contrapositive

RICE'S LOOP Writing in Saturday editions of The Daily News, Kenneth R. Bazinet and Thomas M. DeFrank provide a couple of wisps of information about Condoleeza Rice's closed-door testimony before the 9/11 Commision.

But they bury a startling admission from Rice's spokesman:

Rice, who has refused to testify before the panel under oath and in public, met with the commission privately for four hours Feb. 7.

One issue was her May 16, 2002, statement at the White House when she said, "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center . . . that they would try to use . . . a hijacked airplane as a missile." Intelligence reports had detailed such plans as much as five years before 9/11.

Richard Ben-Veniste, a member of the 9/11 panel, said that during a closed door session Rice revised that statement.

"She corrected [herself] in our private interview by saying, 'I could not anticipate that they would try to use an airplane as a missile,' but acknowledging that the intelligence community could anticipate it," Ben-Veniste said.

"No reports of the use of airplanes as weapons were briefed or presented to Dr. Rice prior to May 2002," said her spokesman Sean McCormack. (Empahsis added.)

Let's step back for a moment and think about what this means.

Rice is stating for the record that, while intelligence about planes being used as weapons existed prior to 9/11, she was unaware of it.

Fine.

A bit troubling? Absolutely. But not news.

But her spokesman seems to be suggesting that, even after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Rice continued to be unaware of this intelligence for another seven months.

That is absolutely shocking.

It's shocking because after 9/11, the existence of such intelligence was widely discussed--and not just in classified memos or CIA briefings. It was discussed in the nation's newspapers.

Here's Matthew Brzezinski in a 4700-word Washington Post Magazine story:

Philippine and U.S intelligence officials said, the Bojinka operation called for a second, perhaps even more ambitious phase, as interrogators discovered when they pressed Murad about his pilot's license. All those years in flight school, he confessed, had been in preparation for a suicide mission. He was to buy, rent, or steal -- that part of the plan had not yet been worked out -- a small plane, preferably a Cessna, fill it with explosives and crash it into CIA headquarters.

There were secondary targets the terrorist cell wanted hit: Congress, the White House, the Pentagon and possibly some skyscrapers. The only problem, Murad complained, was that they needed more trained pilots to carry out the plot.

So there it is--terrorists had contemplated using planes as weapons. The publication date?

December 30, 2001.

That's four full months before Rice's spokesman says she learned of the threat.

And it isn't just a question of a single reference in a single article. Here's Simon Reeve, in an Los Angeles Times op-Ed published five days after 9/11:

One of Yousef's conspirators trained as a pilot at U.S. flight schools, before graduating from an academy in North Carolina with a temporary commercial pilot's license. In a chilling precursor to the attacks last week, Yousef wanted his friend to fly a plane loaded with chemical weapons into the CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.

Here's Dan Murphy, writing for the Christian Science Monitor on February 14, 2002:

The arrests from the 1995 airline bombing plot also provided the first foreshadowing of the Sept. 11 attacks. During the Filipino interrogation - Murad later alleged he was severely tortured - Murad said he and Yousef had toyed with the idea of hijacking a plane and flying it into the Pentagon or the CIA. Murad had even studied at a US flight school in 1992. "My sense is when we reported this to the USA they didn't believe us very well,'' says Jose Almonte, who was the National Security Adviser at that time. Frankly, I was thinking they were just dreaming also. It was a failure of imagination on our parts."

In short, if Rice wasn't the last person to learn of this threat, it's fair to say she got wind of it pretty late in the game.

And that's a pretty damning thing to say about Rice and her staff (including Richard Clarke). She is, after all, the National Security Advisor.

Was Rice not reading the newspapers? Do reporters have better sources at the CIA than she does? How could such crucial information fail to make its way into the NSA's post-9/11 briefings?

There are more than enough questions to go around.

However. That said.

There's another--more cynical--way to look at the comments from Rice's spokesman. And that is:

Maybe Rice did know of these threats. Maybe Clarke himself briefed her on them. And maybe her spokesman's denial on her behalf is just a way to justify her May 16, 2002 "I don't think anybody could have predicted..." remark--which was itself an attempt to muddy the waters about the state of pre-9/11 intelligence.

I don't know.

One thing is clear though--having Rice testify under oath before the 9/11 Commission would be a good way to start the process of finding out.