again, owe the full story, it was very upsetting to me that you didn't put it into context.

Now, had you said, "You know, we were wrong. We were fooled," maybe it would have been better.

BOXER: But there's no mention anywhere.

So, I guess what I am saying, Mr. Chairman, these are my areas of deep concern. I've gone back through the records exhaustively because I knew, Dr. Rice -- and you saw it yesterday, you know, we can get into a give and take, and she's a very good debater and I'm a pretty good debater. And that's interesting.

But I think we need to see what the facts are and why I'm disturbed about this particular nomination. It isn't based on qualifications or intelligence or all the rest, because that's obvious. Wonderful, breaking the glass ceiling and all those beautiful things, which I am proud of. It's not about that.

It's about candor. It's about telling the full story. It's about seemingly not being willing to go with us, both sides of the aisle, because it was the same answer to Senator Chafee when he pressed you.

It seems to me a rigidness here, a lack of flexibility, which is so troubling to me. And most of all, going back into recent history, an unwillingness to give the American people the full story, because the mission, the zeal of selling the war was so important to Dr. Rice. That was her job.

And yet I feel -- and again, I know not everyone agrees with me at all in the country, but many do -- that this war and all of these horrific deaths and the wounded and all of that, is a direct result of not leveling with the American people.

Thank you.

LUGAR: Thank you very much, Senator Boxer.

RICE: Thank you.

I'll just -- I'll be brief.

Senator Boxer, let me respond to a couple of specific points very briefly and then to an overall point.

RICE: But I, first, need to go back to yesterday.

Senator Boxer, you mentioned the letter that we wrote concerning -- I just want to note, and I will want to note for the record, that you put up one provision, not all of the provisions.

BOXER: Yes, that's correct.

RICE: And it was a provision, of course, with which we would have had no difficulty, which was one that is enshrined in law, which is that we should not torture and so forth and so on.

But there were other provisions that you did not put up that was not fully in context what you presented yesterday.

BOXER: Dr. Rice, I agree with you completely. But your letter didn't say...

RICE: No, I understand that.

(CROSSTALK)

BOXER: The conferees could have kept that one provision.

RICE: Yes. We decided -- you're right -- not to try and parse.

But I just want to be clear that you did not put up the entire set of provisions.

BOXER: Of course, I didn't.

RICE: Yes.

BOXER: Because the conferees could have kept that. You didn't tell them to keep it.

RICE: Yes, but the impression was left that what we objected to was that one provision when...

BOXER: Well, you did.

RICE: ... in fact, there were several.

BOXER: Well, you did yesterday object to it. You said it was duplicative.

RICE: No, I said it was in the defense authorization bill.

But I just want, for the record, it to be noted that the Bush administration was objecting not to something to do with the law of the land, but to other provisions. And I'll provide that to you.

So the context here was extremely important.

Secondly, let me just respond very briefly, Senator Boxer, to a few points. First of all, I really just can't agree that Milosevic and Saddam Hussein were the same problem. And we do have to recognize that different tools have to be taken against different dictators.

It was a remarkable set of events with Milosevic. But he was in the center of Europe. We had all kinds of pressure on Milosevic that we had failed to be able to bring about with Saddam Hussein. And so I just reject the analogy between the two.

Secondly, as to the question of Al Qaeda and its presence in Iraq, I think we did say that there was never an issue of operational control, that Al Qaeda -- that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 as far as we know or could tell.

RICE: It wasn't a question of operational alliance. It was a question of an attitude about terrorism that allowed Zarqawi to be in Baghdad and to operate out of Baghdad.

There were contacts going back to the early '90s and those are, indeed, detailed in the 9/11 report.

Third, on the question of aluminum tubes. We didn't go to war because of aluminum tubes. This was a debate about whether this issue, this particular piece of evidence, was evidence of reconstitution of the nuclear program. And there was one agency that disagreed that he was reconstituting his nuclear program and that was the State Department, the INR.

BIDEN: Didn't the Department of Energy also?

RICE: No. The Department of Energy said that they did not believe that the tubes were evidence of reconstitution, but that he was indeed, they believed, reconstituting his program. And that's an important distinction, though.

But I said, "reconstituting his program." I was not talking about the tubes.

The Department of Energy, in fact, I learned when the process unfolded, did have reservations or did believe the tubes were not for nuclear weapons. The majority of agencies in the intelligence community did.

I was representing, Senator -- and I've made this available for the record -- the views of that majority. And the view on reconstitution was one that all but the State Department held.

Now, I just have to put this into context. When you're dealing with intelligence matters, you are not dealing with perfect information.

RICE: And you do have to put that information into a context of someone's history. This was someone who was very close to a nuclear weapon in 1991, much closer than we thought.

Of his present, the intelligence community's belief was that he was reconstituting his program, that there was evidence of this in his procurement activities and keeping the nuclear scientists together.

And that the shadow of future, according to that national intelligence estimate, was that left unchecked, he would have a nuclear device by the end of the decade.

I just don't think that the president of the United States and I were going to give him the benefit of the doubt.

And as to the mushroom cloud statement, one that I've heard repeated many, many times, it was simply a statement about uncertainty; that you didn't want the first evidence that he had nuclear weapons to be the kind of evidence that we learned when we found out that the Soviet Union had a nuclear weapon five years ahead of schedule.

On the Iranians and Iraq, I'll say it right now: The United States government has often, as the president said, supported regimes in the hope that they would bring stability. And we've been, in the Middle East, sometimes blind to the freedom deficit. We're not going to do that anymore. And what happened with Saddam Hussein was probably evidence that that policy was not a very wise policy.

In general, Senator, let me just say again, we did go to the American people with a case for war. It was a case that, yes, said that the threat that this horrible dictator sitting in the Middle East, in the world's most dangerous region, with whom we had gone to war twice before, who had used weapons of mass destruction, who was shooting at our aircraft, that it was not acceptable to have him with weapons of mass destruction.

And we believed, like most of the intelligence agencies in the world, like the United Nations -- and much of the information was from the United Nations -- that he had weapons of mass destruction. He refused to account for them. Even with coalition forces sitting on his doorstep, he refused to account for them.

We weren't prepared to give Saddam Hussein the benefit of the doubt given his history and given the shadow of the future. We also had a situation, now rectified, of a Middle East out of which the terror threat, the jihadist threat comes with a factor in Saddam Hussein, who was going to make it impossible to change the nature of the Middle East.

I don't think anybody can see a different kind of Middle East with Saddam Hussein in the middle of it.

So we can disagree about the course that we took.

RICE: We can certainly have, I think, a healthy debate about the course that we should take going forward. I would be the first, again, to say we've had to make a lot of decisions, some of them good, some of them bad.

But I would hope that what we will do now is to focus on where we go from here. I can assure you, I will be candid. My assessments may not always be ones that you want to hear. They may not always be ones with which you agree. But I will tell you what I think. And that's a promise that I make to you today.

Thank you.

LUGAR: Thank you very much.

BOXER: If I could -- and I know I'm taking a lot of time. I just don't want to have to speak again. But I would like to finish my comments here.

The fact is that the reconstituting were based on the yellow cake and aluminum tubes, both of which proved to be false. And when I asked you about...

RICE: And balancing equipment and the accounts out of which these came and his keeping nuclear scientists together. Let's have the entire picture.

BOXER: OK. Yes. Exactly my point. Let's have the entire picture.

And when I asked you about aluminum tubes, you talked about the larger picture.

The fact is when you go on television and you say the aluminum tubes can only be used for nuclear weapons -- you want to turn it to a different subject, that's OK, but that's what you said, and the facts proved otherwise.

And we knew that at the time that four or five agencies were having a giant battle over that. No one could have possibly said that they could only be used because the intelligence community was split.

My last point has to do with Milosevic.

You said you can't compare the two dictators. You know, you're right. No two tyrants are alike.

But the fact is Milosevic started wars that killed 200,000 in Bosnia, 10,000 in Kosovo and thousands in Croatia. And he was nabbed and he's out, without an American dying for it. That's the fact.

BOXER: Now, I suppose we could have gone in there and people could have killed to get him. The fact is not one person wants either of those two to see the light of day again. And in one case, we did it without Americans dying; in the other case, we did it with Americans dying.

And I think if you ask the average American, you know, "Was Saddam worth one life, one American life?" they'd say no. He's the bottom of the barrel, and the fact is we've lost so many lives over it. So if we do get a little testy on the point -- and I admit to be so -- it's because it continues day in and day out and 25 percent of the dead are from California. We cannot forget -- we cannot forget that.

RICE: May I just close by saying, Senator Boxer, I, probably more than most, because I did have a role in the president's decision to go to war, mourn every day the people that are lost? I look at their pictures. I think about their families. I've been to Walter Reed. I see the pain and suffering. I believe that their service and their sacrifice was needed for our security.

I don't think there's anyone who believes that you could have gone into Iraq and nabbed Saddam Hussein. It wasn't that kind of regime.

LUGAR: Members of the committee, let me just say we tried...

BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: Day 2, well under way. More than an hour of testimony so far in the books for Condoleezza Rice, following up nine hours of testimony yesterday. Despite the disagreements, we anticipate approval by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee possibly late in the morning, sometime early in the afternoon, then full approval tomorrow on inauguration day.

We're going to hand it off now. Are we not?

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN CO-ANCHOR: Yes, we are. We should remind folks before we go inauguration day in Washington, D.C., AMERICAN MORNING will be coming to you live starting at 7:00 a.m. Eastern Time. We will look at the pre-ceremony, what they are doing to set up for the inauguration that happens that afternoon.

With that, we are out of here. But we hand it down to CNN in Atlanta where Daryn and are -- Daryn and Rick are standing by this morning.

Good morning, guys.

DARYN KAGAN, CNN CO-ANCHOR: Thank you. You guys have a safe trip to Washington, D.C. We'll look forward to seeing you there tomorrow morning.

Meanwhile, plenty going on in Washington, D.C. with that confirmation hearing that's going on.

RICK SANCHEZ, CNN CO-ANCHOR: Yes. You might say just as it is getting good in the confirmation hearing. Certainly some verbal sparring going on. Two interesting points being made by two very powerful women. Senator Barbara Boxer of California, as you heard questioning Condoleezza Rice on several issues related to Iraq. Specifically, whether the American people were told the truth heading into the war. It is certainly something we're going to be delving into as well.

I'm Rick Sanchez. KAGAN: And hello, and I'm Daryn Kagan.

Condoleezza Rice saying you might not agree with her but she says she will always tell exactly what she believes.

For more on this, let's bring in our Ed Henry who is on Capitol Hill. He is following the hearings as well.

Good morning.

ED HENRY, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Daryn. That's right, fireworks once again. We thought this might be a slightly more tame session, the second day. Maybe fizzle out a little bit. But Democratic -- the ranking member of this committee, Joe Biden really came out strong as well as Barbara Boxer, who was on the attack yesterday. Once again, you just heard her on the attack again. Zeroing in especially on Iraq, the reasons for going to war, whether or not the administration has a plan.

It was really summed up by Joe Biden in sort of the Democratic thinking on this panel. He came out and said he is going to support this nomination, but he said he has deep concerns. In particular, Biden charged that yesterday in her testimony, after he reviewed it last night, he feels that Dr. Rice did not level with the American people about an exit strategy in Iraq, about how many actual Iraqi officers were trained. She maintains it's over 120,000. Senator Biden and others say it's only about 4,000. Obviously a deep divide there.

Also, Senator Biden coming out and saying that he believes that the Congress is going to have to appropriate probably somewhere around another $200 billion to continue to fight the ongoing effort in Iraq and the reconstruction efforts, et cetera. And Senator Biden also said that he feels again, that the Bush administration really has to level with the Congress and the American people.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. JOE BIDEN (D), DELAWARE: It's not about revisiting the past, Dr. Rice. It's about how you will meet the challenges of the future. And I must tell you, for the first time in the last four years, I have doubts about it. Either because you are not telling us, the president doesn't know, or y'all don't have a plan. Because that's -- and I'm telling you honestly, that's what I walk away from this hearing worried about.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HENRY: Now, both Joe Biden and Barbara Boxer are saying that they feel yesterday Condoleezza Rice did not acknowledge any mistakes in Iraq. And they feel that's a problem as well. After questioning from Barbara Boxer, here's how Dr. Rice responded.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CONDOLEEZZA RICE, NOMINEE, SECRETARY OF STATE: I disagree about the course that we took. We can certainly have, I think, a healthy debate about the course that we should take going forward. I would be the first again to say we had to make a lot of decisions, some of them good, some of them bad. But I would hope what we will do now is to focus on where we go from here.

I can assure you, I will be candid. My assessments may not always be ones that you want to hear. They may not always be ones with which you agree. But I will tell you what I think. And that's a promise I make to you today.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HENRY: Now, Joe Biden also lashed out at Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, saying that Secretary Rumsfeld has also been insisting that 120 Iraqi officers have been trained by the American troops. And in fact, Joe Biden cracked -- he believes the calypso song "Don't Worry be Happy" should be the theme song at the Pentagon. So you can imagine it's getting tough, the rhetoric, a little tense in that committee room.

But when all is said and done, after a few more senators get to speak this morning, Condoleezza Rice is easily going to get a vote, a positive vote out of this Senate Foreign Relations Committee this morning, maybe early afternoon. And then head to the full Senate for easy confirmation by the full Senate tomorrow.

But you are just hearing Democrats expressing concerns. But in the end most of them will vote for her, Daryn.

KAGAN: Interesting to hear Democrats actually sound like Democrats, which is a change since the election. Ed Henry on Capitol Hill, thank you for that.

HENRY: Thank you.

KAGAN: And we'll have a lot more ahead on what's happening with Condoleezza Rice on Capitol Hill.

SANCHEZ: Some people said it was going be boring. Well, not only that but we're also going to have the latest on the inauguration as well.

KAGAN: We'll do that.

SANCHEZ: We'll bring you all of that. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SANCHEZ: And welcome back to CNN LIVE TODAY.

It's now 11 days until the Iraqi national elections. And despite heightened security leading up to the January 30 voting, insurgents continued to launch deadly attacks. Today was particularly bloody in the capitol. There were four separate car bombings in and around Baghdad.

CNN's Jeff Koinange is there with the details.

JEFF KOINANGE, CNN LAGOS BUREAU CHIEF: Hello there, Rick. And it seemed like it was wave after wave of attacks on this Wednesday across Baghdad and beyond. The first, right outside the Australian Embassy, where a suicide bomber detonated himself killing a bystander, wounding up to five others. And we understand there were two Australian soldiers among the wounded.

Less than A half hour later, an even more powerful car bomb. This one right outside the Iraqi Emergency Police Headquarters; 18 people were killed in that including 13 Iraqi policemen, up to 30 people wounded in that incident.

And yet another car bomb, this one right outside an Iraqi military base, two soldiers killed in that. And a fourth one on the southern outskirts of Baghdad at an Iraqi National Guard checkpoint, four people killed in that, including two Iraqi soldiers. And one U.S. soldier was wounded in that incident.

So, yes, one of the bloodiest days in Baghdad in a long time with just 11 days to go before that crucial January 30 poll -- Rick.

SANCHEZ: And no indications at this point that it's going to be letting up. Even military officials seem to be saying that to us.

Jeff Koinange, following things there for us. We thank you Jeff -- Daryn.

KAGAN: Looking at the inauguration taking place tomorrow, there are more events leading up to that today. President Bush is swearing in for a second term.

Our Dana Bash has a look from the White House.

Dana, good morning.

DANA BASH, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Daryn. Well, as you can probably see, it just started to snow here in Washington. The forecast does not show that for tomorrow for inauguration day. As you mentioned, just 26 hours away, the president is going to be sworn in. At this point, as of this morning, he is 16 drafts into the speech. It's running about 17 minutes long. He's going to have a practice session later today here at the White House.

And of course throughout all of today and tomorrow, in addition to the speech, you will have a lot of hoopla. Now, the president, the White House is trying to balance the partying with acknowledgment of the fact that he is president at a time of war. Last night, he paid tribute to those who served in the military. At this hour, Mr. Bush is going to go to the National Archives, view things like the Bible that George Washington used at his inaugural address. Later today, he's going to go to the very cold Ellipse, just next to the White House for some -- for a concert and some fireworks. Then three private candlelight dinners that would be to honor some of those who contributed to the more than about $40 million it is costing to put all of this on. Three of those dinners. And the president throughout all of this, Daryn, is also doing some interviews including one with CNN. He did one with John King yesterday. During that interview he conceded that there are some, in terms of terrorism, that think that this White House is simply crying wolf when it talks about the terrorist threats. But he insisted that since 9/11 this administration is having success at dismantling terror networks.

But when asked if he could fix one thing about the nation's intelligence, he said it's a problem that's been apparent since 9/11.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH (R), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Human intelligence, the ability to get inside somebody's mind, the ability to read somebody's mail. The ability to listen to somebody's phone call, that somebody being the enemy. We've got a commission up and running that will determine why things -- why we didn't find any stockpiles in Iraq.

And out of that commission, coupled with the new national director of intelligence, hopefully this president, and future presidents, will get the best possible intelligence, both human and of course, you know, signal intelligence.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: And Daryn, while the president did not give any ground on the issue of the pre-war planning, whether or not there were mistakes, not only in WMD. But also in whether or not he had enough troops in Iraq. And whether or not they were prepared for not to be greeted as liberators, as we, of course, did end up seeing. He gave no ground on that.

He did talk about as he has in other interviews, the fact that he does feel he was perhaps a bit too blunt with some of his words in the first term. He said he will be more careful in the second term but he's not going to change his plainspoken nature, as he said. He is going to still be very blunt when it comes to how he sees the United States versus countries that perhaps harbor terrorists -- Daryn.

KAGAN: Dana Bash from live from the White House. We will let you get inside out of the snow flurries so you can warm up to be back outside to cover tomorrow's inauguration. Thank you.

Well, security is already tight for the inauguration. It was put to the test yesterday. A van pulled up to the corner of the White House grounds. The driver told Secret Service he had something inside, which could detonate or ignite. Authorities boxed the van in. After a four-hour standoff, the driver surrendered. He was arraigned this morning. Police say the incident was family related and it was not terrorism.

From the swearing in, to the parade, to the parties, CNN will bring you live special coverage of all the inaugural events tomorrow. That is all day tomorrow. SANCHEZ: And we will continue to follow what is going on at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where the confirmation of Condoleezza Rice continues. So does the questioning from -- but weird to tell in these pictures. They should have some kind of headcount coming up pretty soon.

KAGAN: Yes. They are calling it a business meeting.

SANCHEZ: A business meeting. OK.

KAGAN: And then there will be a vote and then, of course, the vote in the full Senate tomorrow.

Right now, we take a quick break here on CNN.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KAGAN: An Amber Alert is now in its fifth day for two North Carolina children. The two-year-old boy and his 11-month-old sister were abducted from their foster home by their natural parents. That couple has been accused of running a meth lab in their home.

CNN's Randy Kaye sat down with the foster mother for an exclusive interview. The foster mother did not want her name or her face seen because of concern for her own safety.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I had just sat down for a cup of coffee. I heard the car come up and I got up to look out the window. I heard the footsteps. Saw people coming up. I went to the door and I opened it, and said, "Hey what are you up to? What do you need?" Not really thinking anything was wrong.

RANDY KAYE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (on camera): And this was James Canter and Alicia Chambers at the door.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It was.

KAYE: And what were they doing? Did they try and come inside...

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Well, in answering my question, they said we are here for the kids. We want the kids. And I started to say no, and to push them back because they were pushing forward. And James pulled out a gun.

They're part of our family. They're my babies. I mean Brianna was just 3 months old when she came to us. And she's all -- I'm all she knows as a mom. I've been there for her new teeth, and her learning to stand up.

KAYE: So how do you go to bed at night wondering where they are? Today is now Day 3 of the manhunt.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I don't want to go to bed. And I don't want to wake up. I want them home safely. They came out of a meth lab situation.

KAYE: When you see a baby bottle in the sink, and a sippy cup next to the remains of meth that was made, what does that do to you?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's scary to think about what those children have been exposed to.

KAYE: What would you want to say tonight to their biological parents?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: That what they're offering those children is not adequate for anybody to grow up to live a normal, healthy life. They might love those children, but they're not giving them what they need. And if they can't make the choice for the children, then let somebody else, who will love them and support them, have them to love and to be a part of their family.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KAYE: That was Brianna and Paul Chambers' foster mom speaking with me last night in her first television interview.

We want to show you once again the children's biological parents who authorities are looking for. That is James Lee Canter, 29 years old. The father in this case. And Alicia Chambers, his girlfriend, the children's mother. She is 18 years old.

Today tips are continuing to roll in. And investigators here in Boone, North Carolina have the added challenge, Daryn, of trying to make sense of these tips. Yesterday, they got one false alarm. There were some reports that the couple and kids had shown up at a convenience store in Tennessee. That was wrong. They also got one report that the couple had been seen in the audience on the "Dr. Phil Show." That clearly was not the case.

So now Day 5, the manhunt underway, Daryn.

KAGAN: Any tips that they might be getting help from their family?

KAYE: They do still believe -- we spoke with the sheriff a short time ago. They still do believe that the family and friends of this couple are helping them avoid capture. The sheriff has been on the phone this morning already with some relatives, and some folks who know this couple. And they're going to keep going until they find them.

KAGAN: All right. Randy Kaye from North Carolina, Thank you.

SANCHEZ: Interesting as we follow the Senate confirmation hearings of Condoleezza Rice. She is being questioned right now by Barack Oropa -- Obama. Interesting enough, his first national platform in a setting like this. He's talking about what perhaps she and others in the administration can do to sometimes disagree with whatever the administration's policies are. We'll continue to follow this. We'll be right back. (STOCK REPORT)

KAGAN: We'll be back after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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