Rice throws a hissy fit

And invents a new history. In a meeting with editors and reporters of the New York Post:

What we did in the eight months [before Sept. 11, 2001] was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years

The secretary of state also sharply disputed Clinton's claim that he "left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy" for the incoming Bush team during the presidential transition in 2001.

"We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda," Rice responded during the hourlong session.

Really? From the Washington Post 45 months ago:

On a closed patch of desert in the first week of June, the U.S. government built a house for Osama bin Laden.

Bin Laden would have recognized the four-room villa. He lived in one just like it outside Kandahar, Afghanistan, whenever he spent a night among the recruits at his Tarnak Qila training camp. The stone-for-stone replica, in Nevada, was a prop in the rehearsal of his death.

From a Predator drone flying two miles high and four miles away, Air Force and Central Intelligence Agency ground controllers loosed a missile. It carried true with a prototype warhead, one of about 100 made, for killing men inside buildings. According to people briefed on the experiment, careful analysis after the missile pierced the villa wall showed blast effects that would have slain anyone in the target room.

The Bush administration now had in its hands what one participant called "the holy grail" of a three-year quest by the U.S. government – a tool that could kill bin Laden within minutes of finding him. The CIA planned and practiced the operation. But for the next three months, before the catastrophe of Sept. 11, President Bush and his advisers held back.

Think Progress compares Rice's claims with the findings of the 9/11 Commission Report which clearly dispatches her statement of the Bush administration being at least as aggressive as the Clinton administration in attempting to kill Osama bin Laden.

The truth is, the Bush administration didn't try at all.

Bush's engagement with terrorism in the first eight months of his term, described in interviews with advisers and contemporary records, tells a story of burgeoning ambition without the commitment of comparably ambitious means.

And now that the administration is being called on it, they're attempting to blame others. They're lying.

Cowards.