Your new Secretary of State?

Memory lane with Condi Rice (via Willis):

Rice acknowledged that throughout the summer of 2001 the CIA was intercepting unusually high volumes of "chatter" about an impending terrorist strike. She quoted from some of this chatter: "attack in near future," "unbelievable news coming in weeks," "a very, very, very big uproar." She said some "specific" intelligence indicated the attack would take place overseas. However, she noted that very little of this intelligence was specific; most of it was "frustratingly vague." In other words (though she doesn't say so), most of the chatter might have been about a foreign or a domestic attack—it wasn't clear.

Given that Richard Clarke, the president's counterterrorism chief, was telling her over and over that a domestic attack was likely, she should not have dismissed its possibility. Now that we know the title of the Aug. 6 PDB, we can go further and conclude that she should have taken this possibility very, very seriously. Putting together the facts may not have been as simple as adding 2 + 2, but it couldn't have been more complicated than 2 + 2 + 2.

The Aug. 6 briefing itself remains classified. Ben-Veniste urged Rice to get it declassified, saying the full document would reveal that even the premise of her analysis is flawed. The report apparently mentions not historical but "ongoing" FBI precautions. Former Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey added that the PDB also reports that the FBI was detecting a "pattern of activity, inside the United States, consistent with hijacking."

Responding to Ben-Veniste, Rice acknowledged that Clarke had told her that al-Qaida had "sleeper cells" inside the Untied States. But, she added, "There was no recommendation that we do anything" about them. She gave the same answer when former Navy Secretary John Lehman, a Republican and outspoken Bush defender restated the question about sleeper cells. There was, Rice said, "no recommendation of what to do about it." She added that she saw "no indication that the FBI was not adequately pursuing" these cells.

Here Rice revealed, if unwittingly, the roots—or at least some roots—of failure. Why did she need a recommendation to do something? Couldn't she make recommendations herself? Wasn't that her job? Given the huge spike of traffic about a possible attack (several officials have used the phrase "hair on fire" to describe the demeanor of those issuing the warnings), should she have been satisfied with the lack of any sign that the FBI wasn't tracking down the cells? Shouldn't she have asked for positive evidence that it was tracking them down?