‘Elimination of al Qaeda’ was Bush’s first major security directive, Rice tells panel

President George W. Bush’s first major national security policy directive was "not Russia, not missile defense, not Iraq, but the elimination of al-Qaeda."

That’s what National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice told 9/11 commissioners Thursday morning, in an implicit refutation of her former staffer Dick Clarke.

That directive was issued a week before the attacks, on September 4, 2001. Although Rice did not say so, others report that it took nearly eight months to prepare because Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and other partisan opponents of the president had deliberately held up the confirmations of key members of the Bush defense policy team until just two months before the terrorists struck. Indeed, much of the US security and intelligence leadership at the time consisted of holdovers from the Clinton administration.

Rice said that the terrorists were able to operate inside the United States undetected in large part because of what she called a national "allergy to domestic intelligence." The nation’s internal security had deteriorated severely since the 1970s, when Senators Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), Frank Church (D-Idaho), Birch Bayh (D-Ind.) and others led a post-Watergate assault on the FBI and other agencies amid the left-wing hysteria against the intelligence community.

"The terrorists were at war with us, but we were not yet at war with them," Rice stated. "For more than 20 years, the terrorist threat gathered, and America’s response across several administrations of both parties was insufficient."

"In hindsight, if anything might have helped stop 9/11, it would have been better information about threats inside the United states, something made difficult by structural and legal impediments that prevented the collection and sharing of information by our law enforcement and intelligence agencies," she testified.

Click here for the full text of Rice’s testimony.