C.I.A. Chief Did Warn Rice on Al Qaeda

Condaleezza Rice told reporters yesterday on board her plane that she did not recall meeting with George Tenet on July 10th 2001 - a meeting at which Bob Woodward claims that Tenet was given the brush off when he warned of an imminent attack on the US - and she said it was “incomprehensible” to suggest she had ignored dire terrorist threats two months before the Sept. 11 attacks.

However, the White House have now confirmed that this meeting did indeed take place.

When details of the meeting emerged last week in a new book by Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, Bush administration officials questioned Mr. Woodward’s reporting.

Now, after several days, both current and former Bush administration officials have confirmed parts of Mr. Woodward’s account.

Condi's inability to even recall the meeting would appear to lend credence to Tenet's suggestion that she did not seem to be giving due attention to the severity of the warning he was imparting.

After all, even if she disagreed with his suggestion that the US was in danger of imminent attack, one would assume that such a warning was sufficiently unusual for the meeting to be retained in the memory banks. However, Condi went on the record yesterday to state that she has no memory of any meeting ever taking place and doubting that it ever happened.

This inevitably leads to either of two possible conclusions. Either she's an incompetent or she's a liar.

If a warning so severe has escaped her memory, then she's incompetent and should be fired.

The only other conclusion is that she remembers it very well and is dissembling in order to avoid the inevitable questions of why she didn't act upon such a highly unusual warning that the US was in imminent danger of being attacked.

Condi has always maintained that such an attack could not have been foreseen.

However, there are many factors that lead one to believe that this is untrue, not least of which is the unexplained decision of John Ashcroft to stop flying commercial jets from 26 July 2001 onwards. This implies that, not only was Ashcroft aware of an imminent attack, but that he also had some inkling that it included the use of jet airliners.

This is not the first time that Tenet and Rice have clashed over what did and did not happen.

In his own book, Mr. Woodward wrote that over time Mr. Tenet developed a particular dislike for Ms. Rice, and that the former C.I.A. director was furious when she publicly blamed the agency for allowing President Bush to make the false claim in the 2003 State of the Union address that Mr. Hussein was pursuing nuclear materials in Niger.

“If the C.I.A., the director of central intelligence, had said, ‘Take this out of the speech,’ it would have been gone, without question,” Ms. Rice told reporters in July 2003.

In fact, the C.I.A. had told the White House months before that the intelligence about Niger was dubious, and had managed to keep the claim out of an October 2002 speech that Mr. Bush gave in Cincinnati.

More recently, Mr. Tenet has told friends he was particularly angry when, appearing recently on Sunday talk shows, both Ms. Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney cited Mr. Tenet as the reason that Bush administration officials asserted that Mr. Hussein had stockpiles of banned weapons and ties to Al Qaeda.

Mr. Cheney recalled in an appearance on “Meet the Press” on Sept. 10: “George Tenet sat in the Oval Office and the president of the United States asked him directly, he said, ‘George, how good is the case against Saddam on weapons of mass destruction?’ The director of the C.I.A. said, ‘It’s a slam dunk, Mr. President, it’s a slam dunk.’ ”

It is becoming a common enough theme for this White House to attempt to blame others for it's mistakes, but for Condi to claim memory loss for such a highly unusual meeting marks a new low.

The White House are now claiming that Condi, far from brushing off Mr Tenet, actually recommended that Tenet also brief Rumsfeld and Ashcroft. What a pity that she feigned memory loss before the White House had a chance to circulate this latest take on what Condi did and didn't do.

"The briefing was a summary of the threat reporting from the previous weeks," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters traveling with Rice in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia. "There was nothing new."

However, McCormack's claims raise as many questions as it answers. If Tenet's briefing did include "nothing new" as he now states, why did Condi ask for Rumsfeld and Ashcroft to be briefed on this information? Why would they need to be briefed on something that was old news?

The administrations version of events simply doesn't hold water.

And even if the recent White House claims regarding her behaviour were true, Condi's confessed memory loss confirms her to be unfit for the office she now occupies.

What all are agreed on is this. Condi was warned by Tenet that all intelligence signals were pointing to an imminent attack on US targets.

She says she has no memory of this meeting.

That's simply astonishing. If you lack the ability to retain information that shocking and that important, then you really ought to find another job.

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Tags: Rice, Tenet, July 10 meeting, CIA, al Qaeda, bin Laden, 9-11, attack, warnings, intelligence, briefings, White House,