A senior terrorism expert said yesterday that he had delivered a final desperate warning of an inevitable terrorist attack to US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice five days before al-Qaeda struck New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington.
On the eve of Rice's public appearance today to defend the record of the administration of US President George W. Bush before the commission studying the Sept. 11 attacks, Gary Hart, a former Democratic presidential candidate who co-chaired an earlier three-year public study of the threats to US security in the 21st century, said his warning had been ignored.
"She [Rice] said, `I'll discuss it with the vice president,' Hart said; but he felt the response was a brush-off.
"All I can say is she didn't feel the degree of urgency I thought was necessary," he said.
He said he has known Rice for 20 years, since she had volunteered to work on his Colorado Senate campaign.
Rice will speak under oath for more than two hours to the national commission examining whether more could have been done to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks. She is expected to make a detailed rebuttal of the allegations by Richard Clarke, a former White House chief counter-terrorist adviser, that the Bush team virtually ignored the al-Qaeda threat because of its fixations on Iraq and strategic missile defense.
Hart's comments add weight to Clarke's argument and make Rice's task even harder.
Together with Warren Rudman, a veteran Republican politician, Hart chaired the US commission on national security/21st century, which was established by former US president Bill Clinton in October 1998 and told to report to the incoming president in early 2001.
That report predicted, "America will become increasingly vulnerable to hostile attack on our homeland (and) Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers."
It recommended a national homeland security agency.
To the surprise of the 14 commissioners, Hart said, the recommendations were ignored. The post of homeland security adviser was established in the White House only after the Sept. 11 attacks.
"We were not just another federal commission. This was supposed to be -- and was -- the most comprehensive review of US national security since 1947," Hart said in Denver, where he now works for an international law firm.
He said that in the first week of February 2001 he and other commissioners briefed Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell to convey their fears personally.
"They were respectful and attentive, interested in what we were saying" -- but nothing was done.
In early May 2001, when Congress was contemplating legislation to establish a homeland security agency, Bush publicly called on it to shelve the issue while it was considered by US Vice President Dick Cheney.
But the senior White House national security officials did not meet to discuss the terrorist threat until the first week of September.
"Imagine eight months before Pearl Harbor, an officially designated group of 14 Americans had told Roosevelt that the Japanese would attack some place somewhere and Roosevelt did nothing," Hart said.
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