Reply #55

Rice Denies Book's Assertion She Brushed Off CIA Terror Warning

`Incomprehensible,' she says of the idea that she ignored Tenet's anxiety over a strike before 9/11.

By Paul Richter
LA Times Staff Writer
October 3, 2006

State Department officials acknowledged late Monday that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was at a 2001 meeting where she was reportedly warned of the need to act on an impending terrorist threat to the United States.

They said she met with then-CIA Director George J. Tenet on or around July 10. A new book by Bob Woodward says she brushed off Tenet's warning at that session.

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"The idea that I would have ignored that, I find incomprehensible," Rice told reporters late Sunday during the flight. "I am quite certain that it was not a meeting in which I was told that there was an impending attack, and refused to respond."

The State Department said Monday that a meeting around the time described by Woodward had in fact taken place, based on government records, but that no new information was given to Rice, who then was President Bush's national security advisor.

In his book, Woodward writes that Tenet and J. Cofer Black, then director of the CIA's counterterrorism center, decided on July 10, 2001, that they had to request a dramatic, "out-of-cycle" meeting with Rice to describe their anxiety over the chance of an attack against American interests, possibly within the United States.

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http://articles.latimes.com/2006/oct/03/nation/na-book3