19 November 2004 - 9pm EST - PBS:
BRANCACCIO: Tonight on NOW...

BUSH: I urge the Senate to promptly confirm Condoleezza Rice as America's 66th Secretary of State.

BRANCACCIO: We investigate two people at the center of power.

What will Condoleezza Rice bring to American diplomacy? And Tom DeLay is probed about a scandal in Texas politics.

EARLE: This is about an organized movement to basically steal an election by using illegal corporate secret donations to political campaigns.

ANNOUNCER: From our studios in New York, Bill Moyers and David Brancaccio.

BRANCACCIO: Welcome to NOW.

Colin Powell made big news twice this week. He announced that he is stepping down as Secretary of State. Then, he pointed world attention at Iran — the one with an "n" next to Iraq — saying it may be developing a missile system to deliver a nuclear bomb. Quote: "I have seen some information that would suggest that they have been actively working on delivery systems. You don't have a weapon until you put it in something that can deliver a weapon."

Frightening, to be sure. But is it true? The world may have a hard time believing him. It's been just 21 months since that same Colin Powell told the world almost the same thing about Iraq. Remember when our Secretary of State went before the United Nations Security Council to make the case for using force against Iraq?

POWELL: The gravity of this moment is matched by the gravity of the threat that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction pose to the world. Let me now turn to those deadly weapons programs and describe why they are real and present dangers to the region and the world."

But those claims eventually proved wrong. Colin Powell had put his personal prestige and the power of his office into a pitch that led America and the world into a war based on bad information.

MOYERS: It's called credibility: the quality of being believed and trusted. Once you cry wolf and it turns out you were only pretending, will anyone take you seriously next time if you say there is a wolf in the woods? That's why surveys and polls show America's credibility in the world has plummeted, including in those Muslim nations whose support is critical to the fight against terrorism.

And it's why the President's nomination this week of Condoleezza Rice as Colin Powell's successor has some experts in Washington and foreign capitals shaking their heads in disbelief. Producer Peter Meryash and I took a look at Dr. Rice's record on two very critical points of credibility.

MOYERS: Recall that in the days and weeks after 9/11, a shocked and grieving people began to ask what government officials had known and when they had known it. In May 2002, at a White House press conference, the President's National Security Adviser tried to quiet the criticism.

RICE: I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.

MOYERS: But Condoleezza Rice was wrong.

Had she looked, she could have found in the files of the intelligence community that the attack she deemed unimaginable had, in fact, been imagined repeatedly.

Twelve times in the seven years before 9/11, the CIA reported that hijackers might use airplanes as weapons.

Furthermore, just 3 days after Rice was sworn in, she received a memo written by this man, Richard Clarke. Clarke, who managed counter-terrorism policy on President Clinton's National Security Council, was kept on the job by President Bush.

LEHMAN: Were you told before the summer that there were functioning al Qaeda cells in the United States?

RICE: In the memorandum that Dick Clarke sent me on January 25th, he mentions sleeper cells. There is no mention or recommendation of anything that needs to be done about them.

MOYERS: But that's not the whole story. In the January 25th memo, Clarke had declared an "urgent need" that the "principals," the heads of the CIA, FBI, State and Defense Departments, meet to be briefed on the al Qaeda threat.

That meeting didn't happen until more than 7 months later, one week before 9/11.

But Clarke had also attached to his memo a plan of action to "roll back" Bin Laden.

RICE: We were not presented with a plan.

KERREY: Well, that's not true. It is not…

RICE: We were not presented, we were not presented… we were presented with the…

KERREY: I've heard you say that, Dr. Clarke. If that 25 January 2001 memo was declassified, I don't believe…

RICE: The fact is that what we were presented on January the 25th was a set of ideas…

KERREY: Okay.

RICE: …and a paper, most of which was about what the Clinton administration had done.

MOYERS: To this day, the White House has refused to declassify Clarke's memo. Rice had effectively demoted him, downgraded his office, and informed him he was no longer needed at the meetings of the principals.

Even as the White House took no action, America's electronic eyes and ears picked up new threats all over the world. By April, the "chatter," as the spies call it, was ominous.

On June 25th, 2001, Richard Clarke warned Rice that "six separate intelligence reports showed al Qaeda personnel warning of a pending attack."

Three days later, on June 28th, the CIA informed Clarke that Osama bin Ladin "… will launch a significant terrorist attack…in the coming weeks…" inflicting "…mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests."

Clarke told Rice al Qaeda planning "…had reached a crescendo."

CIA director George Tenet later testified, "the system was blinking red."

Then, on August 6th, 2001, President Bush, while vacationing at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, received a stark warning in his daily intelligence brief, known as a PDB.

BEN-VENISTE: There was nothing reassuring, was there, in that PDB?

RICE: Certainly not.

MOYERS: Two CIA analysts involved in drafting the PDB told the 9/11 Commission they wanted to make clear that the threat of a bin Ladin attack in the United States was current and serious.

BEN-VENISTE: The President was in Crawford, Texas, at the time he received the PDB. You were not with him, correct?

RICE: That's correct. I was not at Crawford, but the President and I were in contact, and I might have even been, though I can't remember, with him by video link during that time. The President was told this is historical information. I'm told he was told this is historical information. And there was nothing actionable in this.

MOYERS: But what Rice dismissed as "historical information" was in fact far more than that. It was part of an unfolding pattern of terrorist activity leading to 9/11.

BEN-VENISTE: Isn't it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6th PDB warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB.

RICE: I believe the title was "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States." Now, the PDB…

BEN-VENISTE: Thank you.

RICE: No, Mr. Ben-Veniste, you…

BEN-VENISTE: I will get into the…

RICE: I would like to finish my point here.

BEN-VENISTE: I didn't know there was a point.

RICE: Given that you asked me whether or not it warned of attacks…

BEN-VENISTE: I asked you what the title was.

RICE: What the August 6th PDB said, and perhaps I should read it to you…

BEN-VENISTE: We would be happy to have it declassified in full at this time, including its title.

MOYERS: Two days after Rice's testimony and after the Commission's most heated showdown with the Bush administration over access to classified information, the PDB that had been delivered to the President in Texas was released.

It had indeed informed the President that, quote: "bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington."

It had told the President that FBI information, quote, "indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."

And it had informed the President of reports that quote: "a group of bin Ladin supporters are in the U.S. planning attacks."

But the President stayed at his Texas ranch for 23 more days. His National Security Adviser did not convene a cabinet-level meeting to discuss the urgent warnings.

ROEMER: Not once do the principals ever sit down. You, in your job description as the National Security Adviser, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the President of the United States and meet solely on terrorism to discuss, in the spring and the summer, when these threats are coming in, when you've known since the transition that al Qaeda cells are in the United States, when, as the PDB said on August 6th, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack the United States."

RICE: The PDB does not say the United States is going to be attacked. It says bin Laden would like to attack the United States. I don't think you, frankly, had to have that report to know that bin Laden would like to attack the United States. The threat reporting… the threat reporting…

ROEMER: So why aren't you doing something about that earlier than August 6th, then?

MOYERS: It all added up to a pattern of ineptness. But despite her missteps leading up to 9/11, Rice was kept in charge of the national security team and would play a key role as the administration prepared its case for war against Iraq.

Time and again, top officials told the American public that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

CHENEY [8/26/02]: Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.

MOYERS: Rice had a particularly dire warning.

RICE [9/8/02]: The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

MOYERS: A crucial part of the administration's case was the accusation that Iraq had acquired aluminum tubes needed to build nuclear weapons.

BUSH [10/7/02]: Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.

MOYERS: This was the closest the administration ever came to a smoking gun, probably the most significant evidence presented in the lead-up to war.

It was leaked to the NEW YORK TIMES which quoted government officials saying "it was the intelligence agencies' unanimous view" that the tubes "are used to make…centrifuges" that will enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.

The paper quoted one senior but un-named official as saying, "the best technical experts and nuclear scientists…supported [that] assessment."

Vice President Dick Cheney hailed the tubes as "irrefutable evidence" that Saddam has "…once again set up and reconstituted his program…" to build a nuclear weapon.

And Condoleezza Rice? She said the tubes "…are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs."

The President drove the message home in his State of the Union address.

BUSH [1/28/03]: Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.

MOYERS: But in fact, the government's foremost nuclear experts at the Department of Energy disputed the White House position.

After their technical analysis, the best experts on the subject concluded the tubes were "poorly suited for use in gas centrifuges" needed to make nuclear weapons and as a result they found "unpersuasive the arguments that they are intended for that purpose."

And just last month, it was revealed that long before the war started, Condoleezza Rice had known about the dispute.

The NEW YORK TIMES broke the story and Rice was asked about it on ABC News.

RICE [on THIS WEEK]: At the time, I knew that there was a dispute. I actually didn't really know the nature of the dispute. We learned that, I learned that later.

THIELMANN: It is incredible to me that the President's National Security Adviser would not at least satisfy herself in understanding the broad dimensions of a very vigorous dispute inside the U.S. government on the most important evidence behind an allegation about the most important category of weapons of mass destruction.

MOYERS: Greg Thielmann spent 25 years in the foreign service before retiring in mid-2002. As a member of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, he led a team of analysts examining the secret intelligence on Iraq leading up to the war.

I asked him about Rice's assertion that she didn't know the nature of the internal intelligence debate over the aluminum tubes:

THIELMANN: If you don't understand the details of this at least in broad outline, what issues do you understand with regard to justifying a war against Iraq? This was the mother of all intelligence disagreements for this subject. And so she was either irresponsible in not acquainting herself with those broad outlines of the dispute. Or else she's not telling the truth.

MOYERS: After her nomination this week, the WASHINGTON POST cited experts who believe Rice is "one of the weakest National Security Advisers in recent history…" in doing what she was supposed to do "…managing interagency conflicts."

She is also one of the most partisan.

In the recent campaign, in a rare use of a National Security Adviser for partisan purposes, President Bush sent Rice to critical battleground states from Michigan and Washington to Ohio and Florida.

RICE [10/25/04]: When people ask whether Iraq is a part of the war on terror, well, of course. Not only did Saddam support terrorists, not only was he a weapons of mass destruction threat and all those things. But he was a tremendous barrier to change in the Middle East.

MOYERS: And, after one of Rice's campaign-style appearances just before the election, the PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE reported she "did not deviate from the misleading contentions" put forth by the Bush-Cheney ticket and that she sought, once again, "to make the non-existent link between 9/11 and the Iraq war."

Her credibility and competence aside, Condoleezza Rice has never wavered in her loyalty to George W. Bush, and this week he rewarded that loyalty by naming her Secretary of State, the highest post in his cabinet.

MOYERS: So we are to have a new Secretary of State who dreadfully misjudged the terrorist threat leading up to 9/11 and then misled America and the world about the case for invading Iraq. As if that's not disturbing enough, look who is succeeding her as the President's National Security Adviser.

His name is Stephen J. Hadley, Rice's alter ego and deputy at the White House. The very same Stephen Hadley who failed to remove from the President's State of the Union message that phony statement about Iraq's search for uranium in Africa, despite having been warned by the CIA that it wouldn't hold up.

The very same Stephen Hadley who in June of this year wrote this article in USA today insisting that Saddam Hussein had links to al Qaeda, despite the finding by the official 9/11 Commission that there was no operational relationship.

And the very same Stephen Hadley who led the White House planning for the post-war period in Iraq, an occupation that can only be described as a debacle.

I'm not making this up; it's all on the record. So instead of putting America's foreign policy in the hands of people who might have restored the country's credibility in the world, the President has turned it over to two of the people who helped to shred it. Both are known first and foremost for loyalty to the official view of reality, no matter the evidence to the contrary.