"The screeching chatter in the spring and summer of 2001 — 'There will be attacks in the near future' — did not yank Mr. Bush and his team from their Iraq fixation. 'But they don't tell us when,' Ms. Rice protested. 'They don't tell us where, they don't tell us who, and they don't tell us how.' Paging Nancy Drew... Inconclusive intelligence did not bother the Bush team when it wanted to be "actionable" on Iraq, or engage in 'tit for tat' with Saddam... The Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing — remarkably headlined 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States' — mentioned Al Qaeda's wanting to hijack planes and the 70 F.B.I. field investigations into suspected Al Qaeda sleeper cells in the U.S... The briefing had three-month-old information that Al Qaeda was trying to sneak into the country for an explosives attack. No wonder the C.I.A. chief and counterterrorism czar were running around with their hair on fire... What should have made Condi hysterical, she deemed 'historical'... W. kept fishing and denouncing Saddam, while Condi sat for a glam Vogue photo shoot and interview."
-- Maureen Dowd, Our New No-Can-Do Nation, op-ed, The New York Times.