WASHINGTON, 24 July 2004 — The report of the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States illustrates that US President George W. Bush “did everything he could” to protect the country ahead of the deadly strikes, Bush’s National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said yesterday.
“What the commission says is that this country was not prepared for war, and that that was a problem that had begun in the 1990s, maybe even in the 1980s. The president did everything that he could knowing what we did,” Rice told ABC television.
“Had we known that an attack of the magnitude that was coming on Sept. 11 was coming,” she added, “we would have moved heaven and earth to stop it.”
Asked about passages in the report, released Thursday, which showed that several warnings were made on the risk of an attack on the United States, including in the months just before the 2001 attacks, Rice said the Bush administration, which took office in January 2001, did not have enough time to make the changes needed to thwart such an attack.
“You cannot do the kinds of major reforms that are talked about there, to border security, to airport security, in the eight months President Bush was in office,” Rice said.
“What the report says is that this country was not hardened for war, and this is something that the president has said many, many times. Now, much has been done since Sept. 11,” she said. “We are safer, though we are not yet safe.”
Meanwhile, Bush yesterday courted black voters, who voted for his rival in the 2000 elections by a nine-to-one margin, after snubbing a major civil rights group last week. “I believe this country can and will be a place of opportunity and hope for every single citizen. It’s not a given. There’s work to be done,” Bush said in a speech to the Urban League, an influential black group.
Bush highlighted his appointments of several prominent black officials to serve in his administration, including Secretary of State Colin Powell and Rice, as well as Education Secretary Rod Paige.
Bush’s stop in Detroit, Michigan, aimed to repair some of the damage from his decision to snub an invitation to address the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), citing its leaders’ sharp criticisms of him. His remarks came as a new poll showed 79 percent of black voters back Democratic White House hopeful John Kerry but suggested that their support for him is not as warm as it was for then-Vice President Al Gore four years ago.
Just 27 percent of the 1,000 respondents to a July 6-15 Black Entertainment Television CBS News poll said they were enthusiastic about the senator from Massachusetts’ bid for the White House, while 58 percent said they were merely satisfied. And the study had a warning for Democrats, with 35 percent of respondents saying the party takes blacks for granted.
Still, those are numbers the Bush team can only dream about: 85 percent disapprove of his handling of his job, compared with 11 percent who approve, and 90 percent say the war in Iraq was not worth it, against eight percent who say it was. The survey, which had a three-percentage-point margin of error, became public roughly 100 days before the election.
Kerry yesterday was set to launch a symbol-laden journey to his formal nomination as Bush’s challenger in November by calling on Americans to serve something greater than themselves.
Kerry heads into the Democratic convention in Boston next week even — or slightly ahead — in opinion polls and is looking for the customary bounce from four days of carefully choreographed and nationally televised image building.
The candidate and his aides have promised an upbeat gathering, not a repeat of the coarse Bush-bashing from celebrities at a New York fund-raiser two weeks ago. Kerry later distanced himself from some of the performers’ remarks.
“I don’t know if you can ever control completely what anyone says,” Kerry said in an interview with USA Today published yesterday. “But obviously we are trying to encourage people to be as positive as they can be. Some may stray.”
Kerry’s prime-time speech accepting the Democratic nomination on Thursday is likely to be one of the 2004 campaign’s pivotal events, providing the four-term senator from Massachusetts with a national stage to define himself and his policies.
But Kerry, who began writing the speech in longhand on a yellow legal pad weeks ago, rejected the idea that it was a “make or break” moment.
“I think that’s an unrealistic assessment of what happens in these things,” he told ABC News. “Is it an important speech? Yes. A make or break? Absolutely not.”
The road to Boston starts in Aurora, Colorado, where Kerry, 60, spent just four months after his birth at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital. In a speech in Denver, he planned to talk about the values he learned from his parents.
