Yeah, yeah, fine. Why don't you send me a memo on that.

RICE: Dick Clarke had told me, I think in a memorandum -- I remember it as being only a line or two -- that there were Al Qaeda cells in the United States.




Fineman, MSNBC:

Does Rice really know her role?
How national security adviser's testimony hurt Bush

...A self-proclaimed expert at understanding "structural" change in large institutions, Rice wasn't aware — may still not be aware — that the nature of her job had changed by the time she took over as national security adviser in January 2001. Reared in the Cold War era, she saw herself following in the footsteps of Henry Kissinger. "National security" was largely a matter of global state-to-state diplomacy.

In fact, as her predecessor in effect warned her when he was turning over the keys, the model was no longer so much Kissinger as it was, say, Elliott Ness or J. Edgar Hoover...

Asked at the hearing why she hadn't pressed the FBI more closely about what it knew, or didn't know, about domestic terrorist threats, she acted as though the question was an odd one: It wasn't her job. Well, in retrospect, it was and now certainly is.

Worse than a crime, it was a blunder. - Talleyrand

Rauchway, MSNBC:

This reflects more than partisan disagreement: between Kerrey and Rice there's a profound difference of opinion as to what White Houses should do.

Rice believes that the White House should organize the executive bureaucracy so it receives adequate briefings from underlings and can then delegate authority back to appropriate underlings to take action.

Kerrey believes that the White House should recognize that it cannot move bureaucracies around because they're political institutions and the president and his advisors should actively stay on top of things, seeking information where it can be found, and forging connections between bureaucracies isolated by law and habit. Ordinarily you don't get to reorganize the whole shebang, because, you know, the framers designed the Constitution to resist executive re-organization, so the president absolutely must act as a diplomat in his own government. And doing your job means you can't wait for a catastrophe to allow you to thwart that design, but rather to work within it.