the July10 meeting

* christy has a good wrap-up of the July10 meeting - which of course should be renamed b/c ashcroft and rummy got the same briefing the next week.

from p.luk in the comments at fdl:

1) It appears that this “brush off” from Rice (and Ashcroft and Rumsfeld) was what lead to the creation of the August 6 “Bin Laden Determined to Attack the US” PDB. Having gone to the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, and the National Security Advisor and gotten no action, the CIA’s only hope was to present (basically the same) briefing to Bush…. who brushed it off as well.

2) Rice wanted Ashcroft and Rummy briefed…. but not Powell? This is especially strange, given that Rice claims to believe that she wasn’t warned about attacks in the United States — Powell should have been in the loop, and Ashcroft less involved, if the operational assumption was that US interests abroad would be targetted…

* Rand Beers was on DemNow discussing it as well.

I know the wingnuts are running around saying that these warnings were too imprecise and all that - the undeniable response to that is that if people knew there was a multiple terrorist attack in the wings then (at a minimum) they should have evacuated the 2nd WTC building (and other skyscrapers) ASAP after the first tower was hit. easy, no?

* meanwhile, raimondo:

The revelation in Bob Woodward's new book, State of Denial, that Condoleezza Rice (then national security adviser to the president) brushed off CIA chief George Tenet when he came to her a few months before 9/11 with dire warnings of an imminent terrorist attack, is blasting this administration's credibility out of the water – and seriously undercutting the "official" 9/11 narrative.
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As it turns out, however, there were warnings – and plenty of them – from foreign intelligence agencies and from within our own government, including one from the head of the CIA, who was accompanied at his July 2001 meeting with Rice by another top CIA official, Cofer Black, cited by Woodward as saying: "The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head."
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Rice has always played the role of a neocon-facilitator. In the run-up to war, her office – in the person of her chief adviser, Stephen J. Hadley – gave a pass to every tall tale that came out of the neocons' Pentagon policy shop, including the Mohammed Atta-in-Prague story and the Niger uranium forgeries, and assiduously blocked any reports – including those from Richard Clarke, former counter-terrorism chief – indicating that the alleged Iraq-9/11 connection was bogus.

Clarke's report, which concluded that Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with the events of 9/11, had the joint imprimatur of the CIA and the FBI. It got no further than Condi Rice's office, where it elicited a brief but sharp rebuke from "the national security adviser or deputy" – "Wrong answer," went the note at the top of the Clarke report. "Do it again."
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If we look at the organizational history of al-Qaeda, it is clear that it was created, in large part, by the U.S. during the war of "liberation" (version 1.0) against the Soviet occupiers. The Americans facilitated, encouraged, and otherwise collaborated with bin Laden until he turned against them.
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There is much we don't know about the events surrounding 9/11, and getting information out of this administration has been like pulling teeth. Now we know why Condi was so unwilling to even appear before the 9/11 Commission. Her conundrum is to convince the public that she somehow "forgot" an unusual meeting with Tenet and Black two months before 9/11 in which she demurred when urged to take immediate action against the threat posed by bin Laden. As Max Cleland put it when he resigned from the Commission to protest the administration's stonewalling, "They will never give the full story."

They may not give it out freely, but the full story is there, waiting to be discovered. And slowly but surely it will come out, all of it – unless and until another terrorist attack makes it almost irrelevant.