Kerry urges Rice to testify on 9/11
NORTH KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- John F. Kerry yesterday joined other leading Democrats calling for national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to testify publicly before a bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and he said the Bush White House should learn from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's openness during an inquiry after Pearl Harbor.
"If Condoleezza Rice can find time to do `60 Minutes' on television before the American people, she ought to find 60 minutes to speak to the commission under oath," Kerry told reporters, referring to Rice's scheduled appearance tonight on the CBS news program. "We're talking about the security of our country."
Kerry brushed aside White House concerns about putting the national security adviser in a position of disclosing privileged conversations with the president about counterterrorism and other security matters.
"If the secretary of state, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, the undersecretary of state, others can find time to go up there and raise their right hand and talk under oath to make America safer, certainly we can find a way to respect executive privilege -- but nevertheless to accomplish America's needs to protect the security of our country," Kerry added.
A spokeswoman for Bush's reelection campaign, Nicolle Devenish, denounced Kerry's remarks, which were made before a round-table talk with workers in this general-election swing state. It was Kerry's first news conference in two weeks.
"John Kerry's attack on Dr. Rice today is part of the Democrats' strategy to politicize the work of the 9/11 commission," said the campaign's communications director, in a statement. "John Kerry seeks to distract Americans from his own failed ideas for protecting America from future attacks."
Rice has spoken to the commission once, in private and not under oath, but has turned away requests to appear publicly, with the White House citing the need for privacy in her conversations with the president. But under Democratic pressure -- and after Bush's former counterterrorism chief, Richard A. Clarke, rebuked the White House's commitment to the war on terror before the commission last week -- Rice volunteered to reappear, the White House said, to correct mischaracterizations of her views.
Her refusal to testify publicly under oath, while nevertheless appearing regularly on television to criticize Clarke and defend the president, has turned into a Democratic attack line that Kerry seized upon for the first time yesterday. The Massachusetts senator said he would withhold judgment on Rice's fitness as national security adviser but chided Republicans by noting that Roosevelt "didn't need to be prodded" to investigate the Pearl Harbor attacks.
Roosevelt "didn't need to take months, and nobody had to beg him to extend the time. He wanted to know how we were going to protect America and win a war, and we did," Kerry said. "This administration has done the opposite -- stonewall this commission."
Another Bush campaign spokesman, Steve Schmidt, yesterday said Kerry's remarks about Roosevelt were a smoke screen. "He wants to try to obscure his record supporting cuts on defense weapons and intelligence," Schmidt said.
Kerry also accused the Bush administration of engaging in "character assassination" against former advisers turned critics, such as former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, who was assailed after questioning Bush's leadership in a book published earlier this year, and Clarke, who has said that Bush was more preoccupied with toppling Saddam Hussein than defeating Al Qaeda.
"I don't think people want questions about character," Kerry said. "They want questions about our security to be answered."
Joining Kerry on his campaign trip yesterday was a former presidential rival, Representative Richard A. Gephardt, who has been cited by Kerry advisers as a possible vice presidential candidate. Gephardt told reporters he has not discussed the ticket with Kerry.
Patrick Healy can be reached at phealy@globe.com. 