Wow.  Thanks for the link.

I thought this paragraph was especially interesting--and damning:

But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives’ suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day.

What this information seems to establish beyond further doubt is that the Bush/Cheney/Rice/Wolfowitz crowd dropped the ball on AQ by failing to give the threat reports anything resembling the urgent attention they surely merited.  Richard Clarke and the departing Clinton Administration had beseeched them to treat AQ with the utmost seriousness and sense of urgency. 

Assertions by these individuals that they, and their party alone, are the ones who really know how to protect, and did a great job of protecting, our country are powerful and tragic examples of the human capacity for denial and self-delusion and the great harm these can lead to.