Yes, about that meeting...

I've already written about the July 2001 meeting wherein Tenet warned Rice and others about the al Qaeda threat. I've also written about how the fact of this meeting wasn't first revealed in Woodward's book and that it was not a secret when the 9/11 Commission did its work. Much has already been made about Rice's lies about this meeting and other warnings about al Qaeda threats. There were even claims that, had the 9/11 Commission only known about this meeting... well, why not let Commission member Jamie S. Gorelick tell us about it.

She said she checked with commission staff members who told her investigators were never told about a July 10 meeting. "We didn't know about the meeting itself," she said. "I can assure you it would have been in our report if we had known to ask about it." This is all very interesting, outrageous that this information would be suppressed, but hardly surprising from this bunch.

But then I ran across this in the good-old Muckraker:

What did the 9/11 Commission know, and when did they know it? And why didn't they tell the rest of us?

[...]

The meeting, in which Tenet warned Rice of the al Qaeda threat, does not appear in the commission's final report, although it had already been publicly reported two years earlier -- and the panel had been briefed on its details by Tenet himself.

[...]

On the premise that Woodward's book was the first time the meeting had been mentioned to him, 9/11 panelist Ben-Veniste told the New York Times that the meeting “was never mentioned to us.”

“This is certainly something we would have wanted to know about," he told the paper.

When reporters confirmed Tenet's January 2004 briefing with the 9/11 commission yesterday, the Democratic panelist changed his tune. "Ben-Veniste confirmed. . . that Tenet outlined for the 9/11 commission the July 10 briefing to Rice in secret testimony in January 2004," McClatchy newspapers reported. But he wouldn't comment further, referring all questions about the content of the report to Philip Zelikow. Zelikow has yet to comment.

It's clear that the commission knew. Even if they didn't read Time magazine, even if they didn't search for news clips before digging in, they received a detailed briefing -- staffers as well as Ben-Veniste. To date, no one has explained why the meeting wasn't mentioned in the final report. Why not?

WTF...?

UPDATE: WTF, indeed. Digby adds his own insights:

WTF? Why did the White House and Rice say last week that the meeting never took place? What's up with the 9/11 Commission? Did they cover up for Condi or did they fail to note meetings that Condi took seriously? (I doubt that last since the commission's main author is Condi's good buddy, Phil Zelikow.)

This is important because, as we know, the Republicans are working overtime to write the history to say the Clinton administration let the situation develop and fester without any real action while the Bush administration did everything it could within the short time it was in office. That is demonstrably false.

I honestly don't care if Tenet and Black "felt" they were brushed off or not. It's clear that the intelligence communities were warning the administration in dire terms all summer long that a terrorist attack was looming and yet Junior went off to Crawford and cleared brush for the entire month of August.

The overarching reason for all this was that when the Bush admnistration took office they were determined to do everything differently than Clinton, Bush Sr even Reagan. The egomaniacs in charge (and the empty brand name in a suit out front) operated on a childish level that said nothing their predecesors did was correct, none of their priorities were right and they were determined to prove it.

It is documented that these people did not take terrorism seriously before they took office, nor did they take terrorism seriously after they took office. You can look it up. They are temperamentally incapable of changing their minds in the face of new evidence short of a massive terrorist attack on New York and Washington DC ... and even then they saw terrorism mainly as a political opportunity to advance their previous agenda of deposing Saddam Hussein.

These facts are indisputable. The problem is that these details of whether Condi knew on July 10th and whether Tenet felt he was being listened to are the details with which they hope to bury those facts.