Rice, Tenet, CIA, Bush

On Monday, a State Department spokesman conceded that then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice had indeed been briefed in July 2001 by George Tenet, then-director of the CIA, about the alarming potential for an Al Qaeda attack, as Bob Woodward has reported in his aptly named new book, "State of Denial."

"I don’t remember a so-called emergency meeting," Rice had said only hours earlier, apparently still suffering from some sort of post-9/11 amnesia that seemed to afflict her during her forced testimony to the 9/11 Commission.

The omission of this meeting from the final commission report is another example of how the Bush administration undermined the bipartisan investigation that the president had tried to prevent.

Not remembering confirms her inattention to terror reports at a time the Bush administration was already fixated on "regime change" in Iraq.

It is, however, as she stated Monday, "incomprehensible" that she, then the national security advisor to the president and the person most clearly charged with sounding the alarm, would have ignored the threat.

But ignore it the administration did, and then later tried to lay the blame on the Clinton administration, which, Rice claimed at the 9/11 Commission hearings, lied when it said it had given the incoming White House team an action plan for fighting Al Qaeda.