I was just about to turn in for the night when I noticed the following event documented by the Washington Post from Bob Woodword's upcoming book State of Denial. Woodward's book implicates Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as being complicit regarding warnings about the urgent possiblity of a potential attack on U.S. soil, a fact that apparently was not made known to, and was possibly hidden from, the 9/11 commission.
Unbelievable:
The book <snip> reports that then-CIA Director George J. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, grew so concerned in the summer of 2001 about a possible al-Qaeda attack that they drove straight to the White House to get high-level attention.
Tenet called Rice, then the national security adviser, from his car to ask to see her, in hopes that the surprise appearance would make an impression. But the meeting on July 10, 2001, left Tenet and Black frustrated and feeling brushed off, Woodward reported. Rice, they thought, did not seem to feel the same sense of urgency about the threat and was content to wait for an ongoing policy review.
The report of such a meeting takes on heightened importance after former president Bill Clinton said this week that the Bush team did not do enough to try to kill Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) said her husband would have paid more attention to warnings of a possible attack than Bush did. Rice fired back on behalf of the current president, saying the Bush administration "was at least as aggressive" in eight months as President Clinton had been in eight years.
The July 10 meeting of Rice, Tenet and Black went unmentioned in various investigations into the Sept. 11 attacks, and Woodward wrote that Black "felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn't want to know about."
Jamie S. Gorelick, a member of the Sept. 11 commission, said she checked with commission staff members who told her investigators were never told about a July 10 meeting. "We didn't know about the meeting itself," she said. "I can assure you it would have been in our report if we had known to ask about it."
This story is huge, particularly given the whole Clinton interview/Fox News hit piece that played a significant role in this week's news cycle. Now is simply not the time to let up! Let's keep this fucking thing going, and throw it right back in their faces. We all know who is weak on terror, and it is long past time to take this line of attack and run with it. This issue, I am convinced, assures us a win in November, but we must make ourselves heard and repeat the frame over and over again. The Bush administration is weak on terror and did NOTHING to prevent our country from being attacked. 9/11, like so many other issues, is a crystal clear display of the negligence and deceit of this administration. They want to deflect blame in all directions. We simply cannot allow this to happen.
Victory in this election is ours for the taking. For the sake of our country, let us keep our eyes squarely on the prize. Karl Rove is right about one thing, if you destroy your opponents strengths, you win. Guys, its time to get to it!
UPDATE: Several of the comments below mention how Bob Woodward was a huge administration tool prior to writing this book, and therefore we should really take what he says to say here with a large grain of salt. However, IMHO the fact that he was a tool of the Bush administration is exactly why we should push this thing even harder. Take a look at this (thanks to poster jukeboxgrad for the heads up). The White House put Woodward's previous book on their suggested reading list! Why? Because ultimately they approved of the light in which they were being portrayed by Woodward. He was an insider who was, by and large, trusted by the Bush administration to say and write good things about them. That is why he was granted such high level access. This fact makes it quite tough for administration officials to turn around and credibly call him a big fat liar now, doesn't it? The fact that Woodward was a White House suckup simply makes this all the more devastating for them!
UPDATE 2: Woodward is now live on C-SPAN2 discussing the book, for those who are interested (5:00pm ET). C-SPAN will re-air the book fair at which he spoke beginning at 10:00pm ET tonight. I believe Woodward was the last author to speak at this event, so he may be on much later than that (the program concludes at 5:00am ET on Sunday morning). I didn't really get to catch much of it the first time, maybe some people can commment on any pertinent details if they happened to catch it or plan on watching it later tonight. I would be interested to know whether Woodward was questioned about the charge he makes against Rice in his book.