More finger pointing...

Rice Confirms Meeting with Tenet on U.S. Threat

It turns out Condi Rice "misrepresented" the truth over the weekend when she said she didn't remember meeting with George Tenet TWO MONTHS before the September 11th terrorist attacks, where he and the CIA disclosed to her that they had reports of an imminent terrorist attack.

But, even in confirming the meeting - she points fingers:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did receive a CIA briefing about terror threats just about two months before the Sept. 11 attacks, but the information was not new, her chief spokesman said.

In doing so, [Rice's spokesperson] confirmed a meeting - on July 10, 2001 - that [Rice] had said repeatedly she could not specifically recall. ...

A new book by reporter Bob Woodward of Watergate fame describes the White House meeting as an emergency wakeup call that Rice had brushed off. Rice was President Bush's national security adviser at the time and was promoted to the top diplomatic job last year.

Although spokesmen for the State Department and the National Security Council indicated Sunday that such a meeting had taken place, Rice was still saying Monday that she was not sure about it. She said she would have remembered the sort of forceful warning the book claims was conveyed there.

Woodward's book "State of Denial'' recounts the meeting among then-CIA Director George Tenet, Rice and the CIA's top counterterror officer. The book said the session stood out in the minds of the CIA officials as the "starkest warning they had given the White House'' on al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and his network.

McCormack said that after the meting, Rice had asked that the same material be given to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.

So, her response is blame Rumsfeld and Ashcroft. But will that fly?

Meanwhile, Ashcroft said Monday that he should have been notified of any such report dealing with a pending attack on the United States. "It just occurred to me how disappointing it was that they didn't come to me with this type of information,'' he said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Whoops! It's like cannibalism on the right...