Secretary of State Condolezza Rice could be smack, dab at the center of yet another controversy over pre-911 attack warnings to the White House in light of yet another new revelation.
Australia’s Herald-Sun reports:
EIGHT months before the September 11 attacks the White House’s then counterterrorism adviser urged then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to hold a high-level meeting on the al-Qaeda network, according to a memo made public today.
“We urgently need such a principals-level review on the al-Qaeda network,” then White House counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke wrote in the January 25, 2001 memo.
Mr Clarke, who left the White House in 2003, made headlines in the heat of the US presidential campaign last year when he accused the Bush White House of having ignored al-Qaeda’s threats before September 11.
Mr Clarke testified before inquiry panels and in a book that Rice, his boss at the time, had been warned of the threat. Rice is now US Secretary of State.
However, Ms Rice wrote in a March 22, 2004 column in The Washington Post that “No al-Qaeda threat was turned over to the new administration”.
Daily Kos has copy of the memo here. MORE:
Mr Clarke told a commission looking into intelligence shortcomings prior to the attacks, “There’s a lot of debate about whether it’s a plan or a strategy or a series of options – but all of the things we recommended back in January were those things on the table in September. They were all done, but they were done after September 11.”
The document was released by the National Security Archive, an independent US group that solicits government documents for public review.
Can her statements be reconciled with what this document apparently shows? It’ll be interesting to watch, but this administration seems to be facing credibility questions now on several fronts which may not matter to its staunch supporters but will matter to people not belonging to the GOP or Democratic camp.
UPDATE: The Iconic Midwest looks at this issue and concludes that the Kos post and issue itself are riddled with inaccuracies and perhaps outright mistruths so they’re “Products of a Vivid Imagination.”. Required reading if you’ve read the above post and Kos.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.