Condi's at It Again

Last week, when Bill Clinton called out the Bushies on their total disinterest in addressing terrorism during the first eight months of their term, Condi got all high and mighty and complained to the New York Post that they had done at least as much as the Clinton administration had (which, don't forget, included thwarting a terrorist plot during the millennium) and that this was backed up by the 9/11 commission report. Of course, they didn't, and it wasn't.

Although that might've been a learning opportunity for her, she clearly didn't take it. Bob Woodward's book describes a meeting Condi had on July 10, in which CIA director George Tenet provided a grave warning (via PowerPoint) about al-Queda. Because this meeting somehow slipped past the 9/11 commission report, Condi was right back in this morning's Washington Post insisting not only that it never happened but it could never have happened without her remembering it.

Rice angrily rejected those assertions yesterday, saying that it was "incomprehensible" that she would have ignored such explicit intelligence from senior CIA officials and that she received no warning at the meeting of an attack within the United States.

Rice acknowledged that the White House was receiving a "steady stream of quite alarmist reports of potential attacks" during that period, but said the targets were assumed to be in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Israel and Jordan.

"What I am quite certain of, however, 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," Rice said. "The idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible."

Incomprehensibility must be going around, though, because a search of White House records confirms that the meeting did take place. From Tuesday's New York Times:

Officials now agree that on July 10, 2001, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism deputy, J. Cofer Black, were so alarmed about an impending Al Qaeda attack that they demanded an emergency meeting at the White House with Ms. Rice and her National Security Council staff.

According to two former intelligence officials, Mr. Tenet told those assembled at the White House about the growing body of intelligence the Central Intelligence Agency had collected pointing to an impending Al Qaeda attack.

Aside from Condi's faulty memory, how did the 9/11 commission miss that? In Sunday's Times, Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic member of the commission, claimed that they were never told about any such meeting.

"This is certainly something we would have wanted to know about," he said, referring to the July 10, 2001, meeting.

He said he had attended the commission's private interviews with both Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice and had pressed "very hard for them to provide us with everything they had regarding conversations with the executive branch" about terrorist threats before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Unfortunately, the McClatchy Washington Bureau is reporting today that Ben-Veniste did know. In fact, according to three former CIA senior officials, Tenet gave the same PowerPoint presentation to him and Philip Zelikow, the commission's executive director. Yet more evidence that the commission was so busy playing CYA that they didn't bother to find out exactly what led up to the September 11 attack.