CONDI IS CORRECT

Crooks & Liars has the video clip of Condi Rice stating that Tenet didn't tell the 9-11 Commission that the Bush regime wasn't taking the threat seriously and as far as I can tell, she is correct. Here are the relevant excerpts from Tenet's oral testimony:


TRANSCRIPT OF TENET'S TESTIMONY TO THE 9-11 COMMISSION

MR. TENET: No, sir, I think that both groups and both sets of policymakers -- obviously, one set lived through a period -- a much longer time period. But the new group also immediately understood what we were talking about here, and bin Ladin and al Qaeda became an agenda item early on with the national security adviser and the President.

MS. GORELICK: I've never seen you so easily intimidated George. (Laughter.) I would like to ask how your colleagues in the Administration responded. My colleague Mr. Fielding asked you about the briefings that you did of the President, and I was struck by the comment in the -- that the President made in "Bush at War," that bin Ladin was not the focus of his national security team. He said: "I didn't feel that sense of urgency. My blood was not nearly as boiling." And I think that's a fairly candid comment on his part. Did he evidence that he was seized with the urgent nature?

MR. TENET: Look, by the spring and summer, everybody was seized with the urgency of this nature by virtue of what I was telling them, and by this time period the CSG is meeting every day. We're taking actions to undertake disruptions. The Defense Department is taking security precautions at its facilities, the State Department is taking security precautions at facilities overseas. The CSG is issuing advisories to the FAA. So this period of time saw an enormous amount of activity, typical to the kind of activity we saw in previous threat periods. And all I can tell is the policymakers got it because I talked to all of them about it and they understood the nature of what we were dealing with.