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You know that meeting Bob Woodward has detailed that supposedly took place in June 2001, the one where Condi supposedly "brushed off" concerns about an imminent attack? You know, the one Rice has vehemently denied taking place, saying that any claims that she was warned are "ludicrous" and "incomprehensible?"

Uh oh.

The independent Sept. 11, 2001, commission was given the same “scary” briefing about an imminent al Qaida attack on a U.S. target that was presented to the White House two months before the attacks, but failed to disclose the warning in its 428-page report.

Former CIA Director George Tenet presented the briefing to commission member Richard Ben Veniste and executive director Philip Zelikow in secret testimony at CIA headquarters on Jan. 28, 2004, said three former senior agency officials.

Tenet raised the matter himself, displayed slides from a Power Point presentation that he and other officials had given to then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on July 10, 2001, and offered to testify on the matter in public if the commission asked him to, they said.

In the briefing, Tenet warned "in very strong terms" that intelligence from a variety of sources indicated that Osama bin Laden's terrorist organization was planning an attack on a U.S. target in the near future, but didn't provide specifics about the exact timing or nature of a possible attack, or about whether it would take place in the United States or overseas, said the former senior intelligence officials, all of whom requested anonymity because Tenet’s presentation was classified.

However, said one of the officials, "the briefing was intended to 'connect the dots' contained in other intelligence reports and paint a very clear picture of the threat posed by bin Laden." The CIA declined to comment.

The 9/11 panel, however, never asked for additional information or mentioned the briefing in their report.

Former commission members, including Ben Veniste, have said they were never told about the briefing that had been given to Rice, now secretary of state.

So much for the partisan political angle. It appears at least one of the Democrats on the 9/11 Commission knew about this, but for some reason decided to neither let other Commission members know nor put it in the final report. This is not good. If Tenet confirms that he was willing to testify about this in public but was never asked...

Oh, and get this... This leak is reported as part of a defense of Rice and the Bush adminsitration. More:

The former senior intelligence officials challenged some aspects of Woodward’s account of the briefing to Rice, including assertions that she failed to react to the warning and that the information concerned an imminent attack in the United States.

The briefing “didn’t say within the United States,” one former senior intelligence official recounted. “It said on the United States, which could mean a ship, an embassy or inside the United States.”

Call me crazy, but this looks like a barely disguised attack at Rice, not a defense of here. Someone, somewhere has decided that its time to let the truth see some sunshine, but they're spinning it as if it were some sort of ass backwards defense of Condi.

Now normally I would be afraid that this story might get lost in all the attention being paid to the Foley sex scandal, but here's why I don't think that will happen. From today's NYT:

Members of the Sept. 11 commission said today that they were alarmed that they were told nothing about a White House meeting in July 2001 at which George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, is reported to have warned Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, about an imminent Al Qaeda attack and failed to persuade her to take action[...]

The disclosures took members of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission by surprise last week. Some questioned whether information about the July 10 meeting was intentionally withheld from the panel.

In interviews Saturday and today, commission members said they were never told about the meeting despite hours of public and private questioning with Ms. Rice, Mr. Tenet and Mr. Black, much of it focused specifically on how the White House had dealt with terrorist threats in the summer of 2001.

“None of this was shared with us in hours of private interviews, including interviews under oath, nor do we have any paper on this,” said Timothy J. Roemer, a Democratic member of the commission and a former House member from Indiana. “I’m deeply disturbed by this. I’m furious.”

Another Democratic commissioner, former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, said that the staff of the Sept. 11 commission was polled in recent days on the disclosures in Mr. Woodward’s book and agreed that the meeting “was never mentioned to us.”

“This is certainly something we would have wanted to know about,” he said, referring to the July 10, 2001, meeting.

He said he had attended the commission’s private interviews with both Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice and had pressed “very hard for them to provide us with everything they had regarding conversations with the executive branch” about terrorist threats before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Philip D. Zelikow, the executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and now a top aide to Ms. Rice at the State Department, agreed that no witness before the commission had drawn attention to a July 10 meeting at the White House, nor described the sort of encounter portrayed in Mr. Woodward’s book.

Mr. Zelikow said that it was “entirely plausible” that a meeting occurred on July 10, during a period that summer in which intelligence agencies were being flooded with warnings of a terrorist attack against the United States or its allies.

But he said the commissioners and their staff had heard nothing in their private interviews with Mr. Tenet and Mr. Black to suggest that they had made such a dire presentation to Ms. Rice or that she had rebuffed them.

“If we had heard something that drew our attention to this meeting, it would have been a huge thing,” he said. “Repeatedly Tenet and Black said they could not remember what had transpired in some of those meetings.”

They are all denying they knew anything about this. But the new story by KR I excerpted at the top directly contradicts that. It even names Ben-Veniste by name.

Ladies and gentlemen, I do believe we may have ourselves the start of one hell of a media feeding frenzy. And meanwhile, I can't help but ask: Do I need to start building myself a tinfoil hat?

(Tip o' the Cap: TPM)

UPDATE: NYT now confirms the story, with some very significant new details:

A review of White House records has determined that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, did indeed brief Condoleezza Rice and other top officials on July 10, 2001 about looming threat from Al Qaeda, a State Department spokesman said on Monday evening.

The account by the spokesman, Sean McCormack, came hours after Ms. Rice, the secretary of state, told reporters aboard her airplane that she did not recall such a meeting and said it was “incomprehensible” she ignored dire terrorist threats two months before the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. McCormack also said the Bush administration had determined that the Sept. 11 commission had been briefed about the meeting, even though no mention of it appears in the commission’s report.

The question of whether such a meeting took place and what may have occurred has emerged as central since an account of it appeared in “State of Denial,” the new book by Bob Woodward of The Washington Post. The book said that Mr. Tenet and his top counterterrorism deputy, J. Cofer Black, believed that Ms. Rice had not taken their warnings seriously.

Ms. Rice told reporters aboard her plane on Sunday evening, as she began a trip to the Middle East, that she regarded that account as “simply ludicrous.” Mr. McCormack, in confirming later that the meeting had taken place, said that the White House review had found that Ms. Rice had asked Mr. Tenet to provide the same briefing to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, and John Ashcroft, the attorney general. Among those who attended the meting, Mr. McCormack said, was Stephen Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser

Mr. Woodward’s book reports that Mr. Tenet hurriedly arranged a White House meeting on to try to “shake Rice” into taking action on ominous intelligence reports warning of a potentially catastrophic attack by Al Qaeda, possibly within American borders.

The book says that Mr. Tenet and J. Cofer Black, who was then his counterterrorism chief, left the meeting in frustration, believing they had been given a “brush-off.”

Secretary Rice said Sunday night that there would have been no need for a “a kind of emergency meeting in which there was a need to shock me, given that every day we were meeting in the Oval Office going over the threat reporting” during the summer of 2001, when spy agencies were flooded with warnings of an imminent Al Qaeda attack.

“I don’t recall a so-called emergency meeting,” she continued, adding that “it was not unusual that George and I would meet, in a sense, unscheduled” in the White House, especially during such a tense period.

Laura Rozen seems to think that there's even more on this in a yet another forthcoming (but alas unnamed) book. Good lord.

Can anyone in DC keep their stories straight today? First we hear Woodward's account that this meeting took place. Then Condi says maybe. Then she says ludicrous!" Then her staff admits that yes, it did take place, and that it was so significant Condi asked it be given to most of the rest of the cabinet.

Meanwhile, members of the 9/11 Commission act outraged that they hadn't heard about the meeting until now. Only now it turns out that perhaps at one of them did in fact know about it, and received the very same briefing himself! And worst of all, this one individual is the one making the loudest claims about never having been told!

And if that's not bad enough, there's this gem that's sure to drive conspiracy bufs wild:

Secretary Rice said that one of her top aides — Philip D. Zelikow, who was the executive director of the Sept. 11 commission before joining the State Department last year — had remained behind in Washington this week, in part to deal with the swirling controversy over Mr. .Woodward’s book.

“He does want to be able to help reconstruct, from the commission’s side, what happened,” Ms. Rice said.

Zelikow went straight from the 9/11 Commission to working for Condi Rice. Yes, of course... he would be the perfect person to have look into this. Just perfect.

Someone needs to verify this information ASAP. Tenet claims he gave this briefing to 2 people on the 9/11 Commission, but that they never asked for more info. One of those two people has previously denied knowing anything about this. The other now works for Condi Rice, the person (outside of the President) who has the most at stake here.

Nothing to see here... Move along... These aren't the tinfoil hats you're looking for...