Memory games

Today presents an odd juxtaposition of Dubya's public pronouncements: a much heralded Churchillian discourse on Iraq in which he didn't actually provide any details, and today's I'm with Arik stunner, which seems to have sneaked up on people, that he is dumping 37 years of US policy on Israel and the occupied territories. Now while Dubya was intent on avoiding details on Tuesday night, he couldn't help but slip a few incidental ones in anyway -- details that are predictably of questionable validity. We refer you to TAPped for their collection of commentary and links about the obvious clangers. But there are one or two specific things we'd like to highlight. Consider first his response to a question about the August 2001 Daily Brief:

THE PRESIDENT: Ed [LA Times], I asked for the briefing. And the reason I did is because there had been a lot of threat intelligence from overseas. And so -- part of it had to do with Genoa, the G8 conference that I was going to attend. And I asked, at that point in time, let's make sure we are paying attention here at home, as well. And that's what triggered the report.

This mention of Genoa is odd, and smacks of Dubya constructing some memories for himself in light of subsequent analysis. Dubya wants us to think: Going to Genoa got me thinking about terrorist threats, so I asked for an assessment of where we stood at home. And yet Genoa is the topic that has provided one of the few chinks in the armour of Saint Condi of Palo Alto, as the Daily Howler has incomparably explained:

[Howler] How bizarre is Rice?s statement [that no-one had conceived of hijacked planes as weapons]? In July 2001, Rice accompanied President Bush to a G-8 summit in Genoa. On September 26, 2001, David Sanger described a security problem which developed at that event. He wrote on page one of the New York Times:
SANGER: ....in an appearance on Italian television, Gianfranco Fini, the Italian deputy prime minister, discussed parallels between the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and warnings his government had received before the Genoa meeting in July.

"Many people joked about the Italian Intelligence Force," Mr. Fini said, "but actually they had information that in Genoa there was the hypothesis of an attack on the American president with the use of an airplane. That is why we closed the airspace above Genoa and installed antiaircraft missiles. Those who joked should now reflect."

Is this the intelligence that Dubya now says got him thinking about threats at home? And if so, where does that leave his position, similar to Condi's, that he didn't envision a plane as a weapon?

Then there's this:

[Dubya] I mean, I didn't have that great sense of outrage that I felt on September the 11th. I was -- on that day I was angry and sad: angry that al Qaeda had -- well, at the time, thought al Qaeda, found out shortly thereafter it was al Qaeda -- had unleashed this attack; sad for those who lost their life.

So the claim here is that I knew on the day that it was al Qaeda. To know so quickly requires some level of expectation that they might be up to something.

UPDATE: The final paragraphs of this Slate article track the changing official line on whether Dubya actually asked for the August '01 briefing, and the disturbing implications of whatever the correct answer is.