'Who Could Have Imagined' Condi Rice's Memory Lapses on Terrorist Threats?

Either George W. Bush does such a thorough job of confusing Condi Rice that she forgets things or she has a little trouble telling the American people and the 9/11 Commission the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I've always felt that Condi Rice was a poor national security adviser and that her role in the State Department seems primarily dedicated to doing public relations work for Bush rather than performing the duties we normally associate with the enormous responsibilities of America's foreign policy. It's difficult to point to any of Rice's accomplishments.

With the publication of Bob Woodward's book, we again have confirmation that the top officials of the Bush Administration did not take Osama bin Laden seriously until the 9/11 attack. Here's an article by Peter Baker of The Washington Post from a few days ago:

[Woodward's] book also reports that then-CIA Director George J. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, grew so concerned in the summer of 2001 about a possible al-Qaeda attack that they drove straight to the White House to get high-level attention.

Tenet called Rice, then the national security adviser, from his car to ask to see her, in hopes that the surprise appearance would make an impression. But the meeting on July 10, 2001, left Tenet and Black frustrated and feeling brushed off, Woodward reported. Rice, they thought, did not seem to feel the same sense of urgency about the threat and was content to wait for an ongoing policy review.

The report of such a meeting takes on heightened importance after former president Bill Clinton said this week that the Bush team did not do enough to try to kill Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks...

(snip)

The July 10 meeting of Rice, Tenet and Black went unmentioned in various investigations into the Sept. 11 attacks, and Woodward wrote that Black "felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn't want to know about."

Jamie S. Gorelick, a member of the Sept. 11 commission, said she checked with commission staff members who told her investigators were never told about a July 10 meeting. "We didn't know about the meeting itself," she said. "I can assure you it would have been in our report if we had known to ask about it."

Now Condi Rice is an experienced spinner who knows how to get phony denials on the front page or on the network news while hoping and believing the corrections or more accurate versions of the story will somehow appear deeper in the newspapers and maybe not at all in network news coverage. Here's yesterday story by Ann Gearan of the Associated Press as it appeared in The Washington Post:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she cannot recall then-CIA chief George Tenet warning her of an impending al-Qaida attack in the United States, as a new book claims he did two months before the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

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

Rice was President Bush's national security adviser in 2001, when Bob Woodward's book "State of Denial" outlines the July 10 meeting in which Tenet said he warned Rice. Cofer Black, the CIA's top counterterror officer, was also present.

"I don't know that this meeting took place, but what I really don't know, what I'm quite certain of, is that it was not a meeting in which I was told there was an impending attack and I refused to respond," Rice said.

Speaking to reporters en route to Saudi Arabia and other stops in the Middle East, Rice said she met with Tenet daily at that point, and has no memory of the wake-up call from Tenet described in the book.

"It kind of doesn't ring true that you have to shock me into something I was very involved in," Rice said.

There was near constant discussion of possible attacks overseas, and high alarm, Rice said.

Condi Rice, who successfully terrified American voters with images of mushroom clouds if we didn't attack Iraq, is the same Bush official who told us that the famous aluminum tubes were really not suited for any other purpose than centrifuges for enriching uranium; that turned out not to be the case and a number of key experts said the aluminum tubes were unlikely to be for centrifuges and, if anything, were perfectly suited for rocket launchers, which indeed turned out to be the case. Remember, it's absolutely essential that national security advisers get their facts right. Rice has made numerous statements in the last five years that were inaccurate or misleading but has never been held to account for it. I should mention that Woodward's account, via CIA Director George Tenet, is largely consistent with former terrorism expert Richard Clarke's account of the difficulty of getting any action from the Bush Administration.

Here's another article by Dan Eggen and Robin Wright of The Washinton Post:

The meeting has become the focus of a fierce and often confusing round of finger-pointing involving Rice, the White House and the 9/11 Commission, all of whom dispatched staffers to the National Archives and other locations yesterday in attempts to sort out what had occurred.

Members of the commission -- an independent, bipartisan panel created by Congress to investigate the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks -- have said for days that they were not told about the July 10 meeting and were angry at being left out. As recently as yesterday afternoon, both commission chairman Thomas H. Kean and vice chairman Lee Hamilton said they believed the panel had not been told about the July 10 meeting.

But it turns out that the panel was, in fact, told about the meeting, according to the interview transcript and Democratic commission member Richard Ben-Veniste, who sat in on the interview with Tenet. The meeting was not identified by the July 10 date in the commission's best-selling report.

Rice added to the confusion yesterday by strongly suggesting that the meeting may never have occurred at all -- even though administration officials had conceded for several days that it had. A State Department spokesman said later that while the meeting definitely happened, Rice and Tenet disputed Woodward's characterization of her response.

(snip)

Tenet gave testimony about the July 2001 meeting with Rice at his Langley headquarters office on Jan. 28, 2004, occasionally referring to charts and slides. Philip Zelikow, who at the time was the commission's executive director and now works for Rice, was present along with other commission staff members, according to Ben-Veniste and to a portion of the transcript, which was read to The Washington Post by an official with access to it.

At one point in the lengthy session, Tenet recalled a briefing he was given on July 10 by Black and his staff, according to the transcript. He said the information was so important that he quickly called for a car and telephoned Rice to arrange for a White House meeting to share what he had just learned, according to the transcript and Ben-Veniste.

According to the transcript, Tenet told Rice there were signs that there could be an al-Qaeda attack in weeks or perhaps months, that there would be multiple, simultaneous attacks causing major human casualties, and that the focus would be U.S. targets, facilities or interests. But the intelligence reporting focused almost entirely on the attacks occurring overseas, Tenet told the commission.

Let's keep in mind that when Tenet gave testimony to the 9/11 Commission in January 2004, he was still very interested in keeping his job; the same can be said of others in the Bush Administration. I'm sure it was quite a balancing act for administration figures to testify that they were paying attention to terrorism at the same time that they avoided blaming other administration figures for their lapses. For a number of reasons, I'm inclined to believe that Condi Rice did not take the terrorism issue seriously, not to mention the growing noise about al Qaida in the spring and summer of 2001, but being the incompetent national security adviser that she was, it's possible she did take the issue seriously but she may never have followed up on the information and never raised the alert level. It's also possible that Bush or Cheney may have talked her out of pursuing the terrorism issue more fully.

One last point. It appears that the The Washington Post online versions of these stories have been revised several times in the last few days. I prefer the method used by many bloggers of either writing separate posts or adding changes in an UPDATE paragraph either at the beginning or the end of a post. It saves a lot of confusion which is something people like Karl Rove and others specialize in.

Within the Bush Administration, there is considerable finger-pointing at one another going on at the moment and there's a mad scramble for people to get their stories straight. Come to think of it, the same thing is happening within the House leadership as Hastert and others scramble to get their stories straight in the wake of the Foley scandal. The great 2006 Republican meltdown continues. Hang on to your seats. I suspect more is coming.