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CNN Live Sunday

Bush Defends Handling 9-11 Warnings Among Concern of Future Attacks

Aired May 19, 2002 - 17:00   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.
FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: We begin this hour with the latest White House response to criticism about how the government handled pre-9/11 terror warnings. The latest explanations also coincide with new vague warnings of future attacks. CNN's Kathleen Koch joins us live with more details now. Hi, Kathleen.

KATHLEEN KOCH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Fredricka. Well, damage control kicked into high gear here in Washington today. The White House very eager to make its case that the president and his security team did everything they could with what the White House calls "the unspecific terrorism warnings" that they got in the days and months before 9/11.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KOCH (voice-over): The president under fire; the Bush team's heavy hitters went on the offensive Sunday. First, warning that war on terror is far from over.

RICHARD CHENEY, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The prospects of a future attack again the United States are almost certain. I would like to say it is never going to happen again, but I don't think anybody who has really looked at it can say that. We don't know if it is going to be tomorrow or next week or next year.

KOCH: A sobering prediction, but not deflecting calls from lawmakers for a independent inquiry into why action was not taken on pre-9/11 warnings about possible al Qaeda airline hijackings.

REP. DICK GEPHARDT (D-MO), MINORITY LEADER: You can call it what you want -- a task force, a working group, a commission -- but its purpose should be to make -- to analyze what happened in the past and to make valid recommendations to the agencies, to the president, to the Congress for how we can better coordinate all the information that's out there.

KOCH: Other lawmakers warned against painting such a inquiry as un-American.

SEN. JOE LIEBERMAN (D), CONNECTICUT: Republicans ion the administration have to be careful not to be so defensive that they end up calling any reasonable questions about September 11th unpatriotic. KOCH: The Bush administration Sunday said it will not release the August briefing warning President Bush of al Qaeda hijacking threats. It's also against anything other than a closed-door intelligence committee inquiry into the 9-11 attacks. The reason, not politics, say top officials, but national security.

CONDOLEEZZA RICE, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: In the context of this ongoing war, it is extremely important to protect the sources and the methods and the information so that we can try and disrupt further attacks.

KOCH: But one historian says the rhetoric is all too familiar.

ALAN LICHTMAN, PRESIDENTIAL HISTORIAN: This is what we heard all those years during the Vietnam War. We know what is best, we should operate in secret. We should withhold and keep things from the American people.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KOCH: Still this weekend senior administration and government officials are acknowledging a vague terrorism threat. Intelligence agencies noting a spike in activities that could suggest another al Qaeda terrorist attack is in the works. Now, that openness being driven, some suggest, by officials not wanting to be accused of making the same mistake twice -- Fredricka.

WHITFIELD: All right. Thank you very much, Kathleen, from the White House.

President Bush says that criticism is playing politics, and now this barrage of terror warnings. Is there a political connection? CNN political analyst Ron Brownstein is in our Washington bureau with some thoughts on all of this.

Well, first we had criticisms being hurled at the White House for not telling enough about what they knew when, and now a barrage of terror warnings. So is it your belief that this is politics at its best?

RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, I think -- look, the public officials here are in a very, very difficult position. Since 9/11, we've had people criticized for going forward too quickly and either scaring the public or seeming to dilute the impact of warnings, like when Gray Davis last fall in California made public the allegations about the bridges.

On the other hand, I think, Fredricka, over the last week you saw just how much cost there can be if you are seen as not acting quickly enough, as the administration is facing all of these questions about whether it efficiently and effectively put the dots together before September 11. I think on balance the pressure on elected officials is going to be to go public with any kind of a threat that is even remotely plausible, because the political costs of seeming to suppress or not act on information is much greater than the cost of going forward with something that does not bear out. WHITFIELD: It's the result of that post-9/11 culture. So what are people expected to do with this information? We have everything from apartment managers now have to be on the lookout. They're on alert. You hear Vice President Cheney earlier today saying it's not a matter of "if" but "when." What are people supposed do with this? And now New York City also under criticism for perhaps not securing its water supply sites.

BROWNSTEIN: Well, this is really the conundrum. I remember there was a press briefing last fall where Tom Ridge was asked how long the state of highest alert would last, and he said "indefinitely." That's almost a contradiction in terms. People can't be on the highest alert on an open-ended basis.

I mean, the problem here is that if you seem to be casting out too many threats for people to watch for, in effect it becomes sort of background noise. So it is a very, very difficult balancing act for the government, because there is really isn't that much of a political danger in the sense of going forward with things that don't bear out, but maybe a practical effect of, as I said, of diluting the impact of any individual warning. And again, I think it's a situation in which they're going to be second-guessed no matter what they do.

WHITFIELD: Sure. And the concern then from an awful lot of Americans who are hearing about these warnings is that after a while they are going to stop listening to these warnings and feel like, well, nothing happened, they told me to be forewarned and nothing happened, and so I am not going to believe it the next time.

BROWNSTEIN: Don't you think in some extent that's already happened? I mean, I think we think we're much more (UNINTELLIGIBLE) to these kinds of warnings than we were seven, eight months ago. I mean, people are really going about their daily lives. I don't think these -- when they raise these red flags it has quite the same effect. I mean, that is just inevitable in a society like this, the tendency to revert toward the mean, to revert back toward every day behavior is enormous. So the challenge for the government is to figure out how to keep all of us acting -- keeping us on our toes without having to come out so often that it becomes meaningless.

WHITFIELD: And certainly, the Bush administration already admits that the FBI is currently being revamped. There is a new direction it has taken. But is it the Attorney General John Ashcroft who's now going to be responsible or try to get these agencies to better communicate, or is that going to be the duty and the job of home security, Tom Ridge?

BROWNSTEIN: I don't really think there is anybody, I mean, who really has at the moment the sort of the portfolio of taking care of all of this. That's why you are seeing the calls for the congressional hearings or an independent commission that would try to look at this in a systematic way and look at what didn't happen. People are asking me, what did the president know and when did he know it? It's a wrong question. Certainly if Bush had a clear picture of what was going on, he or any other American president would have acted very forcefully before 9/11. The better question, is what didn't the president know and why didn't he know it. And that's something that we may indeed need a broader congressional investigation or some kind of an independent commission to answer.

WHITFIELD: And we may indeed be finding out that if indeed there are those congressional hearings, private or public. We'll find out. Ron Brownstein, thanks very much.

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