"No Al Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration," Dr. Rice wrote in an op-ed article for The Washington Post last March. She wrote that Mr. Clarke and his team "suggested several ideas, some of which had been around since 1998 but had not been adopted."

The News York Times' Scott Shane writes this towards the end of a story entitled "'01 Memo to Rice Warned of Qaeda and Offered Plan." It takes the reader until the 16th paragraph to find out that Condi said she hadn't heard real warnings about Al-Qaeda. Nice work, Scott.

A strategy document outlining proposals for eliminating the threat from Al Qaeda, given to Condoleezza Rice as she assumed the post of national security adviser in January 2001, warned that the terror network had cells in the United States and 40 other countries and sought unconventional weapons, according to a declassified version of the document.

The 13-page proposal presented to Dr. Rice by her top counterterrorism adviser, Richard A. Clarke, laid out ways to step up the fight against Al Qaeda, focusing on Osama bin Laden's headquarters in Afghanistan. The ideas included giving "massive support" to anti-Taliban groups "to keep Islamic extremist fighters tied down"; destroying terrorist training camps "while classes are in session" and then sending in teams to gather intelligence on terrorist cells; deploying armed drone aircraft against known terrorists; more aggressively tracking Qaeda money; and accelerating the F.B.I.'s translation and analysis of material from surveillance of terrorism suspects in American cities.

Mr. Clarke was seeking a high-level meeting to decide on a plan of action. Dr. Rice and other administration officials have said that Mr. Clarke's ideas did not constitute an adequate plan, but they took them into consideration as they worked toward a more effective strategy against the terrorist threat.

So Condi didn't really tell the truth when she said she hadn't seen any Clinton administration plans on Al-Qaeda. Go figure: Someone in the Bush administration not being wholly truthful with the American people on an issue of national security. It's not like that has happened before...