Yesterday, we talked about a meeting then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice had, on July 10, 2001, with then-CIA Director George J. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black. According to the CIA officials, Tenet and Black warned Rice that al Qaeda was planning an attack on American interests, possibly in the United States itself, and that immediate action was needed. Rice, according to reports, blew the concerns off.
With Bob Woodward’s new book, “State of Denial,” highlighting this incident, questions about Rice’s decision making abound. For her part, Rice initially questioned whether the meeting had even happened. Today, news reports shed quite a bit of light on the subject.
Former CIA director George Tenet told the 9/11 Commission that he had warned of an imminent threat from al-Qaeda in a July 2001 meeting with Condoleezza Rice, adding that he believed Rice took the warning seriously, according to a transcript of the interview and the recollection of a commissioner who was there.
Tenet’s statements to the commission in January 2004 confirm the outlines of an event in a new book by Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward that has been disputed by some Bush administration officials. But the testimony also is at odds with Woodward’s depiction of Tenet and former CIA counterterrorism chief J. Cofer Black as being frustrated that “they were not getting through to Rice” after the July 10, 2001, meeting.
There was some question yesterday as to why the 9/11 Commission had not been notified about the meeting. As it turns out, the panel was told about it, by Tenet directly, who showed commission members the same slides he showed Rice two months before 9/11. Indeed, according to the artists formerly known as Knight Ridder, the whole Bush gang — including Rice, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft — saw it, too.
The State Department’s disclosure Monday that the pair was briefed within a week after then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was told about the threat on July 10, 2001, raised new questions about what the Bush administration did in response, and about why so many officials have claimed they never received or don’t remember the warning.
In fact, this raises a whole slew of questions.
Simon Rosenberg asks a few:
1) How did the fact of this meeting fall out of the 9/11 Commission Report? Did the Commission’s Executive Director, Phillip Zelikow, now a Rice staffer, fight to keep it out?
2) Rice has consistently said she was never told that summer that Bin Laden might strike inside the US. Did this briefing have such information? According to this story it did. And why does she keep saying this when the Aug 6th memo to the President clearly indicates that Bin Laden was attempting to strike in the US?
3) Did Rumsfeld and Ashcroft get the same briefing, as Sec. Rice says?
4) What specific actions did the President and National Security Advisor take upon receiving this urgent briefing on July 10th, a full two months before 9/11?
5) Isn’t it now clear that Bush and his team were amply warned about the impending attacks throughout the summer and did nothing? And that the Secretary of State is simply lying about a grave and serious security matter to cover her ass?
As for #3, it appears Rumsfeld and Ashcroft did get the same briefing, which in some ways makes the administration look worse (Rice didn’t just blow off the warnings; the entire Bush team did).
There is one way to help get to the bottom of all of this, and Kevin Drum lays it out for us:
Can we just declassify the damn PowerPoints? Is there any possible chance that making public a five-year-old set of slides about al-Qaeda would damage any sources or methods? Especially if Tenet has already offered to testify about it in public?
These mysteries are absurd. Show us the slides and let’s see who’s telling the truth.
Sounds good to me. According to intelligence officials, the slide presentation was a “10 on a scale of 1 to 10”; it was “intended to ‘connect the dots'” and paint a very clear picture of the threat posed by bin Laden; and the tone of the report was “scary.”
Maybe so, but there’s only one way to find out. If, however, the PowerPoints are as serious as they sound, and Rice & Co. did nothing, the administration won’t have much of a defense.