Nor has there been any comment from J. Cofer Black, Mr. Tenet’s
counterterrorism chief, who is reported in the book to have attended
the July 10 meeting and left it frustrated by Ms. Rice’s "brush-off"
of the warnings.
He is quoted as saying, "The only thing we didn’t do was pull the
trigger to the gun we were holding to her head."
Mr. Black did not return calls left at the security firm Blackwater,
which he joined last year.
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."
..................................................................................................................
Mr. Woodward’s book, he said, raised the question of "why didn’t Condi
Rice and George Tenet tell the 9/11 commission about that? They were
obliged to do that and they didn’t."
From The New York Times, 10/1/06:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/washington/01cnd-book.html?ex=1317355200&en=beb29e8f20ad8f76&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
9/11 Panel Members Weren’t Told of Meeting
By PHILIP SHENON
WASHINGTON --
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.
Since release of the book, "State of Denial," the White House and Ms.
Rice have disputed major elements of Mr. Woodward’s account, with Ms.
Rice insisting through spokesmen that there had been no such exchange
in a private meeting with Mr. Tenet and that he had expressed none of
the frustration attributed to him in Mr. Woodward’s book.
"It really didn’t match Secretary Rice’s recollection of the meeting
at all," said Dan Bartlett, counselor to President Bush, in an
interview on the CBS News program "Face the Nation."
"It kind of left us scratching our heads because we don’t believe
that’s an accurate account," he said.
Although passages of the book suggest that Mr. Tenet was a major
source for Mr. Woodward, the former intelligence director has refused
to comment on the book.
Nor has there been any comment from J. Cofer Black, Mr. Tenet’s
counterterrorism chief, who is reported in the book to have attended
the July 10 meeting and left it frustrated by Ms. Rice’s "brush-off"
of the warnings.
He is quoted as saying, "The only thing we didn’t do was pull the
trigger to the gun we were holding to her head."
Mr. Black did not return calls left at the security firm Blackwater,
which he joined last year.
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.
In interviews Saturday and today, commission members said they were
never told about the meeting despite hours of public and private
questioning with Ms. Rice, Mr. Tenet and Mr. Black, much of it focused
specifically on how the White House had dealt with terrorist threats
in the summer of 2001.
"None of this was shared with us in hours of private interviews,
including interviews under oath, nor do we have any paper on this,"
said Timothy J. Roemer, a Democratic member of the commission and a
former House member from Indiana.
"I’m deeply disturbed by this. I’m furious."
Another Democratic commissioner, former Watergate prosecutor Richard
Ben-Veniste, said that the staff of the Sept. 11 commission was polled
in recent days on the disclosures in Mr. Woodward’s book and agreed
that the meeting "was never mentioned to us."
"This is certainly something we would have wanted to know about," he
said, referring to the July 10, 2001, meeting.
He said he had attended the commission’s private interviews with both
Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice and had pressed "very hard for them to provide
us with everything they had regarding conversations with the executive
branch" about terrorist threats before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Philip D. Zelikow, the executive director of the Sept. 11 commission
and now a top aide to Ms. Rice at the State Department, agreed that no
witness before the commission had drawn attention to a July 10 meeting
at the White House, nor described the sort of encounter portrayed in
Mr. Woodward’s book.
Mr. Zelikow said that it was "entirely plausible" that a meeting
occurred on July 10, during a period that summer in which intelligence
agencies were being flooded with warnings of a terrorist attack
against the United States or its allies.
But he said the commissioners and their staff had heard nothing in
their private interviews with Mr. Tenet and Mr. Black to suggest that
they had made such a dire presentation to Ms. Rice or that she had
rebuffed them.
"If we had heard something that drew our attention to this meeting, it
would have been a huge thing," he said.
"Repeatedly Tenet and Black said they could not remember what had
transpired in some of those meetings."
Democratic lawmakers have seized on Mr. Woodward’s book in arguing
that the Bush administration bungled the war in Iraq and paid too
little attention to terrorist threats in the months before Sept. 11.
Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the senior Democrat on the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on "Face the Nation" on CBS
that there had been "rumors" of such an encounter between Mr. Tenet
and Ms. Rice in the summer of 2001.
Mr. Woodward’s book, he said, raised the question of "why didn’t Condi
Rice and George Tenet tell the 9/11 commission about that? They were
obliged to do that and they didn’t."
__________________________________________________________
"The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were
holding to her head."
Harry
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