This is a
new entry at historycommons.org. Condoleezza Rice didn't deserve
"more favorable" treatment. She belongs in prison.
May-June 2004: Zelikow Has Portions of 9/11 Commission Report Rewritten
to Be More Favorable to National Security Adviser Rice
9/11 Commission Executive Director Philip Zelikow tells the staff
team working on the Bush administration’s response to terrorist
threats in the summer of 2001 that their drafts must be rewritten
to cast National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in a better light.
Rice’s testimony about the administration’s prioritizing
of terrorism has been contradicted by former counterterrorism “tsar”
Richard Clarke, who said that al-Qaeda was not a high priority for
the White House. The commission staffers think that Clarke is telling
the truth, because, in the words of author Philip Shenon, Clarke had
left a “vast documentary record” about the White House’s
inattention to terrorism. Clarke’s account is also corroborated
by other National Security Council (NSC) members, the CIA, and the
State Department.
Zelikow's Reaction - However, Zelikow, a close
associate of Rice (see 1995 and January 3, 2001), tells the staffers
their version is “too Clarke-centric” and demands “balance.”
Shenon will comment: “He never said so explicitly, but Zelikow
made clear to [the staffers] that the commission’s final report
should balance out every statement of Clarke’s with a statement
from Rice. The team should leave out any judgment on which of them
was telling the truth.”
Support from Commission Lawyer - Zelikow is supported
to a point in this dispute by Daniel Marcus, the commission’s
lawyer. Marcus thinks that the staffers are making Clarke into a
“superhero,” and that there were some “limitations
and flaws” in his performance. Marcus also sees that the staff’s
suspicions of Zelikow and his ties to Rice are no longer hidden,
but will later say: “In a sense they overreacted to Philip
because they were so worried about him they pushed and pushed and
pushed, and sometimes they were wrong.”
Staffer Regrets Not Resigning Earlier - One of the
key staffers involved in the dispute, Warren Bass, had previously
considered resigning from the commission due to what he perceived
as Zelikow’s favoring of Rice. At this point he regrets not
resigning earlier, but does not do so now. Bass and his colleagues
merely console themselves with the hope that the public will read
between the lines and work out that Clarke is telling the truth
and Rice is not.
"Tortured Passages" - Shenon will comment:
“[T]he results of the team’s work were some of the most
tortured passages in the final report, especially in the description
of the performance of the NSA in the first months of the Bush presidency.
It was written almost as a point, counterpoint—Clarke says
this, Rice says the opposite—with no conclusion about what
the truth finally was.” [Shenon, 2008, pp. 394-396]
