The Last Ditch

The Bush administration's credibility on Iraq has been crumbling for months and continues to be assaulted, from outside and from within. The Foley child predator scandal and coverup in the House Republican leadership accentuates the GOP culture of corruption, forcing many to face what they tried to ignore and wish away. But when pressed and pushed in recent months, Bush has made his stand in his last ditch--terrorism and 9-11, both of which he intones like a hypnotic spell in virtually every sentence.

Bush's record on terrorism as well as his tactics and strategies have been questioned and even attacked before, but the attempts to pin 9-11 on President Clinton, Clinton's defense of his record in contrast to Bush's, have all made the latest 9-11 revelation all the more powerful.

It is the phantom meeting of July 10, 2001, as described by Bob Woodward in his new book, State of Denial. CIA director George Tenet and a key aide called an urgent high level meeting in the White House with then-National Security director Condi Rice. According to the book:
They went over top-secret intelligence pointing to an impending attack and “sounded the loudest warning” to the White House of a likely attack on the U.S. by Bin Laden.
Woodward writes that Rice was polite, but, “They felt the brushoff.”

But as usual there is the underlying event, and there is the coverup. It turns out that the 9-11 Commission was never told of the meeting. First in Think Progress, and now in this morning's New York Times, some members are saying in no uncertain terms that they are furious about it. The key paragraph in the Times story is this: The disclosures took members of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission by surprise last week. Some questioned whether information about the July 10 meeting was intentionally withheld from the panel...

In other words, the charge is that Rice ignored warnings of an impending 9-11, and then she and the White House covered up that act, essentially lying to the 9-11 Commission.

The Times story also described more of the details from Woodward's book: There has also been no comment on the book from J. Cofer Black, who was Mr. Tenet’s counterterrorism chief, and who, the book says, attended the July 10 meeting and left it frustrated by Ms. Rice’s “brush-off” of the warnings. Mr. Black is quoted as saying, “The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.”

The book says Mr. Tenet hurriedly organized the meeting, calling ahead from his car as it traveled to the White House, because he wanted to “shake Rice” into persuading the president to respond to dire intelligence warnings about a possible terrorist strike. Mr. Woodward writes that Mr. Tenet left the meeting frustrated because “they were not getting through to Rice.”

The Bush House has gone on record disputing Woodward's account of this meeting. But at least one of Woodward's assertions have been confirmed: that Henry Kissinger was advising the Bush House on how to conduct the Iraq war as successfully as he managed Vietnam.

UPDATE: The New York Times says that White House records confirm that the July 10, 2001 meeting did take place, even though today Condi Rice said she had no memory of it. However, this story also says that the 9-11 Commission was informed of this meeting, though whether they were told of the urgency of Tenet's warning--or indeed if Tenet gave such urgent warnings during the meeting--is still disputed. Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post site summarizes the controversy as its developed so far, as the word "coverup" is still being spoken.