Indeed

What Richard Reeves says:

NEW YORK -- Dr. Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) is giving good brains a bad name. Her testimony to the 9/11 commission on Thursday demonstrated that it is not enough to know everything. You have to understand something. She didn't get it and still doesn't.


We screwed up big time, and now she says that she and President Bush (news - web sites) just want to "move forward." But you can't do the latter if you do not understand the former, which is: what happened before Sept. 11, 2001. As smart and alone as she is in her job, she made a huge mistake in answering questions from commission member Richard Ben-Veniste, the combative little lawyer who was a majority (Democratic) counsel during the Watergate hearings 30 years ago.


Ben-Veniste questioned her about the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) of Aug. 6, 2001, and in her nervous answer she blurted out the classified title: "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States." Ben-Veniste knew that, but could not say it because he and other commissioners had been allowed to see parts of the memo on condition that they not reveal its title or contents. Rice, in effect, declassified that title on her own. Many reasonable people will interpret the lack of follow-up -- she lamely said follow-up was not part of her job -- as stupidity and incompetence.


But that is now the hallmark of this administration: stupidity and ignorant incompetence -- in gathering, interpreting and following up pre-9/11 intelligence, and in going to war in Iraq (news - web sites).


(The title of the PDB may not be a smoking gun, but it certainly qualifies as warning ignored, rather than, as Rice said, a vague historical document. The title, by the way, was published a year ago in The Washington Post, but no one noticed -- as no one noticed a front-page story in The New York Times revealing the secret bombing of Cambodia more than 30 years ago. An institutional flaw of the press is that it says things only once, and if the timing is wrong, no one notices.) [emphasis mine]