More Clarke links The Clarke-Rice smackdown!!*

For those who are reluctant to shell out the money, Julia Turner creates a “good parts” version of Against All Enemies in Slate. Brad DeLong, meanwhile, composes what Condoleezza Rice’s public testimony would have looked like — it looks pretty credible. [UPDATE: the New York Times reports that Rice will testify before the 9/11 Commission again in private — she had testified behind closed doors for four hours last month.] Fox News reports on the emnity between Rice and Clarke:

[M]uch of the back-and-forth between the administration and Clarke has focused on seemingly bad blood between Rice and Clarke. Clarke suggested in his recently published book, “Against All Enemies,” which attacks the White House for inaction, that Rice appeared as if Clarke didn’t know whom he was referring to when he mentioned Al Qaeda to her during a discussion early in the administration’s tenure. He also said that the national security adviser might have gotten clues to the Sept. 11 attacks by holding daily counterterrorism meetings in the summer of 2001, the way he had done in 1999. He credits those briefings to the discovery of a plan to launch terrorist attacks during New Year’s Eve celebrations in the United States. “That kind of information was shaken out in December 1999, it would have been shaken out in the summer of 2001 if she had been doing her job,” Clarke told the panel on Wednesday. But McClellan said it wasn’t the briefings that prevented the attack. “Mr. Clarke continues to say that because of the meetings at the White House, they were able to prevent the plot — the Millennium plot. Well, we know from news reports at that time that it was the hard work of an individual Customs agent who was able to thwart the Millennium plot, by stopping this individual at the border,” he said. Rice has also countered that it’s Clarke who wasn’t doing his job, refusing to attend her meetings. Officials say privately that Clarke was angry that CIA Director George Tenet gave President Bush his weekly counterterrorism briefings, something Clarke had done for President Clinton in the previous administration.

The Economist has more here and here. The latter story nicely sums up the state of play:

The Bush administration was urged to do more before 9/11, and chose not to, for reasons that seemed right and reasonable at the time. It was working on a strategy to deal with al-Qaeda, but too slowly to do any good. Some of its members were more concerned about Saddam Hussein than Osama bin Laden. Nothing here can be called indefensible. Whether this is the record of someone who treated al-Qaeda with the utmost seriousness is another matter.

*Post title changed upon request from Tom Maguire. UPDATE: David Adesnik has more.