Gotta love it

Here's something i just realized in the Condi Rice incident. That's where Bob Woodward, in his new book State of Denial, writes that CIA Director George Tenet and his Associate Director Cofer Black briefed Condi on 10 July 2001 that a major terrorist strike was imminent. Condi, of course, claimed that she didn't recall the meeting.

But let's talk about John Ashcroft for a minute, shall we? Here's John being quoted in the earliest stories:

Meanwhile, former Attorney General
John Ashcroft said Monday that he should have been notified of any such report dealing with a pending attack on the United States. "It just occurred to me how disappointing it was that they didn't come to me with this type of information," Ashcroft said in an interview with The Associated Press.

"The FBI is responsible for domestic terrorism," Ashcroft said. He said both Tenet and Black should have been aware that he had pressed for a more aggressive policy in going after bin Laden and his followers in the United States and should have briefed him as well. Rice knew of this advocacy, he suggested.

Here's a later story:

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack later told reporters in Saudi Arabia's city of Jeddah that the State Department was able to confirm that Rice appeared to have had a meeting with Tenet and Black "on or about" July 10, 2001.

"The briefing was a summary of the threat reporting from the previous weeks. There was nothing new," McCormack said.

Despite this, McCormack said Rice asked that Tenet provide the same briefing to Rumsfeld and then U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and the two men received it by July 17.

McCormack was unable to explain why Rice felt the briefing should be given to the defense secretary and the attorney general even though it did not include new material.

Was Ashcroft trying to give Condi cover by saying that the information must have been so insignificant that he wasn't brought on board, or was he sticking the shiv between the ribs by insinuating that he would have done a better job if only he had known? Either way, it's irrelevant, because the record shows he did in fact receive the same information, and he acted just as effectively as our then National Security Advisor, that is to say, not at all.

What a bunch of fuckups.