Riddle me this: When is a warning not a warning?

When it's given to Condoleeza Rice, apparently.

Rice said she believed the memo, called "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States," focused on history and "was not a warning."

The full story over at CNN.com doesn't paint a very impressive picture of our defenders of liberty. Dr. Rice sounds more like someone trying to CYA than give direct answers, which is disappointing. Her mantra is "There was no silver bullet to deter the 9/11 attacks." I believe that's true. No single piece of evidence was available at the time that would've unravelled the plot. But, call me crazy, Sherlock Holmes didn't stumble across too many silver bullets either, yet he managed to solve a case or two. Had the administration heeded the warnings of its own experts and committed more resources to counter-terrorism instead of stoking a fixation on Iraq, our FBI operatives may very well have gotten the support they needed when they voiced suspicions about all these radicals enrolled in flight school.

Former Sen. Bob Kerry asked Rice why the United States did not attack al Qaeda after the bombing of the USS Cole, and her statement that the president was "tired of swatting at flies."

"Can you tell me one example where the president swatted a fly when it came to Al Qaeda prior to 9/11... We only swatted a fly once on the 20th of August 1998. We didn't swat any flies afterwards. How the hell could he be tired?"

Swatting at flies. That's an amusing, if sad, exchange. Sure, I'm tossing around a lot of ifs and buts, and an earlier focus on al Qaeda offers no guarantees of success... but we have the unfortunate historic fact that ignoring al Qaeda guarantees disaster. Leave flies alone long enough and you'll have maggots everywhere. The Bush administration ignored al Qaeda during the early part of the current term, made the rocks bounce in Afghanistan for a few months, then promptly ignored al Qaeda again due to the invasion and occupation of Iraq in order to protect America against non-existant WMDs. We didn't have these kinds of problems when Bush Sr. was in office...

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