It’s 11:30, and I’ve listened to about two-and-a-half hours of Condeleeza Rice testimony before the 9/11 Committee. I’ve got to admire her poise and mobility up until now. Peppered with continuous questions as whether the Bush administration had sufficient information to prevent the World Trade Center attack, Rice bobbed and weaved like a prize fighter. Rice managed to deflect all the blame for 9/11 on the Clinton administration (She kept mentioning that Bush had to rely on the “previous administration’s” intelligence—a subtle jab at Richard Clarke—and that “previous administrations” didn’t act on the terror threat either.)

Rice also kept bringing up the “structural problems” of the intelligence community, i.e., the lack of communication between the FBI and CIA. It was also like a mantra; “There were structural problems, we have tried to fix the structural problems, etc.”

But here’s a question for Condi, regarding both the accountability of the Clinton administration, and the supposed “structural problems” of communication between the White House and the FBI: If terror activity was significantly on the rise during the summer of 2001, and it has been well-documented that it was so, shouldn’t it have especially imperative for the Dubya administration to act against terror, contrary to the supposedly “weak” anti-terror attitudes of their predecessors?

And what about the study drawn up by Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, subsequent to the change in administration? It warned that al Qaeda was more dangerous than ever, that it was imperative that something be done about al Qaeda. What, the Bush administration had time to do a 10-day standoff with China over a spy plane, and to piss off the North Koreans, but it didn’t have time to even BEGIN a strategy to counter terrorism…?

(Ooh. Condi just threw a haymaker at Richard Clarke. She says he could have requested a sit-down with the president at any time. And the committee throws a counter-punch: Why didn’t the principals get together during the summer of 2001 when intelligence, which Condi confirmed, plainly warned that a “big” attack was about to happen on U.S. soil?)

And what about this contentious August 2001 PDC report, the one actually entitled, “Bin Laden wants to attack the U.S.?” Dr. Rice says this was just “historical information” about al Queda, and did not warn at all about impending attacks by terrorist groups in the U.S.? Gee, Dr. Rice, can we make the PDC report public, the ENTIRE document, as opposed to the truncated version that the committee has been given? I don’t think so, replies Dr. Rice. Government documents are too ‘sensitive.’

(Committee has just struck again: No FBI field office has ever received any intelligence about the possibility of an attack on U.S. soil. Isn’t that the job of Defense Advisor Condi Rice? Shouldn’t she have passed the information down the food chain? Now they bring up the memo by Richard Clarke, from September 4th, which the former terrorism czar claims was an warning of an impending attack. According to Dr. Rice, it’s only a warning of ‘bureaucratic inertia,’ to quote Condi, not a warning about September 11th. Good return by committee: So what would be a warning of an impending attack, if not a document that warns, “We would hate to wake up one morning and find that al Qaeda had killed thousands of our own on American soil, and know that we could have done more…?”

(Last committee member has begun questioning Dr. Rice. He’s mentioned pushing “dead horses” out the door. Huh? Oh, the Dick Clarke memo again. Was this something Condi Rice was supposed to act on? What did she understand it to be? Rice: I viewed it as a list of suggestions… which needed decisions. …More questions than answers.

(Now Condi is defending the Bush administration’s hesitating to respond to the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. “We believed that to respond tit-for-tat would have only emboldened the terrorists.” Yes, and doing nothing at all would certainly wound their self-esteem. Ooh! The committee guy just said something like that: What would the Bush administration have done if another U.S. destroyer had been bombed in March 2001? Good for you, committee guy!)

Okay, I’m going to break from live coverage, since the hearing is clearly winding down. I can say that Condi only lost her cool briefly, when a particularly unctious Senator practically demanded that the August 2001 PDC report be made public. Clearly, her best moment came when former Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey got all dramatic about the horrible situation in Iraq. Rice reminded him that, shortly following 9/11, he wrote a "brilliant essay" which stated that the immediate course of action should be kicking Saddam Hussein out of power. (Can you believe they let that man run the New School...?) Otherwise, I doubt today’s events will negatively impact the Bush re-election campaign. We can probably look forward to four more years of bad times for non-zillionaires, because after all, when 9/11 did go down, Bush was the man at the helm.