To say I told you so. The current mia culpas coming from the right almost cry out for it. I could point out that all of us who criticized this war were called traitors, Bush Haters and worse. But not by these two guys.

So I am going to resist the temptation to do what many on the Right have done... I am not going to push anyone's nose into the pooh. It's pretty clear that they are already beating themselves up enough. For Allahpundit, I have no such inclination. He has been one of the biggest cheerleaders of this inept administration from day one, and he, and Dean Esmay and Michelle Malkin and all the rest of the Booster Squad, will have to live with their own concience, if they have one.

The administration has been in denial since September 12, 2001. It is clear that they not only bungled 9/11, but Iraq as well, is clear... The fact that:

JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia, Oct. 2 --Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice Sunday vehemently denied that she ever received a special CIA warning about an imminent terrorist attack on the United States, angrily rebutting new allegations about her culpability in U.S. policy failures before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by al Qaeda.

She said it was "incomprehensible" that she would have ignored such explicit intelligence or appeals by senior CIA officials.

Rice, talking to reporters aboard her plane shortly after leaving Washington Sunday night en route to the Middle East, also dismissed as "simply ludicrous" other reports in a new book by Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward that she supported replacing Donald H. Rumsfeld and that the president had to intervene to get the secretary of defense to return some of her telephone calls.

Rice was responding to reports in Woodward's new book, "State of Denial," that detail disarray within the Bush administration over its troubled foreign policy. The book describes a special meeting requested on July 10, 2001, by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet and CIA counterterrorism chief J. Cofer Black to get Rice to focus on increasing intelligence pointing to an impending attack on U.S. soil. The book describes both men as frustrated by Rice's polite but inattentive response, allegedly brushing them off.

Rice acknowledged Sunday that the White House was receiving a "steady stream of quite alarmist reports of potential attacks" during daily meetings from Tenet during that period. But she said the targets were assumed to be in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Israel and Jordan. She said no reports mentioned the United States.

"What I am quite certain of, however, is that I would remember if I was told -- as this account apparently says -- that there was about to be an attack in the United States. The idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible," she told reporters.

Rice said her staff is now going back to check if there even was a meeting on July 10, 2001. Philip Zelikow, who was executive director of the 9/11 Commission and is now one of Rice's top advisers, stayed behind in Washington to try to reconstruct the sequence of events, she said. Rebuffing descriptions in the book that she was inattentive, Rice said she was concerned enough about a potential attack in the United States -- even without specific intelligence warnings -- that she had a meeting on July 5, 2001, with White House chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr. to urge him to hold a terrorism intelligence briefing for the Federal Aviation Administration and other domestic agencies.

National Security Council counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke also attended the July 5 meeting, she said. In addition, she asked that then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft be shown the terrorism threat reporting, since the Justice Department oversees the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI then held several briefings with their special agents, she said.

They continue to deny how badly they bungled 9/11, is no surprise. The surprise is that some on the Right are finaly starting to acknowledge that possibility... Well some anyway....

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