SpyTalk

This, despite al Qaeda attacks on the USS Cole in Aden in 2000, the 1998 bombing of two American embassies in Africa and the now famous CIA memo she received the month before the attacks, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."

"We knew virtually nothing about how al Qaeda operated," Rice said at the school event Sunday.  "We were as deaf and dumb and blind on September 10th as you could possibly be."

Rice's offhand remark seemed to corroborate the view of former White House terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke that Rice knew nothing and cared less about al Qaeda when he briefed her during the first hours of the administration in January 2001.

In his memoir, "Against All Enemies," Clarke wrote that "her facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard the term before."

Further muddying the question of what Rice knew and when she knew it, Rice is said to have given an interview during the 2000 Bush campaign in which she talked about the urgency of gathering intelligence on al Qaeda.

"You really have to get the intelligence agencies better organized to deal with the terrorist threat to the United States itself," Rice said on Detroit's WJR radio, according to snippets quoted on Fox News Channel's Hannity & Colmes Show.

"One of the problems that we have is a kind of split responsibility, of course, between the CIA and foreign intelligence and the FBI and domestic intelligence."

Rice continued, "There needs to be better cooperation because we don't want to wake up one day and find out that Osama bin Laden has been successful on our own territory."

(I could find no link to the interview, despite voluminous references to it on conservative Web sites.).

On Sunday, Rice also sought to explain her suggestion, made in answer to a Stanford student's question, that torture was legal if the President said it was.

"Now, there's been another confusing statement - I said at one point that it was, therefore, a given that the president - if the president authorized it, it was legal," Rice said.

"This was not a Nixon/Frost moment.  What I intended to say or what I meant to say about this is, the president said I won't authorize anything that is illegal.  It's not that because he authorized it, it was legal.  No, that's a tautology.  It was that he said, I won't authorize anything that's illegal."

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.
 
Read the full transcript of Rice's remarks here.