Am I missing something? The New York Times is trying to make a big story out of a meeting between Condi Rice and George Tenet on July 10, 2001 during which Tenet supposedly told Rice of an imminent Al Qaeda attack and she didn’t pay enough attention. All the reporting about the administration in the weeks and months after 9/11 said that Tenet was incredibly worried, and vocally so, about the increased Al Qaeda “chatter” (remember that word?). That was the CIA dot that was not connected with some of the law-enforcement dots here (the Moussaoui arrest, the flight-school warnings, etc.) — the very reason the law was changed to allow coordination between the intelligence community and the FBI. Tenet was kept on at the CIA in large measure precisely because he had been a Cassandra during that summer.

Even so, when Rice said yesterday that Tenet had not told her of an imminent Al Qaeda attack on July 10, she was obviously telling the truth — because Tenet didn’t say an attack was imminent, nor did the oft-misrepresented August 6 Daily Intelligence Briefing about how Al Qaeda was determined to attack within the United States. Both Tenet and the August 6 memo made it clear the threat was real, but there was no actionable intelligence developed by the CIA about any specific attack.

None of this — not a word of this, save for the fact of a meeting on July 10 — is new.