Eight months before the September11 Eleventh attacks, the White House’s then counterterrorism adviser, Richard Clarke, urged then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to hold a high-level meeting on the al-Qaeda network. This according to a memo dated January 25, 2001 that was made public yesterday. Clarke left the White House in 2003 and accused the Bush White House of having ignored al-Qaeda’s threats before September 11. Clarke testified before inquiry panels and in a book that Rice, his boss at the time, had been warned of the threat. But, in a 2004 column in The Washington Post, Rice wrote, “No al-Qaeda threat was turned over to the new administration”. The memo was released by the National Security Archive, an independent group that solicits government documents for public review.