Fmr. Counterrorism Advisor Rand Beers on Rice's Reported Dismissal of Pre-9/11 CIA Warnings

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The Bush administration is coming under renewed scrutiny over its actions in the months prior to the Sept. 11th attacks.

In his new book, State of Denial, Bob Woodward reveals that on July 10, 2001 then CIA director George Tenet called President Bush's National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to hold an emergency meeting to review the latest on Osama Bin Laden. Intelligence was showing an increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States.

According to the Tenet and his counterterrorism chief Cofer Black told Rice that al-Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibly in the United States itself. They also said that they needed to immediately take covert or military action to thwart bin Laden.

Woodward reports that Tenet hoped his abrupt request for an immediate meeting would shake Rice but he left feeling that Rice had brushed off the warnings. Two months later the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked.

After the publication of Woodward's book, Rice initially suggested such a meeting in July 2001 did not even take place. On Sunday, Rice told reporters said, "The idea that I would have ignored that, I find incomprehensible. I am quite certain that it was not a meeting in which I was told that there was an impending attack, and refused to respond." But on Monday the State Department confirmed that Rice did meet with Tenet and Black on July 10th and that after the meeting Rice was compelled enough to ask the CIA to give the same briefing to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and to then Attorney General John Ashcroft.

• Rand Beers, served in the Bush administration as Senior Director for Combating Terrorism on the National Security Council. He also served on the National Security Council during the Reagan, first Bush and Clinton administrations. He resigned in protest from the Bush administration in March 2003, five days before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He is currently president of the National Security Network.

AMY GOODMAN: Rand Beers joins us now from Washington, D.C. He served in the Bush administration as senior director for combating terrorism on the National Security Council. He also served on the National Security Council during the Reagan, first Bush and Clinton administrations. He resigned in protest from the Bush administration in March 2003, five days before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He is currently president of the National Security Network. We welcome you to Democracy Now!, Rand Beers.

RAND BEERS: Thank you. It’s good to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us about this July meeting?

RAND BEERS: Well, I think it’s pretty straightforward, and the facts are on the table now. There was a meeting. It was a surprise or emergency or unscheduled meeting. Rice was there. Richard Clarke and Roger Cressey, his deputy, were there, in addition to Tenet and his assistant, Cofer Black. They did present information, which said that there was a huge amount of intelligence coming indicating that an attack was imminent. The United States was either the target in an overseas environment or possibly within the United States. So the information was all clearly put on the table, based on the information that was particularly new when they went into the room.

What Dr. Rice appears to have done is a classic Washington pushoff, which is to say, “Go brief somebody else.” She did not, as the National Security Advisor, do what previous national security advisors had done with this kind of a meeting, which was to herself call a meeting of senior levels in the government to discuss the serious information that was available. And so, as I have said before, the issue here is, what did she do about it? And what she did about it was basically nothing.

JUAN GONZALEZ: There has been, though, since the Woodward book focused attention on this meeting, apparently some conflict over to what degree George Tenet believed that she was taking the information seriously. In fact, I think the Washington Post has even written an article questioning their own Bob Woodward's account of it. Your sense of the degree to -- as the facts are being sorted out now?

RAND BEERS: As I said, I think the issue is not what did she specifically do in the room. The issue is, was there any evidence of the administration of the National Security Council at the highest level taking this kind of threat information seriously enough that they were prepared to shake up the government in order to make sure that we were as ready as possible? If seniors don't communicate to their junior officers that they take an issue seriously, then business as usual prevails. And I’m afraid that’s what happened here.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And the degree to which the 9/11 Commission dealt with whatever failures might have occurred here in terms of the response by Rice or the top government officials?

RAND BEERS: Well, it appears that the information that the 9/11 Commission had didn't give them enough of a sense of how significant this meeting may have been, but they certainly did report that during that time frame, there was a lot of intelligence, and Tenet and Dick Clarke were very much concerned that we weren't doing enough.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Rand Beers, former counterterrorism advisor, who served on the National Security Council under Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush. Can you talk about those days before the invasion of Iraq, what was going on, what you understood in 2001, and what happened between that time when you were still serving under George W. Bush and the time that you quit?

RAND BEERS: Well, I was, during that period, both at the State Department and then at the National Security Council staff. And what was basically happening after 9/11 and up to the invasion was that it became more and more clear wherever you were sitting in government that what we were doing in Afghanistan after the expulsion of the Taliban and al-Qaeda was shifting all of our assets and all of our attention in the direction of Iraq.

I became increasingly concerned that the level of attention to Afghanistan was putting us in a more perilous situation there. The amount of violence was increasing. Even only a year after the expulsion of the Taliban, they were already beginning to reconstitute, they were already beginning to attack. And we’re seeing today, I think, the real clear picture of that shift, because the amount of violence in Afghanistan has increased significantly. The instability across the country is now greater than it was, and the individuals who live in Afghanistan, I think, are more fearful of their own security than they have been for some time. So, what we have is the reason that we began this war on terrorism in Afghanistan turning out to be a situation that is getting perilously close to the instability in Iraq.