Condoleezza Rice admitted she carries “deep personal remorse” for not doing enough to prevent 9/11, offering her apologies on Friday during a memorial ceremony at the Pentagon.
“Those of us in authority on that day did not see the nature of the danger in time to prevent the attack of 9/11,” said Rice, who served as national security adviser at the time of the attacks under President George W. Bush.
Follow live updates as America honors the 25th anniversary of 9/11, in NYC and across the nation
“We did what we knew to do, but by definition, it was not enough.”
She offered an apology to the families in the Pentagon audience who were honoring the 184 people killed 25 years ago when the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the US military’s headquarters in a harrowing act of terrorism.
“I want to say something deeply personal,” she said. “I will always carry deep personal remorse for the pain that you, the families of the fallen, still feel, and for the trauma that our country endured.”
On September 11, 2001, Rice was a top adviser to Bush, who had been sworn into office for his first term earlier that year. In the aftermath of the hijacking attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania, Rice faced questions about why 9/11 wasn’t prevented and endured heavy criticism about the lack of a warning.
She later told the 9/11 Commission that the Bush administration knew al Qaeda was a serious threat but that intelligence reports lacked actionable details about a domestic attack.
“I am grateful that there was not a follow-on attack,” she told the audience at the Pentagon on Friday.
“For that miracle, we owe a deep debt of gratitude to our armed forces and to the intelligence community. Their service and their sacrifice in the war on terror kept us safe.”
More coverage on the 25th Anniversary of 9/11:
Rice also shared her memories of the day of the attack, recalling that she was in her office at the White House when an aide told her a plane had struck one of the towers at the World Trade Center.
”The attack came quite literally out of the blue, an assault on our cities that we have not experienced since the War of 1812,” she said.
“‘What a strange accident,’ I thought. I called President Bush, who was reading to children at an education event in Florida; he too thought it must have just been an accident. But within 17 minutes, a second plane hit the World Trade Center,” she noted.
“I remember turning to a television screen, and the horror and the shock that I felt.”
Rice joined Vice President Cheney and other officials in a bunker at the White House that day.
She closed her remarks at the Pentagon with a message of hope.
“September 11 tested us, but it did not break us,” said Rice, who went on to become Bush’s Secretary of State. “As we meet the many challenges ahead, may the memory of our response to that searing experience bring hope for our future as a country and as a people.”
