| directfiesta |
04-01-2004 11:28 PM |
9/11 Rice major speech: Star Wars missile defence system.
More embarassement for the Bush administration....
And NO : no cliff notes ... spend 3 minutes reading... it could jumpstart your brains... LOL
Quote:
Pressure mounts on Rice over 9/11 speech
Undelivered text adds fuel to row over whether Bush White House took al-Qaida threat seriously
Julian Borger in Washington
Friday April 2, 2004
The Guardian
The US national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was due to deliver a major national security speech on September 11 2001. But it dwelt not on terrorism but on the proposed Star Wars missile defence system.
The White House confirmed the existence of the draft speech, which was first reported by the Washington Post, but refused to release the full text. However, a spokesman argued that one speech focusing on missile defence did not mean the White House was ignoring the terrorist threat.
The Rice speech was never delivered. The hijacked planes struck New York, Washington and Pennsylvania before she was due to talk.
But details of the draft have quickly become ammunition in a bitter election-year fight over whether the Bush administration took the al-Qaida threat seriously enough before the 2001 attacks.
After a constitutional tussle, the White House last week reluctantly agreed to allow the national security adviser to give sworn public testimony to a commission investigating US preparedness for the September 11 onslaught, and she will almost certainly be questioned about the speech.
The 2001 address, which was to have been given at a university in Washington, adds weight to allegations in a book by a former White House counter-terrorism expert, Richard Clarke, that the incoming Bush administration was fixated on Iraq and issues inherited from the cold war such as missile defence and relations with China and Russia in the critical months before the al-Qaida attacks.
The draft speech mentions terrorism, but only in the context of the threat posed by "rogue states" armed with weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. Neither the September 11 text nor any other Bush administration speech from that era mentions al-Qaida or Osama bin Laden.
The Rice speech argued for the need to confront "the threats and problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday", and then went on implicitly to criticise the Clinton administration's preoccupation with terrorist groups at the expense of building defences against ballistic missiles.
"We need to worry about the suitcase bomb, the car bomb and the vial of sarin released in the subway," the text of the speech argues, according the Washington Post. "[But] why put deadbolt locks on your doors and stock up on cans of Mace and then decide to leave your windows open?"
The Clinton administration pursued research into a Star Wars project designed to shoot down incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles, but did not approve its deployment because of persistent problems with the technology.
The Bush administration took office arguing that work should be accelerated despite the technical doubts. The first phase of the national missile defence is due to become operational later this year.
Scott McClellan, chief White House spokesman, shrugged off calls for the text of the Rice speech to be published, arguing that it was never delivered and therefore not in the public domain. He added that missile defence and counter-terrorism were not "either-or choices".
"We must act on all fronts to make America safer. These threats are not mutually exclusive, either. Confronting one helps address the other," Mr McClellan said.
Ivo Daalder, a national security council staffer under President Clinton, argued that senior officials in the Bush White House took office with the same foreign policy concerns and outlook they had had eight years earlier working for the first President Bush.
"When they left in January 1993, they hit the pause button. The intervening eight years were missing," said Mr Daalder, now a foreign policy analyst at the Brookings Institution.
"They left believing ballistic missile defence was the way to secure America, and came in believing ballistic missile defence was the best way to secure America."
The national missile defence plan also provided the central thrust of a keynote speech on security by President Bush on May 1 2001, in which he suggested the anti-ballistic missile treaty outlawing such schemes had become obsolescent.
The debate over US readiness for a terrorist attack, in 2001 and now, is the backdrop for an election which Republicans and Democrats alike expect to be tight. Both sides could draw some encourage ment yesterday from polling figures on public attitudes to the threat.
Only 47% of Americans believe the US is safer now than at the time of the attacks, and more than three-quarters expect the US or American interests abroad to be the target of a major terrorist attack in the next few months, according to a survey by the non-partisan Council for Excellence in Government.
However, it showed that three-quarters of those questioned were very or somewhat satisfied with the job the government was doing to prevent attacks. The results suggest a population largely resigned to the constant threat of attack.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/september1...184158,00.html |
