"She burned up a lot of time arguing and providing her view of things when asked for a yes/no answer."

She's volunteered to come back if they ask. What I heard was a lawyer asking two questions, then insisting that since the second was a yes or no kind of question, she should answer both yes or no. Good for her for not putting up with that crap.

"'(1) First and foremost, Rice continues to make the now-discredited claim that the White House did not have intelligence warning them that terrorists were plotting to use airplanes as missiles in an attack on America. In 2002 she said, "I don't think anybody could have predicted that ... they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile"

She said this in spite of the intelligence community having issued 12 separate warnings of such a plan, including a 1999 warning saying that "suicide bomber(s) belonging to al Qaeda's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft...into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House'"

It will be interesting to see what was in those briefing papers because it doesn't matter what the "intelligence community" knew, it matters what was communicated. Problem is it would hardly be surprising for all this to be true with out any of the information necessarily being known to key people. Happens all the time in my organization with only 15,000 people. Imagine what it's like where by their very nature, everyone's trying to keep secrets. That is how spooks work, isn't it?

More importantly, I don't think it matters. Even with his supposed knowledge of the possibility of an attack, all Clarke recommended was setting up a defense specifically for the White House and Congress. How would that have helped the Twin Towers? The same goes for trying to stop the hijacking threat. I've been through dozens of hightened travel alerts traveling every week for the last 15 years. Nothing I saw in all those years would have prevented these hijackings -- until 9/11 everyone was looking for guns and bombs on the passengers, not boxcutters smuggled on the airplane before anyone boarded. As it was things had been on full alert for nearly 6 weeks prior to the attack at Clarke's insistence. What does Clarke think should have been done differently? Why is he only saying so now/

All in all something Clarke admitted early on is still the defining point in this. Even if he had gotten everything he asked for, nothing would have prevented 9/11. He's changed his tune since, but always says "I'd like to believe...". Nice sentiment, but he might as well be saying "If we had only known".

The smartest thing I've heard come out of all of this is what the vice chair of the 9/11 Commission said on TV the other night. It doesn't matter what focus any one in any administration had or what they thought was important.   What mattered was what they did. Clinton may have been more focused on terrorism as Clarke claims but Clinton and Bush achieved the same results -- neither hindered Al Qaeda significantly nor prevented the attack.