We’re having Boiling Rice day at The Mahablog. In the last post we discussed how millions of dollars of aid for New Orleans was wasted because the Secretary of State was too busy shopping for shoes to do her job. Now let’s continue the further adventures of the worst National Security Adviser/Secretary of State ever.

In his new book George Tenet allegedly claims that he told then-National Security Adviser Rice in July 2001 of an “urgent threat” from al Qaeda. Further, he says he said “We need to consider immediate action inside Afghanistan now. We need to move to the offensive.”

Faiz at Think Progress writes that today,

On CBS’s Face the Nation, a perplexed and stunned Rice said, “The idea of launching preemptive strikes into Afghanistan in July of 2001, this is a new fact.” Rice then said, “I don’t know what we were supposed to preemptively strike in Afghanistan. Perhaps somebody can ask that.”

That there was such a briefing given to Condi in July 2001 is not news. In fact, I think this is about the third time around for this “revelation.” The last time the July 2001 meeting made news was last fall, when Bob Woodward’s book State of Denial hit the shelves. Woodward described a presentation made by George Tenet and Cofer Black on July 10 that warned of an imminent al Qaeda attack, possibly on U.S. soil. Rice, who failed to follow up on this information, denied then that such a meeting took place. But White House records revealed the meeting did take place.

And then, when the record proved there had been a meeting, Condi claimed she had been given no warning of an attack within the United States. But on the October 2, 2006 Countdown, Roger Cressey told Keith Olbermann that he had seen the same Tenet-Black presentation that was shown to Condi Rice on July 10, and Cressey confirmed that the presentation was mostly an explicit warning that al Qaeda was about to carry out a major terrorist attack, very possibly in the U.S. In 2001 Cressey was the National Security Council staff director at the time. From the transcript:

OLBERMANN: My first question, you‘re now consulting within a firm with Richard Clarke, who was at that meeting on July 10, on the central question of whether Rice was warned then of an attack on the U.S. Do we know who‘s right here, Woodward or Secretary Rice?

CRESSEY: Yes, she was warned. I mean, there was a meeting. It was George Tenet, Dick Clarke, another individual from the agency, Cofer Black, and Steve Hadley. And what it was, Keith, was a briefing for Dr. Rice that was similar to a briefing the CIA gave to us in the situation room about a week before, laying out the information, the intelligence, laying out the sense of urgency. And it was pretty much given to Dr. Rice and Steve Hadley in pretty stark terms.

OLBERMANN: The $500 million Cofer Black action plan against bin Laden, would have read like crazy talk if that had been presented to her as Woodward describes it?

CRESSEY: Not crazy talk, but because in some respects, that‘s what we did after 9/11, although, as much as I love and respect Cofer, I don‘t think we would have been able to bring his head back in a box then, because, frankly, all the CIA sources in Afghanistan stunk, and that was part of the problem.

But that type of aggressive, robust covert action is ultimately what was implemented after 9/11.

The “$500 million Cofer Black action plan against bin Laden” is, I believe, the famous plans to go into Afghanistan and take out bin Laden and other al Qaeda leadership that had been handed off to the Bushies by the Clinton Administration. My understanding is that this plan was put together after the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in October 2000. The Clinton Administration didn’t carry out the plan because the intelligence guys did not confirm that al Qaeda was behind the Cole attack until right after the Bush II inauguration in January 2001. In spite of impassioned pleas by Richard Clarke and others to step it up, the Bushies took their sweet time circulating the plan. The plan finally hit President Bush’s desk on September 10, 2001.

I’ve written about this before, such as here. This same issue has come up periodically since the spring of 2002, and every time Condi denies ever having heard of it. As I understand it, the plan involved a lot of covert special ops stuff in cooperation with the Northern Alliance — pretty much what the initial action in Afghanistan looked like.

Via Think Progress, here’s a snip of the 9/11 Commission Report:

As the Clinton administration drew to a close, Clarke and his staff developed a policy paper of their own [which] incorporated the CIA’s new ideas from the Blue Sky memo, and posed several near-term policy options. … A sentence called for military action to destroy al Qaeda command-and control targets and infrastructure and Taliban military and command assets. The paper also expressed concern about the presence of al Qaeda operatives in the United States.” [p. 197]

Since “al Qaeda command-and control targets and infrastructure and Taliban military and command assets” were mostly in Afghanistan, one might conclude that’s where the military action was to take place.

This business about the preemptive strike into Afghanistan isn’t news. Richard Clarke wrote about it; Bob Woodward wrote about it. Bleeping Al Franken wrote about it. I’m sure I knew about it by 2002, because I remember reading about it in Time and Newsweek. Yet this is the first Condi has heard of it. Amazing.

Just for fun: Here’s Dan Froomkin, October 2, 2006, while Condi was still denying the July 10 meeting had taken place —

On Sunday, White House counselor Dan Bartlett issued a new rebuttal on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” Here’s the video ; here’s the transcript .

Speaking for Rice, Bartlett said: “I spoke to her this morning. She believes this is a very grossly mis-accurate characterization of the meeting they had.”

Stephanopoulos: “So this didn’t happen?”

And here’s the money quote from Bartlett: “That’s Secretary Rice’s view, that that type of urgent request to go after bin Laden, as the book alleges, in her mind, didn’t happen.”

Get that? In her mind, it didn’t happen.

One wonders what does happen in Condi’s mind.