Maybe it was the typically puerile and irreverent headline that made us do a double-take: “Rice Boils Over At Bubba.” But we couldn’t help but marvel at the oddity of the secretary of state giving an exclusive interview to the New York Post. Among other things, Rice chose the occasion to refute Bill Clinton’s now infamously angry claims on the Fox News channel that the Bush administration dropped the ball on counterterrorism when it took over in 2001.
It’s not just that it’s hard to take the tabloid seriously as a venue for political debate, but it struck us as a strange place for a rebuttal considering that both Fox and the Post are owned by the same man: Rupert Murdoch. What it amounted to was Murdoch allowing the administration to use his paper to respond to a criticism lobbed against it on his network. That’s synergy with a capital S.
A much-quoted part of Clinton’s tirade is his claim that Fox was performing this “conservative hit job” on him as a way of deflecting away anger from viewers of the channel who might be upset that Murdoch has donated money to Clinton’s Global Initiative. At the time, it sounded a bit too kooky and conspiratorial. But with Murdoch’s Post providing a venue for striking back at the ex-president, maybe Bubba’s onto something.
Incidentally, Rice’s treatment by the Post also gave some credence to one of Clinton’s central contentions in his interview with Chris Wallace, that Fox News would never pose the same questions to someone in the Bush administration — or, as Clinton put it, “I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked: Why didn’t you do anything about the Cole? I want to know how many you asked: Why did you fire Dick Clarke? I want to know…”
Condi was able to spin her story seemingly without any interruption, telling the Post that, “We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda,” and that the “The notion somehow for eight months the Bush administration sat there and didn’t do that is just flatly false — and I think the 9/11 commission understood that.” Rice also refutes Clinton’s insistence that, upon coming into office at the NSC, she demoted Richard Clarke, whose role was to watch al Qaeda, and undermined his counterterrorism operation, saying simply that, “Richard Clarke was the counterterrorism czar when 9/11 happened.”
For one thing, the commission’s report makes very clear, on page 197, that “as the Clinton administration drew to a close, Clarke and his staff developed a policy paper of their own [which] incorporated the CIA’s new ideas from the Blue Sky memo, and posed several near-term policy options. Clarke and his staff proposed a goal to “roll back” al Qaeda over a period of three to five years … [including] covert aid to the Northern Alliance, covert aid to Uzbekistan, and renewed Predator flights in March 2001. A sentence called for military action to destroy al Qaeda command-and-control targets and infrastructure and Taliban military and command assets. The paper also expressed concern about the presence of al Qaeda operatives in the United States.”
Also, Clarke, as he makes very clear in his memoirs — which Clinton repeatedly made reference to — never technically lost his title under Rice, but he was certainly demoted. He was not allowed to run meetings with principals (meaning, among others, the president, vice president and defense secretary). He would report instead to deputy secretaries. He was deprived of a staff and was told he would no longer be attending any meetings with budget officials. To Clarke, at least, this was a clear indication, that the administration did not perceive al Qaeda as a threat worth worrying about. As this January 2001 memo from Clarke to Rice makes clear, he found this development worthy of concern.
There is much more that is not completely truthful about Rice’s talk with the Post (and Mahablog does a good job of parsing some other problems), but the point is that she was allowed to deliver her narrative unimpeded, without being pinned down on some of the fundamental facts she was fudging.
Where’s Chris Wallace when you need him?
Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.