Transcript: 9/11: Twenty Years Later with Condoleezza Rice

MR. IGNATIUS: Welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m David Ignatius, a columnist for the Post.

My guest today on this special commemoration of the 20th anniversary of 9/11 is Dr. Condoleezza Rice, who was President George W. Bush's national security advisor on September 11, 2001. She later became secretary of state, the second woman and the first African American woman to hold that post. Today she's director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Madam Secretary, welcome to Washington Post Live. Thanks for joining us.

DR. RICE: Pleasure to be with you, David.

MR. IGNATIUS: So I should tell the audience and tell Dr. Rice that I am coming to you from the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where I today delivered a lecture on national security issues and the 9/11 anniversary jointly with my father, Paul Ignatius, who is 100 years old. So it's been a day of reflection for us as well as for you.

Madam Secretary, I want to ask you to begin with that day, September 11. You were at the White House. You were planning to give a speech that day on missile defense. The president was in Florida. When the first plane hit the World Trade Center, you called the president. It seemed at that point like a "strange attack," he's supposed to have said, and then you were in the Situation Room when somebody handed you a note about the second plane. Pick up the story from there about what happened.

DR. RICE: Well, after we heard about the first plane, we thought it might even be an accident, and then I was handed this note. And, suddenly, I knew it was a terrorist attack if there was a second plane that had gone into the World Trade Center, and I went in to try to get the national security principals together. Colin Powell, it turns out, was in Peru for an Organization of American States meeting. George Tenet, the CIA director, they said had already gone to a bunker in Langley, and then we heard that they couldn't reach Secretary Rumsfeld. His phone at defense at the Pentagon was just ringing and ringing and ringing. We looked behind us, and the plane had hit the World Trade Center--had hit the Pentagon, and about that time, I thought to myself, this is really an all-out attack.

But the Secret Service had taken over, and they said, "You've got to get out of here. Planes are flying into buildings all over Washington, D.C.," and so I was sort of lifted and actually levitated toward the Presidential Management Center, the emergency bunker that is there for the president. And from then on, it was just trying to manage the effects of what had happened that day, a sense that it was all a bit surreal, but you don't have time to think about how surreal it is or any sense of fear. You just simply have to act at that point.

MR. IGNATIUS: What was the mood in that bunker on that terrible day? Who was there? Were there too many people, too few people? Just give us a sense of what it was like inside as you wondered what was happening in the country.

DR. RICE: Well, when I arrived, two figures really stand out in my memory. The first is the vice president who was on the phone with President Bush, and the Air Force had asked should they shoot down any plane that was not responding properly. And the president--there were lawyers trying to figure out if he had the authority to shoot down what might be civilian aircraft, but he just gave the order. He said, of course, they have to because every plane has become a potential missile, and I remember at that moment thinking what a Hobson's choice for the president of the United States to have to shoot down potentially a civilian aircraft.

And the other figure that sticks out in my mind was Norm Mineta, who was the transportation secretary, and he was sitting there with a legal pad trying to track aircraft because we had to ground all civilian aircraft. Again, every plane had become a missile.

It was calm. People were going about their work. I got on the phone with President Putin because our forces were going up on alert, and you didn't want Russian forces to respond. He told me, "Don't worry. Our forces are coming down, and we've canceled all exercises." And I remember at that time thinking, wow, the Cold War is really over.

And the other thing that I did was to get a message out through the deputy secretary of state, Rich Armitage, that the United States of America has not been decapitated. Because the pictures were so terrible, we couldn't speak. You don't want at that moment, friend or foe, to think that you're not operating, and so it was calm. People were going about their work.

But, after a couple of hours, apparently a lot of people had come into the bunker, and the oxygen level started to drop. And so the Secret Service was going around saying, "You're not essential. You have to leave. You're not essential. You have to leave," and that was a kind of weird moment there in the bunker.

MR. IGNATIUS: So one of the remarkable moments you describe in your memoirs is the dreadful disappearance of Flight 93, which is the plane that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, because members of the passenger group stormed the cockpit and took control, and you write in your memoirs that there was a period where you worried that your shoot-down order had led to the shooting down of that plane. Describe that to us.

DR. RICE: Well, this plane had disappeared from the radar screen. As I said, we were tracking. Secretary Mineta was tracking, with the FAA, planes that were landing in Mexico and Canada and being diverted to go back to Europe, and one plane just disappeared, and because the order had been given to shoot down any plane that was not, quote, "squawking" properly, there was this awful few minutes where the vice president kept saying to the Pentagon, "But you must know whether you've engaged a civilian aircraft," and they kept saying they couldn't confirm. And I remember thinking at that moment, did we actually shoot down, ourselves, innocent civilians? We later learned, of course, that those passengers had taken themselves to their death to prevent that plane from reaching what we now know was its target, the U.S. Capitol.

MR. IGNATIUS: You greeted President Bush when he returned to the White House that night, before he addressed the nation. Give us a sense of how he was feeling and reacting, what his initial response was in thinking about what the United States should do.

DR. RICE: He was really quite calm and resolute and steely. I remember thinking that he was angry. We all were, but that the emotion that I would describe was resolute. We've now got to go about the business of doing this. He was going to address the nation.

He first asked if Mrs. Bush was okay, and we said yes. He knew that she had been--that she was safe, but he spent just a moment with her. And then we went into the Oval Office, and he said he wanted the speech to be one of reassurance to the American people. He didn't want to do policy. He just wanted it to be about reassurance.

But, David, you probably know that one decision that was made that night was one line which did become policy. We asked whether he wanted to say if you harbor a terrorist, we will treat you as a terrorist. Since he had said he wanted it to be about reassurance, I said to him, "Mr. President, are you sure that you want to say this?" and he said, "I need to say that tonight. That warning, I need to give tonight." And I was asked to make sure that Colin and Don and others were comfortable with that line, but that one line, which would become known as the "Bush Doctrine," was decided really in a few minutes standing in the Oval Office before he went in to speak to the nation.

MR. IGNATIUS: It's clear from your memoirs that it was really the next day before George Tenet, your CIA director, had a formal finding, a declaration that this was the work of al-Qaeda, but did you have a feeling in those initial hours that that was the source of this terrorist attack?

DR. RICE: We all really knew deep down inside, both intellectually and emotionally, that this was al-Qaeda. We had not--what was surprising was not that there was an attack because we had seen '93 in New York. We had seen the Cole just before the election, the USS Cole which was attacked, a U.S. warship. Of course, there had been the embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya. So it felt like, smelled like an al-Qaeda attack.

The other point is--and this is really ironic--we had had a national security council meeting on September 10th to review a strategy to take down al-Qaeda in a matter of a few years because the president said he was tired of "swatting at flies," as he put it. He wanted to completely disable al-Qaeda. It's ironic that we had done that on September 10th and then September 11th happened, but it shows that it was there in our consciousness. It was there in our mind.

What was surprising was it was on our territory. It was done with civilian aircraft. The attack, the threat had come from within, not from a foreign border.

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MR. IGNATIUS: Let's talk about the months and weeks before the attack. The 9/11 Commission in its exhaustive report on these events found that there were 40 mentions of Osama bin Laden in PDB, presidential daily briefs, between January 20 and September 10. Some were very specific like, now well known, August 6th PDB item that said bin Laden determined to strike in the U.S.

You wrote an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal this week that was very powerful in which you wrote, "To this day, I wonder how this could have happened. I still feel great remorse that it did," and I want to ask you on this anniversary just to expand on that a little bit about your own personal feelings.

DR. RICE: I believe that we did everything that we knew to do with the intelligence that we had. For instance, the famous August 6th, bin Laden determined to attack the United States, wasn't a surprise to anybody. That's the kind of general statement, he's determined to attack the United States, how, when, under what circumstances never really addressed. In fact, the only reason that that was written was that there was so much about what al-Qaeda was doing abroad that President Bush himself asked the intelligence agencies, "Well, don't they want to do something in the United States?" So we weren't really thinking that this attack would likely be an internal attack.

And yet, in retrospect, if you had been able to put together all of the pieces, connect all of the dots, if we had not had a barrier between the FBI and the CIA, where the CIA did external intelligence and the FBI did internal intelligence, I'll just give you one example. Hamzi [phonetic] al-Mihdhar, one of the--who had become one of the hijackers, actually made a phone call from San Diego to Afghanistan, someplace, around September 7th or 8th. Because you didn't track phone calls from inside the United States for very good civil liberties reasons, that was a piece of intelligence that we did not know. Had anybody known that Hamzi al-Mihdhar was actually in the country, alarm bells might have gone off. And so there were lots of pieces.

And I was national security advisor on that day. Of course, I feel responsibility that we didn't somehow put the pieces together. Again, I think we did everything we thought we knew how to do, but now in retrospect, knowing what I know, it's a source of remorse for me that we couldn't stop it.

And I've had a chance to say that to some of the families of the victims. A man came up to me at, of all places, a golf tournament here in California a few years ago, and he said, "I want to thank you for what you did after 9/11." He said, "My wife was on the plane that went into the Pentagon," and I was so stunned, I couldn't speak because I thought you can't thank me. We didn't stop it. Somehow, I wish we had been able to stop it.

MR. IGNATIUS: I want to ask you this in light of what you said about the September 10 discussion about the more aggressive plan to go after al-Qaeda whether the administration over the course of this first nine months had taken or considered taking covert action against al-Qaeda in a way that the previous administration had.

DR. RICE: Well, of course, we kept in place everything that the Clinton administration had been doing, and the view was until we can have a more aggressive strategy, let's at least do what we are doing.

But our hands were, in some ways, tied, as I think were those of the Clinton administration. We didn't have a presence in the region. So something like the kind of intelligence that you get on the ground, the ability to do certain kinds of operations, we didn't have that. If you even think about airfields after 9/11, we had to go and negotiate--is a polite way to talk about it--the use of airfields in places like Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. So we weren't present in the country, and that meant that there were certain kinds of things that you really couldn't do.

The other point I'd made is that certain capabilities that on September 10th, we were still debating whether or not to arm "Predator," as it was called, the famous now drones that strike on the basis of intelligence information and strike into high mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan. That capability existed, but there was an argument that had gone on in the Clinton administration as well.

The Air Force didn't want it really because it wasn't an airplane. It didn't have a human in it, and nobody really thought that an intelligence agency should have that kind of capability. And so, on September 10th, when we were going to give the report to the president on strategy about al-Qaeda, the issue of so-called "armed Predator" was still undecided. On September 12th, we armed Predator.

And so the 9/11 attacks gave us, I think, an urgency and a reason to go after al-Qaeda in the way that nobody was really able to do prior to that.

MR. IGNATIUS: Your description of looking back and the remorse you feel is haunting, and I want to ask you, in light of our withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, whether you worry that we are going to be again without the intelligence we need on the ground, and that we may, horrible as it sounds, face a situation like 9/11 again in the future.

DR. RICE: Well, I do believe that the capabilities that we had by being on the ground--you know, intelligence is not in these cases what you get from satellite imagery. Intelligence is having ears and eyes on the ground. It's human intelligence. It's what diplomats can pick up just by being experienced people in the area. I'm worried that we don't have those capabilities.

I mentioned the deal with Karimov for his airfields in Uzbekistan. We've already heard Vladimir Putin say that the central agents will never allow us to use their airfield in that way, and so we've given up seven American military bases, including Bagram airfield, which, by the way, had the characteristic of not just being, I think, good from the point of view of Afghanistan, but we have to remember Iran has a 900-kilometer border with Afghanistan. And so those capabilities are going to be hard to replace and over the horizon doesn't work in the same way, and so I hope that we will not be attacked again.

We certainly have better systems. The FBI and the CIA do talk to each other in ways that they didn't before through the National Counterterrorism Center, which merges all of our intelligence. We have counterterrorism operations in other parts of the world. I think our allies and even our foes are much more aware of what terrorists can do. We've got systems to track terrorist financing. A lot has happened to make things better.

But we understood, David, the importance of forward deployment. This isn't our first time having troops abroad. I was saying to someone the other day, I think we fell into the wrong narrative about Afghanistan. The narrative should have been that--the analogy might actually have been Korea. We are in an armistice in Korea. We never won that war. We fought the North Koreans and the Chinese to a stalemate, and then we established a stable South Korean government, which by the way was not democratic for many decades, and then we left 28,500 American forces there to make sure that North Korea didn't get any dangerous ideas. I think that was the way we needed to think about Afghanistan, a presence that made us more secure over time, even if there was no war to be won.

MR. IGNATIUS: The troops are gone now. The likelihood that they'll go back, you'd have to say absent a catastrophe, is small. I want to ask you what you think in part as a former secretary of state is the appropriate way for the United States to deal with the Taliban who now are running Afghanistan. Do you think we should be in contact with them? Do you think we should, if conditions are met, recognize them as a government? If so, what conditions would you see as appropriate ones?

DR. RICE: As to the matter of recognition, that's going to be our last card, and I certainly wouldn't play it soon. And I find it hard to believe we would ever actually recognize the government that harbored the people that killed 2,997 innocent souls on our territory. I find that hard to believe, and it would have to be an awfully compelling reason to ever do that with the Taliban.

Now, I am hoping and praying that what we hear about a new 2.0 Taliban is true. I'm hoping that they--that all of those years in Doha that perhaps they are different than they were, the brutal people who not only harbored al-Qaeda but executed women in a soccer stadium given to them by the United Nations. So, if they're different, perhaps we can continue to deal with them. We have ways of dealing with countries that we don't recognize through third parties, for instance. Maybe that's one way.

We've put ourselves in a position where we have to talk to them because we still have Americans and Afghan allies who got to get out of the country, and I'm hoping too that we can find ways to mobilize the international community to moderate some of what they will do to their own people.

But recognition, I just don't see it. I've heard people say, well, we eventually recognized Vietnam. Yes, that was a very different war and very different circumstances. This was a war that they brought to us through their alliance with al-Qaeda. I don't see why we would ever give them that legitimacy.

MR. IGNATIUS: Another part of the story of these 20 years of war that we have lived since 9/11, obviously, is Iraq. Many analysts who look at Iraq and the region have concluded that that was a significant strategic mistake for the United States, that it ended up empowering Iran, genuinely, a troubling adversary for us and for Israel. As you look back, Madam Secretary, what's your own judgment about the decision that was made to invade in March 2003, and if the arguments that Iraq had WMD had been proven false, as many of them turned out to be, do you think President Bush would still have invaded anyway?

DR. RICE: Well, David, it's very hard to say because, as you know, what you know today can affect what you do tomorrow but not what you did yesterday, and so it's completely speculative. What if we had known? It would, of course, depended on what we knew, and the fact is when you have an opaque regime like that that wants to hide weapons of mass destruction or their production, it's very hard to know. And the intelligence certainly supported the idea that they had them.

Now, I still think that Iraq, people of Iraq, the world, the Middle East is better off without Saddam Hussein, and Iraq is a fragile but increasingly stable friend of the United States. Yes, they have to deal with the Iranians, but we also have a presence there that can help us deal with the Iranians and their Shia militia allies.

I think you will see Iraq more and more integrated into a Sunni community of states that is itself changing, changing in its relationship with Israel, as we've seen with the Abraham Accords, changing even in a degree of liberalization that--domestically that we are even seeing in places with all of its problems and all of the problems with the leadership that we're even seeing in Saudi Arabia, and so that Iraq is a different Iraq than it would have been under Saddam Hussein, and I think it's a more positive force in the Middle East.

Before 9/11, the Bush administration was accused of not having connected the dots before that attack. The dots that we were presented around Iraq said this is a mortal enemy of the United States whose tyrannical leader is not only destroying his own people but breaking out of UN sanctions, shooting at our aircraft every day, and, oh, by the way, reconstituting his weapons of mass destruction, and President Bush decided that it was time for the international community to act.

We will see in time whether the United States in the Middle East is stronger as a result of that. I would say that the early returns are we are getting to a different kind of Middle East, particularly among the Sunni states.

MR. IGNATIUS: We have just a minute left, and I want to ask you briefly, Madam Secretary, as you look back 20 years later on this history, how would you briefly sum up what you take to be the lessons for us now?

DR. RICE: The lesson is that despite our vast oceans on both sides and peaceful neighbors to the north and south, we learned the hard way that our security is inextricably linked to others, and that security is not just a matter of external relations. It can be internal. I think we learned that lesson the hard way, and it means that however much we might like to be Fortress America, we're not.

And so an active, engaged America with its allies in the world to try to make it a more peaceful place, to try to make it a more prosperous place, and, oh, yes, if we overreached in hoping that we would help to bring others a more democratic and freer life, that's an overreach I will defend, because there's one other thing that we know. Failed states that oppress their own people are the cesspool in which terrorism grows, and so America is always best when it acts from power and principle. That's what we try to do. We made our share of mistakes because Afghanistan was always going to be very, very hard, but September 11th didn't happen again, hasn't happened yet, and I think that says that the last 20 years and the many, many sacrifices have been worth it.

MR. IGNATIUS: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, thank you so much for joining us today on this commemoration of 9/11. Thank you for all your thoughts.

DR. RICE: Thank you, David.

MR. IGNATIUS: So thank you for joining Washington Post Live. We’ll be back with other programming. We’d invite you to go to WashingtonPostLive.com to register and find out more information. Thank you for being with us today for this special commemoration of 9/11.

[End recorded session]

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