Barbara Ferguson, Arab News

WASHINGTON, 10 April 2004 — National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice testified under oath before the Sept. 11 commission on Thursday, and yesterday America’s leading editorialists were grading her performance.

The New York Times was critical: Under the heading “The Rice Version,” the editor wrote: “Ms. Rice was utterly unconvincing when she tried to portray Al-Qaeda as anything approaching a top concern for the White House.

“If President Bush were not making 9/11 the center of his re-election campaign, it might be possible for the country to settle on a realistic vision of how the White House handled the threat posed by Al Qaeda...” said the NYT.

“The (Aug. 6, 2001) briefing memo is still being withheld from the public. The administration should rethink that position, as well as the president’s insistence on answering the committee’s questions only briefly, in private and — most strangely — only in the company of Vice President Dick Cheney,” said the NYT.

The Washington Times condemned the panel: “As expected, it was more an exercise in fingerprinting than a search for insight.

“The lines of questioning pursued by Mr. Ben-Veniste and others on the panel raise serious doubts about the commission’s ability to fulfill the duties it was chartered with,” said the WT.

The Washington Post was disparaging: “...Ms. Rice didn’t add much to the administration’s previous explanations...Voluntary accountability, however, only goes so far in an election year.

“It’s possible to say, as Ms. Rice did, that the threat of Al-Qaeda was not fully grasped in the United States, that the intelligence was weak and the bureaucracy unprepared to stop a domestic terrorist attack — and go on to accept that in that context, mistakes were made and more could have been done. It’s a shame that President Bush and his top national security aide haven’t offered that honest accounting,” said the WP.

The Boston Globe’s headline summed up its opinion: “Condoleezza’s Contortions”.

“Rice’s testimony violated the commission’s spirit of corrective inquiry because it was tainted by election-year politics. Again and again, her answers were contorted to defend the actions — or inaction — of her boss, President Bush.

“Bush has nothing to complain about in Rice’s performance. She was sharp and forceful in her efforts to shield him from any responsibility for a failure to anticipate a terrorist attack in this country and to take effective preventive measures.”

“Bush would have been better off letting Rice be honest about his failure to make terrorism an urgent priority. Not having that freedom, she was the epitome of competence defending his incompetence,” concluded the Globe.

The LA Times editorialist asked: “Is America Safer Now? The unspoken, hovering question was this: Is the US safer now than it was before 9/11?...The questions won’t go away.

“Rice ably parried the commission’s questions, but she and other officials still bear the consequences of bad intelligence in Iraq that bogs down US troops, and in Afghanistan, where the Taleban is back on the rise. No matter how much Rice portrays President Bush as having been alert to terrorist dangers before 9/11, the more important concern is why he isn’t doing more to solve the intelligence gaps that led to the disaster,” said the LAT.