Condi Rice should have knocked some heads before 9-11:J.Marshall

http://www.hillnews.com/marshall/041404.aspx
Condi Rice should have knocked some heads before 9-11

In a hothouse political environment like today’s, it’s often hard to disentangle what’s just White House political spin and what explanations actually tell us something quite real about how the chief players at the White House understand their jobs.

The picture they are painting of themselves is one of essential passivity: a president who is reading the reports that are bubbling up through the national security and intelligence bureaucracies, and ready to act when planners at the CIA or the FBI find a specific threat and produce a plan to counter it that he could sign off on.

It is very much an “in-box” model of executive leadership, with information and action plans bubbling up the chain of command, and little tussling or pushing or demands for more to be done going back down in the opposite direction.

The idea that the president or his top White House advisers would or should have gotten involved in the interplay among the FBI, the CIA and other relevant agencies — “shaken the trees,” as Clarke puts it — simply doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. Not then, and apparently not even now.

In this sense, the attitude and approach Rice presented when she testified last week is the most startling. Even in times of dire threat, presidents have many jobs to accomplish. One wouldn’t want a president to get bogged down in buttonholing the director of central intelligence or the FBI chief or knocking heads together down into the national security and intelligence bureaucracies. Even in the worst of times the president has a lot of things he needs to keep an eye on.

Seems a bit different from the Iraq scenario, with the Bushistas demanding the plans, and evidence, that they wanted.