9/11 Panel Not Told of Meeting

Wow:

Members of the Sept. 11 commission said today that they were alarmed that they were told nothing about a White House meeting in July 2001 at which George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, is reported to have warned Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, about an imminent Al Qaeda attack and failed to persuade her to take action.

Details of the previously undisclosed meeting on July 10, 2001, two months before the Sept. 11 terror attacks, were first reported last week in a new book by the journalist Bob Woodward.

The final report from the Sept. 11 commission made no mention of the meeting nor did it suggest there had been such an encounter between Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice, now secretary of state.

The book says that Mr. Tenet hurriedly organized the meeting — calling ahead from his car as it traveled to the White House — because he wanted to “shake Rice” into persuading the president to respond to dire intelligence warnings that summer about a terrorist strike. Mr. Woodward writes that Mr. Tenet left the meeting frustrated because “they were not getting through to Rice.”

The disclosures took members of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission by surprise last week. Some questioned whether information about the July 10 meeting was intentionally withheld from the panel.

I don't know how to say it anymore plainly; the Bush administration is full of liars and rife with deceit. In the article they do not deny the meeting took place, and the only thing Dan Bartlett says about Tenet's description of the meeting is that they don't "believe" it's an accurate account, which is a non-denial denial if I've ever heard one. If someone had claimed I met with someone and said things I didn't say, would I say "I don't believe that's an accurate account?" Uh...no, I would've said "That guy is full of shit." But they can't say that, because that would be a plain bald lie, which somehow to this administration is not the same thing as merely covering up what you know. So what we have is this: despite the repeated claims to the contrary, despite the propoganda from Fox News and the right-wing blogosphere, it's clear that President Bush and his entourage were not taking the threat of terrorism seriously in the early months of his administration, and after the giant "oh shit" that was 9/11 they've made every effort to appear as if they did take it seriously-even to the point of deliberately failing to mention a meeting that they must have known the 9/11 Commission would be interested-in because they knew how bad it would make them look.

So, tell me again Bush supporters....why is it you trust this President and his administration to win the war in Iraq and the "war on terror"?

Update: Rice, for her part, denies it all in this article in the Washington Post. "Simply ludicrous", she says. We of course, have no reason to question that.