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CNN Newsnight Aaron Brown

Dr. Rice grilled before 9/11 commission, Signs of coordination between Shiite and Sunni fighters in Iraq; U.S. official says opposition in Iraq is a small minority

Aired April 08, 2004 - 22:00   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.


AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening again everyone.
Much of the program tonight, as you would expect, deals with the 9/11 commission and Condoleezza Rice's testimony. It was something to watch. There were remarkable moments telling about the country's and the administration's view of the problem of terrorism before 9/11.

Consider just one moment Ms. Rice said based on intelligence that al Qaeda might be planning hijackings she and her agency warned both the FBI and the FAA to take action.

Neither the secretary of transportation nor the head of FAA nor anyone at the FBI, to date at least, has told the commission they remember receiving any such warning. How could that be you may wonder? It is a question that will be asked several times tonight.

We begin with the nuts and bolts of the testimony. Our White House Correspondent Suzanne Malveaux in Crawford, Texas, Suzanne a headline.

SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, Aaron, President Bush watched Rice's testimony from his Crawford ranch. He even called her from his pickup truck to congratulate her, tell her she did a good job, but Bush's critics argue that she created more questions than answers.

BROWN: Suzanne, thank you.

Next a step back, some perspective from Jeff Greenfield, but first, Jeff, a headline.

JEFF GREENFIELD, CNN SR. ANALYST: Well, Aaron, can a national security adviser sitting across the table from a commission of distinguished ex-government officials look at the same set of facts and come to remarkably different conclusions? Yes. How can they do that? If you ask that question, you don't understand the bureaucracy of government -- Aaron.

BROWN: We'll ask the question. Thank you, Jeff.

Finally to Baghdad, another rough day across the country, not just for the Americans who are there. CNN's Walter Rodgers again with the duty for us, so Walter a headline.

WALTER RODGERS, CNN SR. INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, there was a new and terrifying front opened in the war in Iraq today. Islamic militants have begun to kidnap foreign civilians, journalists, aid workers, even Christian missionaries -- Aaron.

BROWN: Walter, thank you. We'll get back to you and the rest in a moment.

Also ahead on the program tonight the reaction from Capitol Hill to the Rice testimony, the politics of interpretation in a presidential election year.

Later in the program our own version of Tivo, Dr. Rice's testimony in her own words, a very big sound byte of it in any case.

And morning papers where we're betting today's testimony makes more than a few headlines. It is that sort of night, all that and more coming up in the hour ahead.

We begin with what Dr. Rice said on a long anticipated day after some foot dragging and no small measure of partisan back and forth. Her testimony came at a crucial moment in the war in Iraq as well. It was aimed in part to rebut the testimony of a former colleague, Richard Clarke, who believes the administration fixated on Iraq at the expense of fighting terrorism.

With that as a backdrop, with her boss in the fight of his political life, and with a national television audience watching, Condoleezza Rice stepped today into a mighty warm spotlight.

Our reporting begins with CNN's Suzanne Malveaux.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MALVEAUX (voice-over): In a highly anticipated session before the 9/11 commission, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice faced three key questions. Could the attack have been prevented?

CONDOLEEZZA RICE, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: There was no silver bullet that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks.

MALVEAUX: But commissioners cite a presidential daily brief from August, 2001 entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike the U.S." as a clear warning.

TIM ROEMER, 9/11 COMMISSION: The threat reporting saying the United States is going to be attacked should trigger the principals getting together to say we're going to do something about this I would think.

RICE: Mr. Roemer. Mr. Roemer let's be very clear. The PDB does not say the United States is going to be attacked. It says bin Laden would like to attack the United States.

MALVEAUX: Rice also received a memo from her deputy Richard Clarke a week before 9/11 urging her to push the CIA and Pentagon to fight terrorism even harder or imagine a day hundreds of Americans lay dead due to an attack. RICE: It would not be appropriate or correct to characterize what Dick wrote to me on September 4th as a warning of an impending attack.

MALVEAUX: Where does Rice see the biggest failure building up to 9/11?

RICE: We had a structural problem in the United States and that structural problem was that we did not share domestic and foreign intelligence.

MALVEAUX: Rice says the administration had an aggressive plan to eliminate al Qaeda but commissioners wanted evidence.

BOB KERREY, 9/11 COMMISSION: You said the president was tired of swatting flies. Can you tell me one example of where the president swatted a fly when it came to al Qaeda prior to 9/11?

RICE: I think what the president was speaking to was...

KERREY: No, no, what fly had he swatted?

RICE: Well, the disruptions abroad was what he was really focusing on.

MALVEAUX: Finally, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks did the president push his administration to focus too much on Iraq?

RICE: It's not surprising that the president would say what about Iraq, given our hostile relationship with Iraq and I'm quite certain that the president never pushed anybody to twist the facts.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MALVEAUX: Now in an effort tonight, Aaron, for the administration to prove it's being more forthcoming, it is working with the 9/11 commission to try to declassify some elements of that controversial presidential daily brief, the one that caused so many questions in Rice's testimony -- Aaron.

BROWN: This is the August brief, bin Laden has plans or hopes to attack the United States. Any sense of timing when we might see that which we might see?

MALVEAUX: Well, actually we think it's going to happen relatively soon. This is something that they began working on immediately after the testimony was complete. White House officials saying that they wanted to put out that section, at least that section that was talked about in the testimony and it's not clear whether or not they're going to put out the whole thing.

BROWN: Suzanne, thank you very much, Suzanne Malveaux tonight.

As the brief in question makes its way through the declassification process, there are reams of material for the commission to consider, either long in the public domain or revealed in some cases by Dr. Rice today.

For more on that side of things, CNN's Barbara Starr.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Three years before 9/11, President Clinton uses cruise missiles in retaliation for al Qaeda's bombing of U.S. embassies in East Africa.

GENEREAL HUGH SHELTON, CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF: This is by no means the first time the bin Laden network has been connected to terrorist attacks.

STARR: Then the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in October, 2000, but no U.S. response. Now, the 9/11 commission struggling to understand what the Bush administration knew about bin Laden and what it was prepared to do as threat reports spiked in the months before September 11th.

RICE: The president had been told by the director of Central Intelligence that was not going to be a silver bullet to kill bin Laden that you had to do much more.

STARR: In August, 2001, the president was warned in a classified intelligence document that al Qaeda might be planning to hijack airplanes but no specific information.

Rice revealed that during the summer, the FBI was conducting 70 full field investigations of suspected al Qaeda cells in the U.S. Now, she says, in hindsight the FBI and CIA failed to communicate about the threats they saw at home and abroad.

(on camera): Here at the Pentagon there was constant military planning to try and attack Osama bin Laden but, like today, the intelligence was never good enough to capture or kill him.

Barbara Starr, CNN, the Pentagon.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: We have much more tonight on Ms. Rice's day before the 9/11 commission. We'll talk with a commission member, a former national security adviser as well.

Other news of day first and that means Iraq on a day when we learned of five more American fatalities. In total, 44 Marines and soldiers have died in the past week. American and coalition forces have come under attack more than 140 times.

The general in charge of the region, General John Abizaid, said today he's considering delaying the return home of some units and the early callback of others to strengthen the force.

Shiite insurgents now control major pieces of three large cities in the south of the country. According to one commander there are signs too of coordination between Shiite and Sunni fighters, which would be as remarkable as it is troubling. Add to that today yet another twist.

Here's CNN's Walter Rodgers.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

RODGERS (voice-over): Shown here three Japanese taken hostage. Other video shows them being manhandled and humiliated and threatened with guns and knives, obviously for the benefit of the camera.

The Japanese government has been given three days to pull its troops out of the American-sponsored coalition in Iraq or a shadowy group calling itself the Mujahedeen squadrons threatens to burn the Japanese hostages alive.

In another incident two Israeli-Arabs, Palestinian aid workers, were also seized and seven Korean Christian missionaries were also taken hostage by Islamic militants. They were later released. Still, the sudden (unintelligible) of hostage taking of foreigners seems a new tactic.

Sunni insurgents in Fallujah continue to battle U.S. Marines trying to retake control of that city. This U.S. tank was hit at Fallujah, the crew wounded, attesting to the ferocity of the outgunned Arab fighters. Increasingly, the Iraqi people see these Marines as the aggressors accusing them of killing women and children.

LT. GEN. RICARDO SANCHEZ, CMDR., JOINT TASK FORCE: We do everything possible to protect infrastructure, to protect non- combatants, but that is a fact when you're on a battlefield of this nature in an urban environment.

RODGERS: Parts of three southern Iraqi cities an-Najaf, Kut and Kufa were still in the control of Shiite rebels Thursday night. This Shiite cleric said: "The Americans are attacking us and we are attacking back. We say to the Americans, remove your tanks."

(END VIDEOTAPE)

RODGERS: The military initiative may have been regained by the Americans, although U.S. forces may be losing the public relations war here this as an increasing number of Iraqis seem to see the American forces as part of the problem rather than part of the solution -- Aaron.

BROWN: Let's talk a bit about tomorrow or Friday your time. It's Friday morning there now. It is a major holiday. There are lots of concerns about what could go down tomorrow.

RODGERS: That's true. This would be the anniversary of the toppling of that statue of Saddam Hussein a year ago, which means the Americans have been in Baghdad for a year. There are demonstrations planned but even more threatening in terms of security and stability here is April 11th and 12th.

That's the Arbayeen holiday, a major Shiite holiday and U.S. forces here are saying openly they're braced for more terror attacks, more bombings of the Shiites when they gather for big religious ceremonies -- Aaron.

BROWN: Walter, thank you. It's been a long day for you, Walter Rodgers in Baghdad.

A bit later in the program we'll talk to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser to President Carter, who is critical of the administration's handling of Iraq and terrorism

Earlier in the day by chance I was talking to a predecessor of his, Henry Kissinger, for his take. These days, he said, are the most important days for the American effort since the war began and the outcome, said Dr. Kissinger, is very much in doubt. A reality check for us and a pretty sharp counterpoint to the message coming out of the Pentagon these days.

Here's CNN's Jamie McIntyre.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN SR. PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: The video of three kidnapped Japanese civilians being threatened with death by immolation is just one more image fueling perceptions that Iraq insurgents may be gaining the upper hand and keeping Pentagon officials on the defensive.

DONALD RUMSFELD, DEFENSE SECRETARY: Well, of course, terrorists have been doing that type of thing for hundreds of years.

MCINTYRE: While Japan says it won't pull its troops, as the kidnappers demand, some U.S. allies in Iraq are shrinking from dangerous duty raising concerns about how long countries like Ukraine and Bulgaria will stay.

From Fallujah another disturbing picture, bloodied Marines crawl from their crippled M1A1 battle tank after an RPG attack. The isolated image can give the impression of defeat even in victory.

MAJ. GEN. KEITH STALDER, COMMANDER, 1ST MARINE EXPEDITIONARY FORCE: We're winning every firefight we engage in there.

MCINTYRE: In Vietnam, the U.S. won virtually every battle but lost. The Bush administration rejects the suggestion Iraq is turning into a quagmire.

COLIN POWELL, SECRETARY OF STATE: I think it is not a swamp that is going to devour us.

KERREY: I think the military operations are dangerously off track.

MCINTYRE: Still, as U.S. troops engage in the sort of deadly urban combat they managed to avoid during the initial invasion, the mounting casualties are making critics out of former supporters.

KERREY: I think we're going to end up with civil war if we continue down the military operation strategy that we have in place. I say that sincerely as someone that supported the war in the first place.

MCINTYRE: U.S. commanders insist at the end of the day the U.S. military has the muscle to bring Iraq under control so long as America doesn't lose its nerve.

SANCHEZ: I'll tell you that right now we are on track. We are prepared for a sustained operation. We are not walking away from the problem.

MCINTYRE (on camera): The CIA is disputing what unnamed intelligence sources have told the "New York Times," namely that he uprisings in Iraq have broader support than the Pentagon admits. A U.S. official says that does not reflect the consensus of the intelligence community, which generally agrees the opposition in Iraq is a small minority.

Jamie McIntyre, CNN, the Pentagon.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Ahead on the program tonight back to Dr. Rice and the 9/11 commission reaction, some of it partisan, some not, to the testimony on Capitol Hill.

And later in the program the women for whom the events today are deeply personal. They're known in Washington as the 9/11 Jersey Girls. We'll take a break first.

From New York this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: 9/11 hearings are a reminder that facts and words are open to interpretation. Semantics have been a sparring point throughout the hearings, were again today. The questioning at times aggressive. Some of the answers raising more questions still.

Tim Roemer is a Democrat on the commission, a former Congressman from the State of Indiana. We spoke with him earlier tonight.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Congressman, if everyone else is going to do this I guess you might as well too. If you were going to write the headline for the day, what would it be, what stands out in this long day for you and the commission?

TIM ROEMER, 9/11 COMMISSION MEMBER: That's a good question, Aaron. First of all it would be only in America. Only in America can you have the opportunity to see the current adviser, top adviser to the president of the United States have some kind of an accountability hearing on what happened on 9/11.

And then sit down with the former president of the United States and also ask for accountability from the previous administration. Truly an extraordinary day and hopefully leads toward significant reforms to make the country safer.

BROWN: Let's talk about some of the substance of the day. How can it be, maybe this is easier for someone who has been in Washington a long time to understand but how can it be that directives given by the White House, National Security Council, whoever, to the FAA, to the FBI and you go to the FBI and you go to the FAA and they say we never saw those. We don't know anything about that. How can that be?

ROEMER: Aaron, I don't know that you could spend five lifetimes in Washington, D.C. From where I come from in Indiana that just doesn't make any kind of common sense.

The fact that today we asked Dr. Rice when you're getting these even general warnings about bin Laden wanting to attack the United States, you then have to get your hair on fire and say to the relevant agency, in this case the FBI, what are you finding out there in America?

We know there are sleeper cells out there. Are they activated? Where are they going? Who's doing something about it? And the fact that there was just this huge disconnect between what Dr. Rice said tasking the FBI to look at this situation and then when we've done these thousands of interviews and documents.

Mr. Picard who was the acting director of the FBI says he has no recollection of this tasking. The special agents in charge in the field say they never did it. What happened? So next week when we have the FBI before us that's certainly going to be one of the major questions for them.

BROWN: Does this in any way give credibility to the idea put forth by Mr. Clarke that the administration's attitude lacked urgency, not that they weren't paying attention but that they weren't urgent?

ROEMER: I certainly think that Mr. Clarke is a credible, reliable witness in the 9/11 commission hearings. I also think that when you not just listen to Mr. Clarke but when we had Mr. Armitage appear before the commission in Dr. Rice's place a couple weeks ago, he said this process was not moving speedily.

And then we have other people saying many of the same things. General Hugh Shelton was saying that in the Bush administration the terrorism issue was put on the back burner.

We don't say those things to try to blame the Bush administration. We want to see what went wrong in order to make it right. We want to look back so that we can make the reforms and move the bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. toward this new threat.

BROWN: Just finally, we got less than a minute here, have you read the August, I guess it's August 6th memo and, if you had, is it in fact history? Is it more than history? Will we ever get to see what it is?

ROEMER: I asked Dr. Rice two or three times today why we shouldn't make this available to you and to 270 million Americans, Aaron. You should see it. America should see it. It doesn't have sources and methods in it. It doesn't have a risk to national security. It does talk about what the FBI perceived as a threat.

The title of it is "Bin Laden Determined to Attack the United States" and it talks about him wanting to attack this country for four or five years. So, while that's not somebody with a red tie is going to attack New York City on September 11th, it is enough of a warning that you've got to go running out of that room as one of the top policymakers in the government saying we got to find out how true this is, whether there's a threat in the United States, whether the domestic agency tasked with doing something about it is doing something about it.

BROWN: Congressman, next week the FBI. We'll look forward to talking to you again next week we hope. Thank you again.

ROEMER: Look forward to seeing you, Aaron. Thanks for having me.

BROWN: Thank you, sir.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Tim Roemer, former Congressman from Indiana. We talked with him earlier tonight.

Condoleezza Rice today delivered one of the highest level public defenses of the administration's handling of terrorism. Her appearance came by way of a political storm, of course set off by Richard Clarke's controversial book and testimony. We suspect few were surprised that politics was part of the reaction as well.

Here's CNN's Joe Johns.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOE JOHNS, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Even before Condoleezza Rice had finished and with all eyes on Capitol Hill riveted to her testimony, the number two Republican in the Senate launched an attack on the 9/11 commission.

SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL (R), KENTUCKY: Hopefully the commission will identify additional methods to improve U.S. security but, forgive me for not being terribly optimistic. I fear the commission has lost sight of this goal and has become a political casualty of the electoral hunting season.

JOHNS: After the hearing, Republicans rushed to the microphones in a coordinated defense of Rice.

SEN. KAY BAILY HUTCHISON (R), TEXAS: I am very pleased that Condy Rice came and did such a credible and good job.

JOHNS: Republicans used the words of Bush critic Richard Clarke to bolster Rice's case that September 11th could not have been prevented and cited Clarke's admission that implementing his recommendations would not have changed the outcome.

SEN. JUDD GREGG (R), NEW HAMPSHIRE: Would that have stopped the 9/11 event? Would that have prevented the 9/11 event? A one word answer from Mr. Clarke, no.

JOHNS: Democrat Chuck Schumer of New York, without specifically mentioning Clarke's dramatic apology to the victims' families, said he had expected to hear more from Rice.

SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER (D), NEW YORK: Unfortunately, we did not hear from adviser Rice three important words, we made mistakes.

JOHNS: But there was little dispute, even from most Democrats, about the substance of Rice's testimony and, from one, a bit of praise.

SEN. JOSEPH LIEBERMAN (D), CONNECTICUT: She's a strong, able person who stood her ground in a way that was not divisive.

JOHNS (on camera): But at the end of the day, one Senator said, no one had any illusions Condoleezza Rice was going to change any minds.

Joe Johns, CNN, Capitol Hill.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Still ahead on the program tonight, could anyone have prevented 9/11? Jeff Greenfield joins us with his take on a remarkable day and the possibility that even with the best people the system itself, the bureaucracy may have failed us.

From New York this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: The headlines in the 9/11 investigation have, we think, tended to highlight the either/or, either the president took the threat of terrorism urgently or not. Either Richard Clarke was in the loop or not. Either the FBI did its job or didn't and, of course, either the system failed or it did not and we can answer that one, clearly it did.

And just as clearly a lot of people made a lot of mistakes. Either/or covers a world of territory but not all of it, which got our Jeff Greenfield thinking.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GREENFIELD (voice-over): Yes, it was high political drama. Yes, there was a partisan elbow or two but at its root the exchanges between Condoleezza Rice and the commissioners were about something else, how to measure the way a bureaucracy works or doesn't.

Clearly, Dr. Rice was answering a man who wasn't there today, her one time top terrorism deputy Richard Clarke who painted the Bush administration as complacent in the face of growing threats in the spring and summer of 2001. She spent much of her prepared testimony detailing what the administration had done.

RICE: The FAA issued at least five civil aviation security information circulars. The FBI tasked all 56 of its U.S. field offices to increase surveillance of known suspected terrorists and to reach out to known informants.

GREENFIELD: But listen to what Commissioner Jamie Gorelick says they found.

JAMIE GORELICK, 9/11 COMMISSION: Secretary Minetta, the Secretary of Transportation, had no idea of the threat. The administration of the FAA, responsible for security on our airlines had no idea.

GREENFIELD: And here's Commissioner Tim Roemer on the FBI response.

ROEMER: To date we have found nobody, nobody at the FBI who knows anything about a tasking of field offices, nothing went down the chain to the FBI field offices on spiking of information, on knowledge of al Qaeda in the country and still the FBI doesn't do anything.

GREENFIELD: Who's right? Well, the way Washington works they could all be right. Dr. Rice did order a memo sent out but they were dealt with the way a bureaucracy usually deals with such stuff routinely because in a pre-9/11 world they seemed routine.

It's much the same with the dust up between former Senator Bob Kerrey and Rice over the meaning of an August 6th memo sent to the president.

KERREY: This is what the August 6th memo said to the president that the FBI indicates patterns of suspicious activity in the United States consistent with preparations for hijacking.

RICE: I can tell you that I think the best antidote to what happened in that regard would have been many years before to think about what you could do for instance to harden cockpits. That would have made a difference. We weren't going to harden cockpits in the three months that we had a threat spike.

GREENFIELD: Of course that's exactly what happened after September 11th but pre-9/11 any such suggestion would have been dismissed as pure government make work. And, again and again, Dr. Rice noted how little time the Bush administration had.

RICE: We were in office 233 days. And the kinds of structural changes that have been needed by this country for some time did not get made in that period of time.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

GREENFIELD: So 233 days, eight months. In the prism of 9/11, that seems like an eternity. In the years before 9/11, not much time at all for a government to act on.

BROWN: Let's talk about -- this has come up a lot, about whether Mr. Clarke said he in fact that nothing could have prevented 9/11. It has been said on this program I think five different times in the last week. You hear it differently.

GREENFIELD: Well, I took the liberty of reading what Clarke said.

What Clarke said specifically -- was asked, if all of your recommendations of January 25 with regard to Afghanistan had been implemented, arming the Predator, arming the Northern Alliance, would that have stopped 9/11? He had a one word answer, no, because the muscle was here. But he also was clear about how unclear he was about whether shaking the tree in the spring and summer of 2001 might...

BROWN: Which he was also recommending.

GREENFIELD: Yes. So when people say he said that nothing could have stopped it, they're half right. Once again, it depends on what you want to hear, I guess.

BROWN: Jeff, thank you, Jeff Greenfield with us.

Still to come on the program, a learned hand in matters of war and peace, a former national security adviser to a president as well, a great first.

This is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Just over a week ago, when the White House agreed to allow Dr. Rice to testify in public, Iraq had not yet erupted, the horrific murders of the four U.S. contractors in Fallujah were still hours away. It was the relative calm before a terrific and horrible storm. The story is different in Iraq tonight. It was the backdrop in many respects of this morning's testimony.

Ms. Rice's counterpart in the Carter administration, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, joins us tonight from Chicago.

Dr. Brzezinski, good to have you with us.

(CROSSTALK)

BROWN: Did you watch Dr. Rice, today, by the way?

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, FORMER NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: I watched some of it, not all of it.

BROWN: Do you have a take on it?

BRZEZINSKI: I think she was very professional, very competent. But on the big story, 9/11, it seems to me that everyone was missing the point, to some extent. It was a plot that really shouldn't have succeeded. Just imagine the following. Suppose someone came to you and said, I have a scheme for kidnapping four airliners with 18 or 19 foreign looking guys, some of them even immigrants, or illegal immigrants, actually, armed with box cutters.

In the middle of the flight, four of them will take over the pilot's seats, having been trained on, then flying light planes and they'll fly these huge aircraft into targets. What probability of success would you give that scheme? Maybe 5 percent. In fact, they had 75 percent success. And the reason is, airport security was lax, FBI wasn't really tracking these people, CIA wasn't really penetrating hostile terrorist groups abroad, and no one at the top was cracking the whip.

BROWN: Let's move ahead.

Mostly, I hope to talk about Iraq tonight and get your take on events there. Obviously, you've had serious concerns about the administration's going into Iraq. And do you think -- this is such a baseline question, but do you think where are safer, that the world is safer, that the Middle East is better off, for what has been accomplished?

BRZEZINSKI: I don't really think so.

I think the Middle East is progressively being set on fire. Our so-called liberation of Iraq is now becoming, in the eyes of the Iraqis, many Iraqis, and many Arabs, increasingly a direct military occupation and occasionally, unfortunately, quite brutal at that. They see it as an extension of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the two occupations being the two sides of a single coin.

And the IISS, the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies, has recently completed a report showing there are more terrorist groups now directing their hostility at the United States. We're more isolated internationally than we were a year ago. So I think the balance sheet is not a very good one.

BROWN: We are there. That is sort of the fact of the matter. We are there. What do we do now?

BRZEZINSKI: Well, I have a view on that which may strike you as somewhat paradoxical.

But my view is, if our military wants more U.S. military in there, we should without hesitation provide them. We have to show that we have staying power and that we can handle the security problem. But, at the same time, we really ought to engage ourselves politically. This is not a problem to be solved militarily and just by U.S. occupation. We ought to move rapidly in transforming the authority in Iraq into a U.N.-sponsored authority, so that it isn't an American occupation.

We ought to hand over "sovereignty" -- in quotation marks -- on schedule. And we ought to become much more active in promoting the Israeli-Palestinian peace, because we can't disengage from Iraq if the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is still going on. So we need a political dimension that's much more active. And that will be more likely to gain us international support, both from the Europeans and maybe even from some moderate Muslim countries.

BROWN: That's a great synopsis of where you see things now.

Dr. Brzezinski, it's good to see you again. Thank you, sir, very much. Thank you.

BRZEZINSKI: It's good to be with you.

BROWN: Ahead on the program still, we want to give you a chance for those of you who were busy today -- many of you were -- to have at least a larger taste of what Dr. Rice had to say. So we'll roll that out after the break.

Around the world, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: And more to come.

Condoleezza Rice testified for three hours this morning, 30 minutes longer than scheduled. In the hours since, many people have weighed in on what was said and what was not. It is the 9/11 Commission's job to decide officially what all the testimony means within the context of all their other work.

As we said earlier, the questioning was tough at times today. Here in her own words is what Dr. Rice said in some of the more contentious moments.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Dr. Rice, you please rise and raise your right hand? Do you swear or affirm to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

RICE: I do.

There was no silver bullet that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. In hind tight, if anything might have helped stop 9/11, it would have been better information about threats inside the United States, something made very difficult by structural and legal impediments that prevented the collection and sharing of information by our law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

RICHARD BEN-VENISTE, 9/11 COMMISSION MEMBER: Did you tell the president, at any time prior to August 6, of the existence of al Qaeda cells in the United States?

RICE: First, let me just make certain...

BEN-VENISTE: If you could just answer that question, because I only have a very limited...

RICE: I understand, Commissioner, but it's important...

BEN-VENISTE: Did you tell the president...

RICE: ... that I also address...

(APPLAUSE)

BEN-VENISTE: Isn't it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6 PDB warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB?

RICE: I believe the title was, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States. "

Now, the...

BEN-VENISTE: Thank you.

JAMIE GORELICK, 9/11 COMMISSION MEMBER: You indicate in your statement that the FBI tasked its field offices to find out what was going on out there. We have no record of that. The Washington field office international terrorism people say they never heard about the threat, they never heard about the warnings, they were not asked to come to the table and shake those trees. SACs, special agents in charge, around the country -- Miami in particular -- no knowledge of this.

And so, I really come back to you -- and let me add one other thing. Have you actually looked at the -- analyzed the messages that the FBI put out?

RICE: Yes.

GORELICK: To me, and you're free to comment on them, they are feckless. They don't tell anybody anything. They don't bring anyone to battle stations.

And I personally believe, having heard Coleen Rowley's testimony about her frustrations in the Moussaoui incident, that if someone had really gone out to the agents who were working these issues on the ground and said, "We are at battle stations. We need to know what's happening out there. Come to us," she would have broken through barriers to have that happen, because she was knocking on doors and they weren't opening.

BOB KERREY, FORMER U.S. SENATOR: You said the president was tired of swatting flies.

KERREY: Can you tell me one example where the president swatted a fly when it came to al Qaeda prior to 9/11?

RICE: I think what the president was speaking to was...

KERREY: No, no. What fly had he swatted? RICE: Well, the disruptions abroad was what he was really focusing on...

KERREY: No, no...

RICE: ... when the CIA would go after Abu Zubaydah...

KERREY: He hadn't swatted...

RICE: ... or go after this guy...

KERREY: Dr. Rice, we didn't...

RICE: That was what was meant.

KERREY: We only swatted a fly once on the 20th of August 1998. We didn't swat any flies afterwards. How the hell could he be tired?

RICE: I'm aware, Mr. Kerrey, of a speech that you gave at that time that said that perhaps the best thing that we could do to respond to the Cole and to the memories was to do something about the threat of Saddam Hussein.

That's a strategic view.

TIMOTHY ROEMER, PRESIDENT, CENTER FOR NATIONAL POLICY: Why don't you get Dick Clarke to brief the president before 9/11? Here is one of the consummate experts that never has the opportunity to brief the president of the United States on one of the most lethal, dynamic and agile threats to the United States of America.

Why don't you use this asset? Why doesn't the president ask to meet with Dick Clarke?

RICE: Well, the president was meeting with his director of central intelligence. And Dick Clarke is a very, very fine counterterrorism expert -- and that's why I kept him on.

And what I wanted Dick Clarke to do was to manage the crisis for us and help us develop a new strategy. And I can guarantee you, when we had that new strategy in place, the president -- who was asking for it and wondering what was happening to it -- was going to be in a position to engage it fully.

The fact is that what Dick Clarke recommended to us, as he has said, would not have prevented 9/11. I actually would say that not only would it have not prevented 9/11, but if we had done everything on that list, we would have actually been off in the wrong direction about the importance that we needed to attach to a new policy for Afghanistan and a new policy for Pakistan.

The real lesson of September 11 is that the country was not properly structured to deal with the threats that had been gathering for a long period of time. I think we're better structured today than we ever have been. We've made a lot of progress. But we want to hear what further progress we can make. And because this president considers his highest calling to protect and defend the people of the United States of America, he'll fight for any changes that he feels necessary.

THOMPSON: Thank you, Dr. Rice.

RICE: Thank you.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: Dr. Rice's day before the 9/11 Commission. Ahead on NEWSNIGHT, four 9/11 widows and their quest for answers.

A break first. This is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: The 9/11 Commission has been on the job for more than 16 months. Its members have reviewed more than two million documents, interviewed more than 1,000 people. The work has not been easy. That it is being done and all is not for nothing, as they say, which brings us to another number, the No. 4, four women brought together by loss, determined to find answers.

Here is CNN's Alina Cho.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ALINA CHO, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): You may think they're life-long friends. They are not.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You know what? You have homework.

CHO: The four mothers never knew each other before September 11, but when all of them lost their husbands that day...

MINDY KLEINBERG, 9/11 WIDOW: We wanted to know, how could this have happened? How could we live here and have been taken over by 19 terrorists from another country?

LORIE VAN AUKEN, 9/11 WIDOW: 9/11 for us was a colossal failure, a failure of defense, security.

PATTY CASAZZA, 9/11 WIDOW: We reached out and found each other because we were like-minded. We had burning questions.

CHO: Patty Casazza and Mindy Kleinberg joined with Kristen Breitweiser and Lorie Van Auken to form a group of 9/11 families determined to find answers. The women hardly knew where to begin, hardly knew how government worked.

VAN AUKEN: I knew there were a couple of houses. I knew the Congress was split between the Senate and the House. But I didn't know which one had more members. And now I know. We schooled ourselves. We have binders and binders of information filled with articles that we read on all these subjects and nobody told us anything.

CHO: They lobbied hard for the creation of the 9/11 Commission.

THOMAS KEAN, CHAIRMAN, 9/11 COMMISSION: They're influential in everything. Really, they're there. They work. When we need something, they're on the spot.

CHO: They also pressed for the best witnesses and staged a walkout when Richard Armitage testified instead of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. When Rice finally came before the commission, they were there. Now they want the president and vice president to testify before the American public.

CASAZZA: In a crisis situation, we need to know what the leadership of our nation was doing on that day.

CHO: The women continue their work, even though it means precious time away from their children.

KLEINBERG: If we go to Washington, we go for the day. We leave at 4:00 in the morning, so that we can be back that night.

KRISTEN BREITWEISER, 9/11 WIDOW: We really did lose 2 1/2 years with our kids.

CHO: This is their life now.

CASAZZA: We all take some measure of responsibility of what happened on September 11, because we as citizens weren't watching our leaders. We weren't holding them accountable to us. And in the future, we can't ever let that happen again.

CHO: Alina Cho, CNN, East Brunswick, New Jersey.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Morning papers after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(ROOSTER CROWING)

BROWN: Okeydoke, time to check morning papers from around and around the world, a bunch of them. I want to try and get to many.

"The International Herald Tribune," published by "The New York Times," in Paris. "New Iraq Tactic: Hostages," as we reported earlier. It is just interesting to look at how the Rice testimony has been headlined. Pretty straight headline here. "Rice Defends Efforts Before 9/11 Commission."

Now, come on, pan back up for a second and give me a shot of this picture. It will appear in "The Herald Tribune" and perhaps elsewhere tomorrow. It's an AP picture of a group of Marines praying over a fallen comrade. It's a very good and very painful picture. "The International Herald Tribune." "The Dallas Morning News." "Rice: 'We did what we could. There was no silver bullet to stop 9/11,' Bush Adviser Says." Pretty straight there in the "Dallas Morning News."

"The Washington Times" runs the same picture out of Iraq, the AP photo out of Iraq. Again, I find this kind of interesting, headline for the paper. "Heavy Fighting in Fallujah." Down below, "Iraqi Militants Put Allies on the Defensive." A conservative paper, and that's an interesting headline from them, I think. Anything else I wanted to -- oh, yes, "Clear Channel," the big radio conglomerate or whatever they are, "Fined $495,000 For Stern Acts." That would be Howard Stern, and so they dumped him. I think they carried him on six stations. They dumped him. It's all getting a little wacky, isn't it?

"The Oregonian." Did "The Oregonian" change its layout? It looks different to me. "No Silver Bullet" is the headline. "Rice Says Attacks Could Not Have Been Prevented." "Rice's Three-Hour Testimony," down at the bottom here, "Leaves Some Key Questions Unanswered." And so they take a look at an Associated Press analysis of Dr. Rice.

Sure, just hand it to me. This is kind of informal. "The Christian Science Monitor." "On the Stand, Rice Strikes Back" is the way they headline it. And down at the corner, down in the corner, "How It Happened in Iraq: A Perfect Storm. A Series of Events Has Triggered the Bloodiest Crisis to Date for U.S. Forces in Postwar Iraq." I'm really beginning to like that paper.

"The Detroit News" today -- 30 seconds. Thank you. "Rice: U.S. Miscalculated Terror Threat" is their headline. But over here is really the story they're talking about in Detroit. They haven't had a whole lot to laugh about of late. It's really their tough time in the city. But the baseball team, which was horrible last year, the worst in baseball, 4-0 to start it all off.

The weather in Chicago tomorrow, for those you've in Chicago tomorrow, is "ducky."

(CHIMES)

BROWN: That's the program. We're back here tomorrow night. We hope you are, too.

Until then, good night for all of us at NEWSNIGHT.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com


Aired April 8, 2004 - 22:00   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening again everyone.
Much of the program tonight, as you would expect, deals with the 9/11 commission and Condoleezza Rice's testimony. It was something to watch. There were remarkable moments telling about the country's and the administration's view of the problem of terrorism before 9/11.

Consider just one moment Ms. Rice said based on intelligence that al Qaeda might be planning hijackings she and her agency warned both the FBI and the FAA to take action.

Neither the secretary of transportation nor the head of FAA nor anyone at the FBI, to date at least, has told the commission they remember receiving any such warning. How could that be you may wonder? It is a question that will be asked several times tonight.

We begin with the nuts and bolts of the testimony. Our White House Correspondent Suzanne Malveaux in Crawford, Texas, Suzanne a headline.

SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, Aaron, President Bush watched Rice's testimony from his Crawford ranch. He even called her from his pickup truck to congratulate her, tell her she did a good job, but Bush's critics argue that she created more questions than answers.

BROWN: Suzanne, thank you.

Next a step back, some perspective from Jeff Greenfield, but first, Jeff, a headline.

JEFF GREENFIELD, CNN SR. ANALYST: Well, Aaron, can a national security adviser sitting across the table from a commission of distinguished ex-government officials look at the same set of facts and come to remarkably different conclusions? Yes. How can they do that? If you ask that question, you don't understand the bureaucracy of government -- Aaron.

BROWN: We'll ask the question. Thank you, Jeff.

Finally to Baghdad, another rough day across the country, not just for the Americans who are there. CNN's Walter Rodgers again with the duty for us, so Walter a headline.

WALTER RODGERS, CNN SR. INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, there was a new and terrifying front opened in the war in Iraq today. Islamic militants have begun to kidnap foreign civilians, journalists, aid workers, even Christian missionaries -- Aaron.

BROWN: Walter, thank you. We'll get back to you and the rest in a moment.

Also ahead on the program tonight the reaction from Capitol Hill to the Rice testimony, the politics of interpretation in a presidential election year.

Later in the program our own version of Tivo, Dr. Rice's testimony in her own words, a very big sound byte of it in any case.

And morning papers where we're betting today's testimony makes more than a few headlines. It is that sort of night, all that and more coming up in the hour ahead.

We begin with what Dr. Rice said on a long anticipated day after some foot dragging and no small measure of partisan back and forth. Her testimony came at a crucial moment in the war in Iraq as well. It was aimed in part to rebut the testimony of a former colleague, Richard Clarke, who believes the administration fixated on Iraq at the expense of fighting terrorism.

With that as a backdrop, with her boss in the fight of his political life, and with a national television audience watching, Condoleezza Rice stepped today into a mighty warm spotlight.

Our reporting begins with CNN's Suzanne Malveaux.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MALVEAUX (voice-over): In a highly anticipated session before the 9/11 commission, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice faced three key questions. Could the attack have been prevented?

CONDOLEEZZA RICE, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: There was no silver bullet that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks.

MALVEAUX: But commissioners cite a presidential daily brief from August, 2001 entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike the U.S." as a clear warning.

TIM ROEMER, 9/11 COMMISSION: The threat reporting saying the United States is going to be attacked should trigger the principals getting together to say we're going to do something about this I would think.

RICE: Mr. Roemer. Mr. Roemer let's be very clear. The PDB does not say the United States is going to be attacked. It says bin Laden would like to attack the United States.

MALVEAUX: Rice also received a memo from her deputy Richard Clarke a week before 9/11 urging her to push the CIA and Pentagon to fight terrorism even harder or imagine a day hundreds of Americans lay dead due to an attack. RICE: It would not be appropriate or correct to characterize what Dick wrote to me on September 4th as a warning of an impending attack.

MALVEAUX: Where does Rice see the biggest failure building up to 9/11?

RICE: We had a structural problem in the United States and that structural problem was that we did not share domestic and foreign intelligence.

MALVEAUX: Rice says the administration had an aggressive plan to eliminate al Qaeda but commissioners wanted evidence.

BOB KERREY, 9/11 COMMISSION: You said the president was tired of swatting flies. Can you tell me one example of where the president swatted a fly when it came to al Qaeda prior to 9/11?

RICE: I think what the president was speaking to was...

KERREY: No, no, what fly had he swatted?

RICE: Well, the disruptions abroad was what he was really focusing on.

MALVEAUX: Finally, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks did the president push his administration to focus too much on Iraq?

RICE: It's not surprising that the president would say what about Iraq, given our hostile relationship with Iraq and I'm quite certain that the president never pushed anybody to twist the facts.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MALVEAUX: Now in an effort tonight, Aaron, for the administration to prove it's being more forthcoming, it is working with the 9/11 commission to try to declassify some elements of that controversial presidential daily brief, the one that caused so many questions in Rice's testimony -- Aaron.

BROWN: This is the August brief, bin Laden has plans or hopes to attack the United States. Any sense of timing when we might see that which we might see?

MALVEAUX: Well, actually we think it's going to happen relatively soon. This is something that they began working on immediately after the testimony was complete. White House officials saying that they wanted to put out that section, at least that section that was talked about in the testimony and it's not clear whether or not they're going to put out the whole thing.

BROWN: Suzanne, thank you very much, Suzanne Malveaux tonight.

As the brief in question makes its way through the declassification process, there are reams of material for the commission to consider, either long in the public domain or revealed in some cases by Dr. Rice today.

For more on that side of things, CNN's Barbara Starr.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Three years before 9/11, President Clinton uses cruise missiles in retaliation for al Qaeda's bombing of U.S. embassies in East Africa.

GENEREAL HUGH SHELTON, CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF: This is by no means the first time the bin Laden network has been connected to terrorist attacks.

STARR: Then the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in October, 2000, but no U.S. response. Now, the 9/11 commission struggling to understand what the Bush administration knew about bin Laden and what it was prepared to do as threat reports spiked in the months before September 11th.

RICE: The president had been told by the director of Central Intelligence that was not going to be a silver bullet to kill bin Laden that you had to do much more.

STARR: In August, 2001, the president was warned in a classified intelligence document that al Qaeda might be planning to hijack airplanes but no specific information.

Rice revealed that during the summer, the FBI was conducting 70 full field investigations of suspected al Qaeda cells in the U.S. Now, she says, in hindsight the FBI and CIA failed to communicate about the threats they saw at home and abroad.

(on camera): Here at the Pentagon there was constant military planning to try and attack Osama bin Laden but, like today, the intelligence was never good enough to capture or kill him.

Barbara Starr, CNN, the Pentagon.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: We have much more tonight on Ms. Rice's day before the 9/11 commission. We'll talk with a commission member, a former national security adviser as well.

Other news of day first and that means Iraq on a day when we learned of five more American fatalities. In total, 44 Marines and soldiers have died in the past week. American and coalition forces have come under attack more than 140 times.

The general in charge of the region, General John Abizaid, said today he's considering delaying the return home of some units and the early callback of others to strengthen the force.

Shiite insurgents now control major pieces of three large cities in the south of the country. According to one commander there are signs too of coordination between Shiite and Sunni fighters, which would be as remarkable as it is troubling. Add to that today yet another twist.

Here's CNN's Walter Rodgers.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

RODGERS (voice-over): Shown here three Japanese taken hostage. Other video shows them being manhandled and humiliated and threatened with guns and knives, obviously for the benefit of the camera.

The Japanese government has been given three days to pull its troops out of the American-sponsored coalition in Iraq or a shadowy group calling itself the Mujahedeen squadrons threatens to burn the Japanese hostages alive.

In another incident two Israeli-Arabs, Palestinian aid workers, were also seized and seven Korean Christian missionaries were also taken hostage by Islamic militants. They were later released. Still, the sudden (unintelligible) of hostage taking of foreigners seems a new tactic.

Sunni insurgents in Fallujah continue to battle U.S. Marines trying to retake control of that city. This U.S. tank was hit at Fallujah, the crew wounded, attesting to the ferocity of the outgunned Arab fighters. Increasingly, the Iraqi people see these Marines as the aggressors accusing them of killing women and children.

LT. GEN. RICARDO SANCHEZ, CMDR., JOINT TASK FORCE: We do everything possible to protect infrastructure, to protect non- combatants, but that is a fact when you're on a battlefield of this nature in an urban environment.

RODGERS: Parts of three southern Iraqi cities an-Najaf, Kut and Kufa were still in the control of Shiite rebels Thursday night. This Shiite cleric said: "The Americans are attacking us and we are attacking back. We say to the Americans, remove your tanks."

(END VIDEOTAPE)

RODGERS: The military initiative may have been regained by the Americans, although U.S. forces may be losing the public relations war here this as an increasing number of Iraqis seem to see the American forces as part of the problem rather than part of the solution -- Aaron.

BROWN: Let's talk a bit about tomorrow or Friday your time. It's Friday morning there now. It is a major holiday. There are lots of concerns about what could go down tomorrow.

RODGERS: That's true. This would be the anniversary of the toppling of that statue of Saddam Hussein a year ago, which means the Americans have been in Baghdad for a year. There are demonstrations planned but even more threatening in terms of security and stability here is April 11th and 12th.

That's the Arbayeen holiday, a major Shiite holiday and U.S. forces here are saying openly they're braced for more terror attacks, more bombings of the Shiites when they gather for big religious ceremonies -- Aaron.

BROWN: Walter, thank you. It's been a long day for you, Walter Rodgers in Baghdad.

A bit later in the program we'll talk to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser to President Carter, who is critical of the administration's handling of Iraq and terrorism

Earlier in the day by chance I was talking to a predecessor of his, Henry Kissinger, for his take. These days, he said, are the most important days for the American effort since the war began and the outcome, said Dr. Kissinger, is very much in doubt. A reality check for us and a pretty sharp counterpoint to the message coming out of the Pentagon these days.

Here's CNN's Jamie McIntyre.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN SR. PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: The video of three kidnapped Japanese civilians being threatened with death by immolation is just one more image fueling perceptions that Iraq insurgents may be gaining the upper hand and keeping Pentagon officials on the defensive.

DONALD RUMSFELD, DEFENSE SECRETARY: Well, of course, terrorists have been doing that type of thing for hundreds of years.

MCINTYRE: While Japan says it won't pull its troops, as the kidnappers demand, some U.S. allies in Iraq are shrinking from dangerous duty raising concerns about how long countries like Ukraine and Bulgaria will stay.

From Fallujah another disturbing picture, bloodied Marines crawl from their crippled M1A1 battle tank after an RPG attack. The isolated image can give the impression of defeat even in victory.

MAJ. GEN. KEITH STALDER, COMMANDER, 1ST MARINE EXPEDITIONARY FORCE: We're winning every firefight we engage in there.

MCINTYRE: In Vietnam, the U.S. won virtually every battle but lost. The Bush administration rejects the suggestion Iraq is turning into a quagmire.

COLIN POWELL, SECRETARY OF STATE: I think it is not a swamp that is going to devour us.

KERREY: I think the military operations are dangerously off track.

MCINTYRE: Still, as U.S. troops engage in the sort of deadly urban combat they managed to avoid during the initial invasion, the mounting casualties are making critics out of former supporters.

KERREY: I think we're going to end up with civil war if we continue down the military operation strategy that we have in place. I say that sincerely as someone that supported the war in the first place.

MCINTYRE: U.S. commanders insist at the end of the day the U.S. military has the muscle to bring Iraq under control so long as America doesn't lose its nerve.

SANCHEZ: I'll tell you that right now we are on track. We are prepared for a sustained operation. We are not walking away from the problem.

MCINTYRE (on camera): The CIA is disputing what unnamed intelligence sources have told the "New York Times," namely that he uprisings in Iraq have broader support than the Pentagon admits. A U.S. official says that does not reflect the consensus of the intelligence community, which generally agrees the opposition in Iraq is a small minority.

Jamie McIntyre, CNN, the Pentagon.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Ahead on the program tonight back to Dr. Rice and the 9/11 commission reaction, some of it partisan, some not, to the testimony on Capitol Hill.

And later in the program the women for whom the events today are deeply personal. They're known in Washington as the 9/11 Jersey Girls. We'll take a break first.

From New York this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: 9/11 hearings are a reminder that facts and words are open to interpretation. Semantics have been a sparring point throughout the hearings, were again today. The questioning at times aggressive. Some of the answers raising more questions still.

Tim Roemer is a Democrat on the commission, a former Congressman from the State of Indiana. We spoke with him earlier tonight.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Congressman, if everyone else is going to do this I guess you might as well too. If you were going to write the headline for the day, what would it be, what stands out in this long day for you and the commission?

TIM ROEMER, 9/11 COMMISSION MEMBER: That's a good question, Aaron. First of all it would be only in America. Only in America can you have the opportunity to see the current adviser, top adviser to the president of the United States have some kind of an accountability hearing on what happened on 9/11.

And then sit down with the former president of the United States and also ask for accountability from the previous administration. Truly an extraordinary day and hopefully leads toward significant reforms to make the country safer.

BROWN: Let's talk about some of the substance of the day. How can it be, maybe this is easier for someone who has been in Washington a long time to understand but how can it be that directives given by the White House, National Security Council, whoever, to the FAA, to the FBI and you go to the FBI and you go to the FAA and they say we never saw those. We don't know anything about that. How can that be?

ROEMER: Aaron, I don't know that you could spend five lifetimes in Washington, D.C. From where I come from in Indiana that just doesn't make any kind of common sense.

The fact that today we asked Dr. Rice when you're getting these even general warnings about bin Laden wanting to attack the United States, you then have to get your hair on fire and say to the relevant agency, in this case the FBI, what are you finding out there in America?

We know there are sleeper cells out there. Are they activated? Where are they going? Who's doing something about it? And the fact that there was just this huge disconnect between what Dr. Rice said tasking the FBI to look at this situation and then when we've done these thousands of interviews and documents.

Mr. Picard who was the acting director of the FBI says he has no recollection of this tasking. The special agents in charge in the field say they never did it. What happened? So next week when we have the FBI before us that's certainly going to be one of the major questions for them.

BROWN: Does this in any way give credibility to the idea put forth by Mr. Clarke that the administration's attitude lacked urgency, not that they weren't paying attention but that they weren't urgent?

ROEMER: I certainly think that Mr. Clarke is a credible, reliable witness in the 9/11 commission hearings. I also think that when you not just listen to Mr. Clarke but when we had Mr. Armitage appear before the commission in Dr. Rice's place a couple weeks ago, he said this process was not moving speedily.

And then we have other people saying many of the same things. General Hugh Shelton was saying that in the Bush administration the terrorism issue was put on the back burner.

We don't say those things to try to blame the Bush administration. We want to see what went wrong in order to make it right. We want to look back so that we can make the reforms and move the bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. toward this new threat.

BROWN: Just finally, we got less than a minute here, have you read the August, I guess it's August 6th memo and, if you had, is it in fact history? Is it more than history? Will we ever get to see what it is?

ROEMER: I asked Dr. Rice two or three times today why we shouldn't make this available to you and to 270 million Americans, Aaron. You should see it. America should see it. It doesn't have sources and methods in it. It doesn't have a risk to national security. It does talk about what the FBI perceived as a threat.

The title of it is "Bin Laden Determined to Attack the United States" and it talks about him wanting to attack this country for four or five years. So, while that's not somebody with a red tie is going to attack New York City on September 11th, it is enough of a warning that you've got to go running out of that room as one of the top policymakers in the government saying we got to find out how true this is, whether there's a threat in the United States, whether the domestic agency tasked with doing something about it is doing something about it.

BROWN: Congressman, next week the FBI. We'll look forward to talking to you again next week we hope. Thank you again.

ROEMER: Look forward to seeing you, Aaron. Thanks for having me.

BROWN: Thank you, sir.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Tim Roemer, former Congressman from Indiana. We talked with him earlier tonight.

Condoleezza Rice today delivered one of the highest level public defenses of the administration's handling of terrorism. Her appearance came by way of a political storm, of course set off by Richard Clarke's controversial book and testimony. We suspect few were surprised that politics was part of the reaction as well.

Here's CNN's Joe Johns.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOE JOHNS, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Even before Condoleezza Rice had finished and with all eyes on Capitol Hill riveted to her testimony, the number two Republican in the Senate launched an attack on the 9/11 commission.

SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL (R), KENTUCKY: Hopefully the commission will identify additional methods to improve U.S. security but, forgive me for not being terribly optimistic. I fear the commission has lost sight of this goal and has become a political casualty of the electoral hunting season.

JOHNS: After the hearing, Republicans rushed to the microphones in a coordinated defense of Rice.

SEN. KAY BAILY HUTCHISON (R), TEXAS: I am very pleased that Condy Rice came and did such a credible and good job.

JOHNS: Republicans used the words of Bush critic Richard Clarke to bolster Rice's case that September 11th could not have been prevented and cited Clarke's admission that implementing his recommendations would not have changed the outcome.

SEN. JUDD GREGG (R), NEW HAMPSHIRE: Would that have stopped the 9/11 event? Would that have prevented the 9/11 event? A one word answer from Mr. Clarke, no.

JOHNS: Democrat Chuck Schumer of New York, without specifically mentioning Clarke's dramatic apology to the victims' families, said he had expected to hear more from Rice.

SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER (D), NEW YORK: Unfortunately, we did not hear from adviser Rice three important words, we made mistakes.

JOHNS: But there was little dispute, even from most Democrats, about the substance of Rice's testimony and, from one, a bit of praise.

SEN. JOSEPH LIEBERMAN (D), CONNECTICUT: She's a strong, able person who stood her ground in a way that was not divisive.

JOHNS (on camera): But at the end of the day, one Senator said, no one had any illusions Condoleezza Rice was going to change any minds.

Joe Johns, CNN, Capitol Hill.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Still ahead on the program tonight, could anyone have prevented 9/11? Jeff Greenfield joins us with his take on a remarkable day and the possibility that even with the best people the system itself, the bureaucracy may have failed us.

From New York this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: The headlines in the 9/11 investigation have, we think, tended to highlight the either/or, either the president took the threat of terrorism urgently or not. Either Richard Clarke was in the loop or not. Either the FBI did its job or didn't and, of course, either the system failed or it did not and we can answer that one, clearly it did.

And just as clearly a lot of people made a lot of mistakes. Either/or covers a world of territory but not all of it, which got our Jeff Greenfield thinking.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GREENFIELD (voice-over): Yes, it was high political drama. Yes, there was a partisan elbow or two but at its root the exchanges between Condoleezza Rice and the commissioners were about something else, how to measure the way a bureaucracy works or doesn't.

Clearly, Dr. Rice was answering a man who wasn't there today, her one time top terrorism deputy Richard Clarke who painted the Bush administration as complacent in the face of growing threats in the spring and summer of 2001. She spent much of her prepared testimony detailing what the administration had done.

RICE: The FAA issued at least five civil aviation security information circulars. The FBI tasked all 56 of its U.S. field offices to increase surveillance of known suspected terrorists and to reach out to known informants.

GREENFIELD: But listen to what Commissioner Jamie Gorelick says they found.

JAMIE GORELICK, 9/11 COMMISSION: Secretary Minetta, the Secretary of Transportation, had no idea of the threat. The administration of the FAA, responsible for security on our airlines had no idea.

GREENFIELD: And here's Commissioner Tim Roemer on the FBI response.

ROEMER: To date we have found nobody, nobody at the FBI who knows anything about a tasking of field offices, nothing went down the chain to the FBI field offices on spiking of information, on knowledge of al Qaeda in the country and still the FBI doesn't do anything.

GREENFIELD: Who's right? Well, the way Washington works they could all be right. Dr. Rice did order a memo sent out but they were dealt with the way a bureaucracy usually deals with such stuff routinely because in a pre-9/11 world they seemed routine.

It's much the same with the dust up between former Senator Bob Kerrey and Rice over the meaning of an August 6th memo sent to the president.

KERREY: This is what the August 6th memo said to the president that the FBI indicates patterns of suspicious activity in the United States consistent with preparations for hijacking.

RICE: I can tell you that I think the best antidote to what happened in that regard would have been many years before to think about what you could do for instance to harden cockpits. That would have made a difference. We weren't going to harden cockpits in the three months that we had a threat spike.

GREENFIELD: Of course that's exactly what happened after September 11th but pre-9/11 any such suggestion would have been dismissed as pure government make work. And, again and again, Dr. Rice noted how little time the Bush administration had.

RICE: We were in office 233 days. And the kinds of structural changes that have been needed by this country for some time did not get made in that period of time.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

GREENFIELD: So 233 days, eight months. In the prism of 9/11, that seems like an eternity. In the years before 9/11, not much time at all for a government to act on.

BROWN: Let's talk about -- this has come up a lot, about whether Mr. Clarke said he in fact that nothing could have prevented 9/11. It has been said on this program I think five different times in the last week. You hear it differently.

GREENFIELD: Well, I took the liberty of reading what Clarke said.

What Clarke said specifically -- was asked, if all of your recommendations of January 25 with regard to Afghanistan had been implemented, arming the Predator, arming the Northern Alliance, would that have stopped 9/11? He had a one word answer, no, because the muscle was here. But he also was clear about how unclear he was about whether shaking the tree in the spring and summer of 2001 might...

BROWN: Which he was also recommending.

GREENFIELD: Yes. So when people say he said that nothing could have stopped it, they're half right. Once again, it depends on what you want to hear, I guess.

BROWN: Jeff, thank you, Jeff Greenfield with us.

Still to come on the program, a learned hand in matters of war and peace, a former national security adviser to a president as well, a great first.

This is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Just over a week ago, when the White House agreed to allow Dr. Rice to testify in public, Iraq had not yet erupted, the horrific murders of the four U.S. contractors in Fallujah were still hours away. It was the relative calm before a terrific and horrible storm. The story is different in Iraq tonight. It was the backdrop in many respects of this morning's testimony.

Ms. Rice's counterpart in the Carter administration, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, joins us tonight from Chicago.

Dr. Brzezinski, good to have you with us.

(CROSSTALK)

BROWN: Did you watch Dr. Rice, today, by the way?

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, FORMER NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: I watched some of it, not all of it.

BROWN: Do you have a take on it?

BRZEZINSKI: I think she was very professional, very competent. But on the big story, 9/11, it seems to me that everyone was missing the point, to some extent. It was a plot that really shouldn't have succeeded. Just imagine the following. Suppose someone came to you and said, I have a scheme for kidnapping four airliners with 18 or 19 foreign looking guys, some of them even immigrants, or illegal immigrants, actually, armed with box cutters.

In the middle of the flight, four of them will take over the pilot's seats, having been trained on, then flying light planes and they'll fly these huge aircraft into targets. What probability of success would you give that scheme? Maybe 5 percent. In fact, they had 75 percent success. And the reason is, airport security was lax, FBI wasn't really tracking these people, CIA wasn't really penetrating hostile terrorist groups abroad, and no one at the top was cracking the whip.

BROWN: Let's move ahead.

Mostly, I hope to talk about Iraq tonight and get your take on events there. Obviously, you've had serious concerns about the administration's going into Iraq. And do you think -- this is such a baseline question, but do you think where are safer, that the world is safer, that the Middle East is better off, for what has been accomplished?

BRZEZINSKI: I don't really think so.

I think the Middle East is progressively being set on fire. Our so-called liberation of Iraq is now becoming, in the eyes of the Iraqis, many Iraqis, and many Arabs, increasingly a direct military occupation and occasionally, unfortunately, quite brutal at that. They see it as an extension of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the two occupations being the two sides of a single coin.

And the IISS, the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies, has recently completed a report showing there are more terrorist groups now directing their hostility at the United States. We're more isolated internationally than we were a year ago. So I think the balance sheet is not a very good one.

BROWN: We are there. That is sort of the fact of the matter. We are there. What do we do now?

BRZEZINSKI: Well, I have a view on that which may strike you as somewhat paradoxical.

But my view is, if our military wants more U.S. military in there, we should without hesitation provide them. We have to show that we have staying power and that we can handle the security problem. But, at the same time, we really ought to engage ourselves politically. This is not a problem to be solved militarily and just by U.S. occupation. We ought to move rapidly in transforming the authority in Iraq into a U.N.-sponsored authority, so that it isn't an American occupation.

We ought to hand over "sovereignty" -- in quotation marks -- on schedule. And we ought to become much more active in promoting the Israeli-Palestinian peace, because we can't disengage from Iraq if the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is still going on. So we need a political dimension that's much more active. And that will be more likely to gain us international support, both from the Europeans and maybe even from some moderate Muslim countries.

BROWN: That's a great synopsis of where you see things now.

Dr. Brzezinski, it's good to see you again. Thank you, sir, very much. Thank you.

BRZEZINSKI: It's good to be with you.

BROWN: Ahead on the program still, we want to give you a chance for those of you who were busy today -- many of you were -- to have at least a larger taste of what Dr. Rice had to say. So we'll roll that out after the break.

Around the world, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: And more to come.

Condoleezza Rice testified for three hours this morning, 30 minutes longer than scheduled. In the hours since, many people have weighed in on what was said and what was not. It is the 9/11 Commission's job to decide officially what all the testimony means within the context of all their other work.

As we said earlier, the questioning was tough at times today. Here in her own words is what Dr. Rice said in some of the more contentious moments.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Dr. Rice, you please rise and raise your right hand? Do you swear or affirm to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

RICE: I do.

There was no silver bullet that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. In hind tight, if anything might have helped stop 9/11, it would have been better information about threats inside the United States, something made very difficult by structural and legal impediments that prevented the collection and sharing of information by our law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

RICHARD BEN-VENISTE, 9/11 COMMISSION MEMBER: Did you tell the president, at any time prior to August 6, of the existence of al Qaeda cells in the United States?

RICE: First, let me just make certain...

BEN-VENISTE: If you could just answer that question, because I only have a very limited...

RICE: I understand, Commissioner, but it's important...

BEN-VENISTE: Did you tell the president...

RICE: ... that I also address...

(APPLAUSE)

BEN-VENISTE: Isn't it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6 PDB warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB?

RICE: I believe the title was, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States. "

Now, the...

BEN-VENISTE: Thank you.

JAMIE GORELICK, 9/11 COMMISSION MEMBER: You indicate in your statement that the FBI tasked its field offices to find out what was going on out there. We have no record of that. The Washington field office international terrorism people say they never heard about the threat, they never heard about the warnings, they were not asked to come to the table and shake those trees. SACs, special agents in charge, around the country -- Miami in particular -- no knowledge of this.

And so, I really come back to you -- and let me add one other thing. Have you actually looked at the -- analyzed the messages that the FBI put out?

RICE: Yes.

GORELICK: To me, and you're free to comment on them, they are feckless. They don't tell anybody anything. They don't bring anyone to battle stations.

And I personally believe, having heard Coleen Rowley's testimony about her frustrations in the Moussaoui incident, that if someone had really gone out to the agents who were working these issues on the ground and said, "We are at battle stations. We need to know what's happening out there. Come to us," she would have broken through barriers to have that happen, because she was knocking on doors and they weren't opening.

BOB KERREY, FORMER U.S. SENATOR: You said the president was tired of swatting flies.

KERREY: Can you tell me one example where the president swatted a fly when it came to al Qaeda prior to 9/11?

RICE: I think what the president was speaking to was...

KERREY: No, no. What fly had he swatted? RICE: Well, the disruptions abroad was what he was really focusing on...

KERREY: No, no...

RICE: ... when the CIA would go after Abu Zubaydah...

KERREY: He hadn't swatted...

RICE: ... or go after this guy...

KERREY: Dr. Rice, we didn't...

RICE: That was what was meant.

KERREY: We only swatted a fly once on the 20th of August 1998. We didn't swat any flies afterwards. How the hell could he be tired?

RICE: I'm aware, Mr. Kerrey, of a speech that you gave at that time that said that perhaps the best thing that we could do to respond to the Cole and to the memories was to do something about the threat of Saddam Hussein.

That's a strategic view.

TIMOTHY ROEMER, PRESIDENT, CENTER FOR NATIONAL POLICY: Why don't you get Dick Clarke to brief the president before 9/11? Here is one of the consummate experts that never has the opportunity to brief the president of the United States on one of the most lethal, dynamic and agile threats to the United States of America.

Why don't you use this asset? Why doesn't the president ask to meet with Dick Clarke?

RICE: Well, the president was meeting with his director of central intelligence. And Dick Clarke is a very, very fine counterterrorism expert -- and that's why I kept him on.

And what I wanted Dick Clarke to do was to manage the crisis for us and help us develop a new strategy. And I can guarantee you, when we had that new strategy in place, the president -- who was asking for it and wondering what was happening to it -- was going to be in a position to engage it fully.

The fact is that what Dick Clarke recommended to us, as he has said, would not have prevented 9/11. I actually would say that not only would it have not prevented 9/11, but if we had done everything on that list, we would have actually been off in the wrong direction about the importance that we needed to attach to a new policy for Afghanistan and a new policy for Pakistan.

The real lesson of September 11 is that the country was not properly structured to deal with the threats that had been gathering for a long period of time. I think we're better structured today than we ever have been. We've made a lot of progress. But we want to hear what further progress we can make. And because this president considers his highest calling to protect and defend the people of the United States of America, he'll fight for any changes that he feels necessary.

THOMPSON: Thank you, Dr. Rice.

RICE: Thank you.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: Dr. Rice's day before the 9/11 Commission. Ahead on NEWSNIGHT, four 9/11 widows and their quest for answers.

A break first. This is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: The 9/11 Commission has been on the job for more than 16 months. Its members have reviewed more than two million documents, interviewed more than 1,000 people. The work has not been easy. That it is being done and all is not for nothing, as they say, which brings us to another number, the No. 4, four women brought together by loss, determined to find answers.

Here is CNN's Alina Cho.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ALINA CHO, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): You may think they're life-long friends. They are not.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You know what? You have homework.

CHO: The four mothers never knew each other before September 11, but when all of them lost their husbands that day...

MINDY KLEINBERG, 9/11 WIDOW: We wanted to know, how could this have happened? How could we live here and have been taken over by 19 terrorists from another country?

LORIE VAN AUKEN, 9/11 WIDOW: 9/11 for us was a colossal failure, a failure of defense, security.

PATTY CASAZZA, 9/11 WIDOW: We reached out and found each other because we were like-minded. We had burning questions.

CHO: Patty Casazza and Mindy Kleinberg joined with Kristen Breitweiser and Lorie Van Auken to form a group of 9/11 families determined to find answers. The women hardly knew where to begin, hardly knew how government worked.

VAN AUKEN: I knew there were a couple of houses. I knew the Congress was split between the Senate and the House. But I didn't know which one had more members. And now I know. We schooled ourselves. We have binders and binders of information filled with articles that we read on all these subjects and nobody told us anything.

CHO: They lobbied hard for the creation of the 9/11 Commission.

THOMAS KEAN, CHAIRMAN, 9/11 COMMISSION: They're influential in everything. Really, they're there. They work. When we need something, they're on the spot.

CHO: They also pressed for the best witnesses and staged a walkout when Richard Armitage testified instead of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. When Rice finally came before the commission, they were there. Now they want the president and vice president to testify before the American public.

CASAZZA: In a crisis situation, we need to know what the leadership of our nation was doing on that day.

CHO: The women continue their work, even though it means precious time away from their children.

KLEINBERG: If we go to Washington, we go for the day. We leave at 4:00 in the morning, so that we can be back that night.

KRISTEN BREITWEISER, 9/11 WIDOW: We really did lose 2 1/2 years with our kids.

CHO: This is their life now.

CASAZZA: We all take some measure of responsibility of what happened on September 11, because we as citizens weren't watching our leaders. We weren't holding them accountable to us. And in the future, we can't ever let that happen again.

CHO: Alina Cho, CNN, East Brunswick, New Jersey.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Morning papers after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(ROOSTER CROWING)

BROWN: Okeydoke, time to check morning papers from around and around the world, a bunch of them. I want to try and get to many.

"The International Herald Tribune," published by "The New York Times," in Paris. "New Iraq Tactic: Hostages," as we reported earlier. It is just interesting to look at how the Rice testimony has been headlined. Pretty straight headline here. "Rice Defends Efforts Before 9/11 Commission."

Now, come on, pan back up for a second and give me a shot of this picture. It will appear in "The Herald Tribune" and perhaps elsewhere tomorrow. It's an AP picture of a group of Marines praying over a fallen comrade. It's a very good and very painful picture. "The International Herald Tribune." "The Dallas Morning News." "Rice: 'We did what we could. There was no silver bullet to stop 9/11,' Bush Adviser Says." Pretty straight there in the "Dallas Morning News."

"The Washington Times" runs the same picture out of Iraq, the AP photo out of Iraq. Again, I find this kind of interesting, headline for the paper. "Heavy Fighting in Fallujah." Down below, "Iraqi Militants Put Allies on the Defensive." A conservative paper, and that's an interesting headline from them, I think. Anything else I wanted to -- oh, yes, "Clear Channel," the big radio conglomerate or whatever they are, "Fined $495,000 For Stern Acts." That would be Howard Stern, and so they dumped him. I think they carried him on six stations. They dumped him. It's all getting a little wacky, isn't it?

"The Oregonian." Did "The Oregonian" change its layout? It looks different to me. "No Silver Bullet" is the headline. "Rice Says Attacks Could Not Have Been Prevented." "Rice's Three-Hour Testimony," down at the bottom here, "Leaves Some Key Questions Unanswered." And so they take a look at an Associated Press analysis of Dr. Rice.

Sure, just hand it to me. This is kind of informal. "The Christian Science Monitor." "On the Stand, Rice Strikes Back" is the way they headline it. And down at the corner, down in the corner, "How It Happened in Iraq: A Perfect Storm. A Series of Events Has Triggered the Bloodiest Crisis to Date for U.S. Forces in Postwar Iraq." I'm really beginning to like that paper.

"The Detroit News" today -- 30 seconds. Thank you. "Rice: U.S. Miscalculated Terror Threat" is their headline. But over here is really the story they're talking about in Detroit. They haven't had a whole lot to laugh about of late. It's really their tough time in the city. But the baseball team, which was horrible last year, the worst in baseball, 4-0 to start it all off.

The weather in Chicago tomorrow, for those you've in Chicago tomorrow, is "ducky."

(CHIMES)

BROWN: That's the program. We're back here tomorrow night. We hope you are, too.

Until then, good night for all of us at NEWSNIGHT.

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