Rice: I Don’t Recall Warning About 9/11
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
SHANNON, Ireland — Secretary of State Rice said she cannot recall the then-director of central intelligence, George Tenet, warning her of an impending Qaeda attack in America, as a new book says he did two months before the attacks on September 11, 2001.
“What I am quite certain of is that I would remember if I was told, as this account apparently says, that there was about to be an attack in the United States, and the idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible,” Ms. Rice said.
Ms. Rice was President Bush’s national security adviser in 2001, when Bob Woodward’s book “State of Denial” outlines the July 10 meeting in which Mr. Tenet said he warned Ms. Rice. Cofer Black, the CIA’s top counterterror officer, was also present.
Meanwhile, Fox News reported that Secretary of State Rice offered to resign from her previous post as national security adviser in 2004.
“I did tell the president at one point that I thought maybe all of us should go, because we had fought two wars and we … had the largest terrorist attack in American history,” Fox quoted Ms. Rice as saying.
“And when he asked me to be secretary of state, I said, ‘I think maybe — maybe you need new people.'” She did not say what the president’s immediate response was.
