Did Condoleezza Rice perjure herself?CLAIM: “One of the problems was there was really nothing that look like was going to happen inside the United States…Almost all of the reports focused on al-Qaida activities outside the United States.” [Condoleezza Rice, Senate Testimony, 4/8/04]
FACT: In the months before Sept. 11, the Federal Aviation Administration told some of the nation’s largest airports that if a terrorist wanted to hijack a plane to commit suicide in a “spectacular explosion,” it would probably be a hijacking on U.S. soil rather than overseas. [Newsday, 2/11/05]
More memories…CLAIM: “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. [No one predicted] that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.” [Condoleezza Rice, 5/16/02]
CLAIM: “We received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles.” [Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04]
CLAIM: “Richard Clarke had plenty of opportunities to tell us in the administration that he thought the war on terrorism was moving in the wrong direction and he chose not to.” [Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04]
FACT: Eight months before 9/11, “Clarke urged then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to hold a high-level meeting on the al-Qa’ida network…a memo has revealed. “We urgently need such a principals-level review on the al-Qa’ida network,” Clarke wrote on January 25, 2001. [AFP, 2/12/05]
FACT: The report by the 9/11 commission detailed 52 warnings given to Federal Aviation Administration leaders from April to September 10, 2001, about al Qaeda and its desire to attack airlines, according to a previously undisclosed report by the commission that investigated the terror attacks. [CNN, 2/11/05]