Fried Rice

Watching National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice testifying before the 9/11 commission had something of a surreal air about it. Here was a woman who spent days making the talk-show rounds, insisting that she would love to testify but simply did not have the time, representing an Administration which fought the commission so fiercely it only convinced Americans that they had something to hide.

In the end, obtaining Rice's testimony, as enlightening as parts of it turned out to be, may well turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory. The price was steep: the commission had to agree not to call anyone else from the Administration under oath and not to recall Rice at all. The commission will be allowed to question President Bush, but any testimony has to be brief, private, not under oath – and given with Vice President Cheney in the same room. (Speculation immediately started circulating as to why Cheney has to be there, with most explanations along the lines of "nobody trusts Bush to say the right thing without Cheney there to keep him in line.")

In her testimony, Rice claimed that nothing pointed towards an imminent terrorist attack – only to contradict herself moments later when she reluctantly admitted that the notorious August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing was titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States." Her attempts to depict the PDB as "frustratingly vague" as to the "manner of attack" also self-destructed when a commissioner said that according to the PDB, "the FBI indicates patterns of suspicious activity in the United States consistent with preparations for hijacking."

Trying to salvage the situation, she said the PDB was actually about "historical" information rather than a current warning. Nobody believed her; after all, at the time numerous intelligence reports warned of just such an imminent attack. And her vain attempts to repaint Bush's pre-9/11 activities as gunning for Osama bin Laden were simply pathetic, if for no other reason that anyone who paid any attention to the news in 2001 knows that al Qaeda wasn't anywhere on the Administration radar at the time.

The overall impression of her testimony fits perfectly with the long-standing White House pattern of never admitting mistakes no matter what. Whenever anything goes wrong, it's always someone else's fault. Rice spent hours blaming the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, Richard Clarke, Bill Clinton – everyone except the people who were actually in charge that terrible September morning.

Yesterday's events are indicative of the White House attitude towards the 9/11 commission as a whole. After fighting the victims' families for months on the need for any investigation at all, the Administration grudgingly created it but stalled every inch of the way. Refusing to divulge information, refusing to allow testimony, stonewalling like mad – it's like the White House is wearing a large sign saying "We Have Something To Hide, And It's Pretty Darn Big."

Just this week, it was revealed that the White House withheld thousands of pages of documents dating back to the Clinton Administration from the commission, claiming they did not need to see them even though Clinton staffers had already given their approval. (They do not seem to understand that it's up to the commissioners to determine whether items are relevant or not.) The Administration also announced that they would scrutinize the commission's report line-by-line before its release, raising immediate suspicion that anything politically unpleasant would be removed (as happened with the Congressional 9/11 report, when the White House excised information on al Qaeda connections with the Saudi royal family), or at least held up until after the election.

The Administration wants to keep 9/11 as an event solely to be exploited for political purposes, whether it's whipping up public support for invading Iraq or for re-election ads showing a stalwart Bush facing down the evildoers. Any honest debate and/or introspection are officially, in the words of New York Times columnist William Safire, a "blame game," a "you-should-have-known inquisition." God forbid we should try to learn anything from what happened.

Could the 9/11 attacks have been prevented? Maybe, maybe not. A definitive answer may never be known. But that is hardly an excuse for the Bush Administration to drag its feet as it has. They owe it to the nation – and especially to the families – to stop obstructing the commission's work and to support a full, fair and public accounting of what happened.