1115.org

As expected, White House records have confirmed that the briefing did indeed take place:

A review of White House records has determined that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, did brief Condoleezza Rice and other top officials on July 10, 2001, about the looming threat from Al Qaeda, a State Department spokesman said Monday.

That’s not the real story, though. The plot is rapidly thickening, due to this McClatchy Newspapers report:

The independent Sept. 11, 2001, commission was given the same “scary” briefing about an imminent al Qaida attack on a U.S. target that was presented to the White House two months before the attacks, but failed to disclose the warning in its 428-page report.

Former CIA Director George Tenet presented the briefing to commission member Richard Ben Veniste and executive director Philip Zelikow in secret testimony at CIA headquarters on Jan. 28, 2004, said three former senior agency officials.

Tenet raised the matter himself, displayed slides from a Power Point presentation that he and other officials had given to then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on July 10, 2001, and offered to testify on the matter in public if the commission asked him to, they said.

In the briefing, Tenet warned “in very strong terms” that intelligence from a variety of sources indicated that Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organization was planning an attack on a U.S. target in the near future, but didn’t provide specifics about the exact timing or nature of a possible attack, or about whether it would take place in the United States or overseas, said the former senior intelligence officials, all of whom requested anonymity because Tenet’s presentation was classified.

However, said one of the officials, “the briefing was intended to ‘connect the dots’ contained in other intelligence reports and paint a very clear picture of the threat posed by bin Laden.” The CIA declined to comment.

The 9/11 panel, however, never asked for additional information or mentioned the briefing in their report.

Former commission members, including Ben Veniste, have said they were never told about the briefing that had been given to Rice, now secretary of state.

Leave to one side for now the whole slew of questions arising from Ben-Veniste’s claim that they were never told about the briefing, and the apparent ignorance of other 9/11 Commission members about the matter. There can be no doubt we’re going to be hearing a lot about this in the next few days.

Up to now, the focus on this story has been on the credibility of Condi Rice. And there’s no doubt that just took another big beating.

Of course, Rice can still claim that technically she was never specifically warned about an attack in the U.S. In fact, judging by her past performances, she will probably even try to maintain the fiction that Tenet did not deliver an urgent warning about al Qaeda on July 10, 2001. (There was no new information, etc.) But at this point, it has to be painfully aware to everyone that she has been caught flatfooted in a self-evident lie.

*** Update, 7:35 am ***

I just found the original McClatchy story, and it also contains the following:

One official who helped to prepare the briefing, which included a PowerPoint presentation, described it as a “10 on a scale of 1 to 10″ that “connected the dots” in earlier intelligence reports to present a stark warning that al-Qaida, which had already killed Americans in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and East Africa, was poised to strike again.