Obviously to get Bob Kerrey some TV time, and to be "fair" to him, as opposed to the investigation of the facts. A great exchange that makes you wonder why have Rice tesify in public if you aren't going to let her testify.
RICE: May I finish answering your question, though, because this is an important ...I didn't know that this was the Bob Kerrey Commission. But in fairness to Dr. Rice, let's see what she said about why she didn't just adopt the Clinton plan.
KERREY: I know it's important. Everything that's going on here is important. But I get 10 minutes.
RICE: But since we have a point of disagreement, I'd like to have a chance to address it.
KERREY: Well, no, no, actually, we have many points of disagreement, Dr. Clarke, but we'll have a chance to do in closed session. Please don't filibuster me. It's not fair. It is not fair. I have been polite. I have been courteous. It is not fair to me.
I understand that we have a disagreement.Sounds like the plan that was left for the Bush Administration was tactical, about "swatting flies," and not strategic. Is it a law enforcement, ad hoc reactionary policy as pursued by Clinton and advocated by Kerry, or a strategic, preemptive policy as Bush has pursued and as he had in the works prior to 9/11? That's a legitimate argument to have regarding how to conduct the war on (or prosecution of) terror, and goes a lot farther to figuring out what happened and how to proceed than simply complaining that Bush didn't do what Clinton did, therefore he did nothing. Or the alternative useless argument that Clinton had 8 years and did nothing.
RICE: Commissioner, I am here to answer questions. And you've asked me a question, and I'd like to have an opportunity to answer it.
The fact is that what we were presented on January the 25th was a set of ideas and a paper, most of which was about what the Clinton administration had done and something called the Delenda plan which had been considered in 1998 and never adopted. We decided to take a different track.
We decided to put together a strategic approach to this that would get the regional powers _ the problem wasn't that you didn't have a good counterterrorism person.
The problem was you didn't have an approach against al-Qaida because you didn't have an approach against Afghanistan. And you didn't have an approach against Afghanistan because you didn't have an approach against Pakistan. And until we could get that right, we didn't have a policy.
KERREY: Thank you for answering my question.
RICE: You're welcome.
