Rice: "I don't recall"

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she cannot recall then-CIA chief George Tenet warning her of an impending al-Qaida attack in the United States, as a new book claims he did two months before the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

''What I am quite certain of 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, and the idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible,'' Rice said.

Rice was President Bush's national security adviser in 2001, when Bob Woodward's book ''State of Denial'' outlines a July 10 meeting among Rice, Tenet and the CIA's top counterterror officer.

''I don't know that this meeting took place, but what I really don't know, what I'm quite certain of, is that it was not a meeting in which I was told there was an impending attack and I refused to respond,'' Rice said.

Hah! If this were a cartoon, she'd have been saying "er, ah, um, well, y'see" and yanking her collar around. Funny stuff.

(Or, well, it would be, were it not for the subject matter. Damned Republican arrogance.)