What about the Condi Rice testimony to the 9/11 Commission. Some have categorized her statements as evasive, combative and unwilling to accept blame. Evasive? She refused to give short, one word or one-line answers. Few responses to any question can be made without qualification. To understand the answer, one must understand the context of the events in which the question, and therefore the answer, refers. That cannot be done in one sentence or word.
Combative? When an interrogator asks a question, then refuses to allow the respondent to give a full answer, only seeking out takes from which to establish the interrogator's agenda, the respondent has every right to press for opportunity to answer fully and not be limited to a partial answer.
Unwilling to accept blame? For what? In office for some 280 days after the contentious aftermath of the elections, retaining holdovers from the Clinton administration for both continuity and simplicity of transition, the Bush administration not only inherited perhaps some sour grapes with the intellectual property, but also inherited something that has been ingrained in Washington and our national/political/governmental culture. The restraint place on intelligence gathering on American soil.
Much has been said about the inability of the CIA and FBI to "connect the dots" with the tidbits of information they had separately gathered. First of all, it is so very easy to see the image after the fact from an elevated view. While in the process of gathering information it's not so clear. Even if there is one investigator who is receiving all the data, until enough pieces come together to allow him to see a pattern, he's against the wall.
When there are dozens of investigators spread across the country, each perusing information, not as part of a grand investigation, but as many individual investigations, none of them has enough of the pieces to begin to form the puzzle. Perhaps a change in the FBI procedure to develop a database or clearinghouse for this investigatory information would help. That is the basis for the threat terrorism information center, the TTIC, to gather this information from many diverse government sources, analyze it and look for patterns forming.
The other part of the accusation involving the CIA is even deeper rooted in basic American rights. For decades, I cannot say just how long, there has been an abhorrence to covert investigation, of the type the CIA conducts, on Americans, on American soil. Not only is this viewed as trampling on our civil and privacy rights as citizens, should it take place, it is prevented by law. The CIA, by statutory regulation cannot spy on US citizens in America. By extension, the sharing of information by the CIA with domestic agencies is both culturally and legally limited for the same reasons, fear of abuse of the information and the methodology of collection.
So we as a society have decided to avoid the problems of the internal state security organs such as the Soviet KGB and the Nazi SS by telling our very necessary foreign spy agencies their work ends when they cross our borders.
I don't have a problem with that. But don't then turn around and accuse the same agencies of failure when had that information been shared and the knowledge made public, there would have been an outcry of violation of civil and privacy rights from the very same people who are now accusing these agencies of breech of duty.
The Cole, Kobar Towers, the '93 Trade Center bombings, Mogadishu, the attacks on American installations in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996, the East Africa embassy bombings of 1998. Where was the Clinton administration on these? Where was their response? Where were the critics who now paint the Bush administration as uninterested in terrorism and want to hang on Bush the failures of Clinton in responding to terrorist threat?
Is there a political agenda here? You bet!