… But we can disclose contents of a classified July 4, 2001 memo while you wait because it serves our current political needs (even though it was issued from the offices of a man we have been calling Satan for the last several weeks).

From today’s New York Times:

Also on Friday, the White House offered evidence that the Federal Bureau of Investigation received instructions more than two months before the Sept. 11 attacks to increase its scrutiny of terrorist suspects inside the United States. But it is unclear what action, if any, the bureau took in response.

The disclosure appeared to signal an effort by the White House to distance itself from the F.B.I. in the debate over whether the Bush administration did enough in the summer of 2001 to deter a possible terrorist attack in the United States in the face of increased warnings.

A classified memorandum, sent around July 4, 2001, to Condoleezza Rice, the president’s national security adviser, from the counterterrorism group run by Richard A. Clarke, described a series of steps it said the White House had taken to put the nation on heightened terrorist alert. Among the steps, the memorandum said, “all 56 F.B.I. field offices were also tasked in late June to go to increased surveillance and contact with informants related to known or suspected terrorists in the United States.”

Parts of the White House memorandum were provided to The New York Times on Friday by a White House official seeking to bolster the public account provided a day before by Ms. Rice, who portrayed an administration aggressively working to deter a domestic terror attack. …

… The White House on Friday put off a decision on declassifying the document at the center of the debate ? the Aug. 6 briefing, titled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.” But the administration appeared ready to release at least portions of the document publicly in the coming days.

The memo from Mr. Clarke’s group in July 2001 about F.B.I. activities adds another piece of evidence to the document trail, but it is unlikely to resolve the questions over whether the administration did enough to deter an attack.

White House officials, who spent several weeks attacking Mr. Clarke’s credibility, said Friday that they believed the memo from his counterterrorism group was an accurate reflection of steps the White House took to deter an attack. But they questioned whether the F.B.I. executed the instructions to intensify its scrutiny of terrorist suspects and contacts in the United States.

So, Dick Clarke was a disgruntled, partisan, racist, sexist, out-of-the-loop hack with a “weird” lifestyle, but we’ll certainly use his work product to try to point the finger of accountability at someone, anyone else?

So, the August 6, 2001 PDB memo was just a “historical” document with no fresh intelligence for us to act upon, but only a month earlier the July 4 memo clearly shows how seriously we took the terrorist threat and how quickly and efficiently we responded to it, but others didn’t?

I’m not really sure what to make of all of this; the discordance and contradictions that spew forth daily from this White House continue to amaze me.

But I certainly smell two things: dishonesty and fear.