*EPF507 09/14/01
White House Report, Sept. 14: NSC's Rice on Terrorist Attacks
(Describes initial reaction of Bush on learning the news) (640)

TERRORIST ATTACKS HAVE TRANSFORMED NATION, RICE SAYS

The September 11 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center have been "a transforming event for all of us, for the country, and clearly for the President of the United States," White House National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice says.

Speaking September 13 with White House correspondents, Rice said, "We've always known that something like this could happen on American soil. We've all had it as a nightmare, but you couldn't watch those planes go into the World Trade Towers, you couldn't go out to the Pentagon like we did yesterday and see the side of the Pentagon cratered, you couldn't go through the moments when we didn't know how many planes were still in the air, what else was next on the list, and not be transformed by it."

Asked by reporters to describe the President's first reaction on learning of the attacks, she said it was "a defining moment" for him.

His first reaction, she said, was to say 'I'm going to use this terribly painful moment to try to make the world better the next time around. That's what America has always done -- whether it was after Pearl Harbor, where it committed the United States in ways it had never been committed to the international system.' That was the sense of what I got from the President," Rice told reporters.

His reaction, she said, was "in many ways, almost immediate. The interesting thing is that we were all trying to deal with the immediacy of the situation, we were all trying to deal with the consequences of the situation, we were all trying to assess what was happening.

"But in his very first statement to his National Security Council he said: 'this was an attack on freedom and we're going to define it as such, and we're going to go after it, and we're not going to lose focus; and we're going to minister to the country and deal with the horrors that people are experiencing and the consequences; and we're going to get through our period of mourning, but we're not going to lose focus and resolve on what happened here and what this means for the United States of America in its leadership role to mobilize the world, now, to deal with this scourge. And I think it was much quicker with him than it probably was with any of the rest of us."

Rice said those first few hours were "pretty remarkable -- coming out of the Situation Room, we heard that there was a second plane into the World Trade Towers, and then, as we were coming out, that something had hit the Pentagon, that something was likely headed for the White House.

"To get down then to the secure facility and hear the code name for Air Force One, there's something headed for Air Force One -- I don't think that you can underestimate, at that moment, that you're sorting lots of information and you're trying to deal with the consequences, but you recognize that something's changed forever in the way that the United States thinks about its security."

The other thing President Bush "has been very focused on," Rice said, "is that even though we are going to make sure that we do everything we can in terms of security measures, we're not going to let the terrorists win by changing our way of life."

The President, she said, "has said that very effectively" to leaders of Congress, to the families, and to the young rescue workers at the Pentagon.

(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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