From Steamed Rice to Cooked Rice

The only thing of significance, I think, to come out of Bob Woodward's book that is new - not things that the reality-based community was pretty clear on for years and years - is the fact that George Tenet and Cofer Black, basically a good portion of the counter-terrorism brain trust at the time, met with Condoleezza Rice on July 10, 2001, two months before 9-11, to explain that the threat of a major Al Qaeda attack was real and growing stronger by the day.

Tenet had been losing sleep over the recent intelligence. There was no conclusive, smoking-gun intelligence, but there was such a huge volume of data that an intelligence officer's instinct strongly suggested that something was coming.

He did not know when, where or how, but Tenet felt there was too much noise in the intelligence systems. Two weeks earlier, he had told Richard A. Clarke, the National Security Council's counterterrorism director: "It's my sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is going to be the big one."

But Tenet had been having difficulty getting traction on an immediate bin Laden action plan, in part because Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had questioned all the intelligence, asking: Could it all be a grand deception? Perhaps, he said, it was a plan to measure U.S. reactions and defenses.

Tenet had the National Security Agency review all the intercepts, and the agency concluded they were of genuine al-Qaeda communications. On June 30, a top-secret senior executive intelligence brief contained an article headlined "Bin Laden Threats Are Real." [...]

The meeting did not go well.

On July 10, 2001, the book says, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, met with Ms. Rice at the White House to impress upon her the seriousness of the intelligence the agency was collecting about an impending attack ... But both men came away from the meeting feeling that Ms. Rice had not taken the warnings seriously.

Tenet left the meeting feeling frustrated. Though Rice had given them a fair hearing, no immediate action meant great risk. Black felt the decision to just keep planning was a sustained policy failure. Rice and the Bush team had been in hibernation too long. "Adults should not have a system like this," he said later.

Now, this is not significant because it somehow reveals that the Bush Administration did not take the terrorism threat seriously in the months leading up to 9-11; we already know that, as Keith Olbermann documents here. It's significant because, if true, it involves the commission of a federal crime.

Because you see, the 9-11 Commission didn't know about this meeting, and if it is found that the Bush Administration deliberately covered up the meeting from them, that would be a crime. There's no question that this meeting would have been front and center if the 9-11 Commission discovered its taking place. And certainly the Commission had ample opportunity to talk to Ms. Rice:

The Commission interviewed Condoleezza Rice privately and during public testimony; it interviewed George Tenet three times privately and during public testimony; and Cofer Black was also interviewed privately and publicly. All of them were obligated to tell the truth. Apparently, none of them described this meeting, the purpose of which clearly was central to the Commission’s investigation. Moreover, document requests to both the White House and to the CIA should have revealed the fact that this meeting took place. Now, more than two years after the release of the Commission’s report, we learn of this meeting from Bob Woodward.

Was it covered up? It is hard to come to a different conclusion. If one could suspend disbelief to accept that all three officials forgot about the meeting when they were interviewed, then one possibility is that the memory of one of them was later jogged by notes or documents that describe the meeting. If such documents exist, the 9/11 Commission should have seen them. According to Woodward’s book, Cofer Black exonerates them all this way: “Though the investigators had access to all the paperwork about the meeting, Black felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn’t want to know about.” The notion that both the 9/11 Commission and the Congressional Joint Inquiry that investigated the intelligence prior to 9/11 did not want to know about such essential information is simply absurd. At a minimum, the withholding of information about this meeting is an outrage. Very possibly, someone committed a crime. And worst of all, they failed to stop the plot.

Of course, Tenet and Black were part of numerous inquiries by the Commission as well. Were all of them lying, or at least not forthcoming with the information? Billmon asks the same question.

...what motive would the CIA Bobbsey Twins have for blowing the whistle on themselves? They're on the hook almost as deep as Rice, thanks to their (then) convenient memory lapses in front of the 9/11 Commission.

Is there a paper trail that Tenet and Black don't dare to deny on the record? Does Woodward have that paper? Does the paper constitute hard evidence of perjury, obstruction of justice, false statements, etc. on the part of some extremely senior government officials? Is the paper classified?

Patrick Fitzgerald, call your office. You may have a new case.

Certainly the Administration will try very hard to eliminate any possibility for a smoking gun here. But there have been leaks before, and there will be again. This is very serious. We knew that the White House did all they could to cover their ass about their failure of imagination pre-9/11. If they also broke the law to do that, we've got an even bigger scandal than we've yet seen, which is saying a lot.

UPDATE: OK, I'm really confused now:

The independent Sept. 11, 2001, commission was given the same “scary” briefing about an imminent al Qaida attack on a U.S. target that was presented to the White House two months before the attacks, but failed to disclose the warning in its 428-page report.

Former CIA Director George Tenet presented the briefing to commission member Richard Ben Veniste and executive director Philip Zelikow in secret testimony at CIA headquarters on Jan. 28, 2004, said three former senior agency officials.

Tenet raised the matter himself, displayed slides from a Power Point presentation that he and other officials had given to then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on July 10, 2001, and offered to testify on the matter in public if the commission asked him to, they said.

In the briefing, Tenet warned "in very strong terms" that intelligence from a variety of sources indicated that Osama bin Laden's terrorist organization was planning an attack on a U.S. target in the near future, but didn't provide specifics about the exact timing or nature of a possible attack, or about whether it would take place in the United States or overseas, said the former senior intelligence officials, all of whom requested anonymity because Tenet’s presentation was classified.

However, said one of the officials, "the briefing was intended to 'connect the dots' contained in other intelligence reports and paint a very clear picture of the threat posed by bin Laden." The CIA declined to comment.

The 9/11 panel, however, never asked for additional information or mentioned the briefing in their report.

I knew that the final 9/11 Commission Report was a political document. Until now, maybe I didn't realize how political. Yet Ben Veniste was a Democratic member of the commission, and he's publicly said he was never told about the briefing.

More is going to come out about this, but at this point I think it's fair to say I don't know what the hell's going on here. Which is OK to say, by the way, in my book.