All over Washington, Republicans are ratting out one another like defendants in a conspiracy case looking for a deal from the prosecution —- or, in this case, from history and the voters.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney have been letting it be known, publicly and privately, that the Sept. 11 tragedy and the administration's multiple misreadings on Iraq are largely the result of intelligence failures by the CIA and, by implication, its former director George Tenet.
Tenet wasn't about to take the weight for those screw-ups. But, like a good spy, he didn't go public with his beef. He went to Washington's super reporter-sleuth Bob Woodward.
As Woodward reports it in his new book, Tenet claims he warned Rice, then the national security adviser, on July 10, 2001 —- two months before Sept. 11 —- that intelligence intercepts pointed to an impending al-Qaida attack in the United States.
Rice said she couldn't recall such a meeting or Tenet's warning, which would have raised questions about just how serious a priority the administration gave terrorism. Somebody could get hurt here, and she wasn't about to be the one.
But, alas, a State Department spokesman disclosed last week that White House records confirm that such a meeting did in fact take place. Well, perhaps it did, Rice has conceded, but she remembers no such dire warning.
Andrew Card, President Bush's former White House chief of staff, also has been talking to Woodward. He related having warned Bush that the administration had three big problems —- "Iraq, Iraq and Iraq" —- and recommending that Donald Rumsfeld, the Pentagon's imperious boss, be canned. Even Laura Bush felt that way about Rumsfeld, Card reportedly said.
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