Indeed, the record of her failures and coverups is deep and long. Arguably, one has to go back to McGeorge Bundy and the Vietnam War to find a national security advisor with one half as bad a record. Clarke's new book, "Against All Enemies," adds further documentation to the record that Rice was blasé and unconcerned about the al-Qaida terrorist threat before 9/11. She received serious warnings about it, as Clarke has documented, from the outgoing Clinton administration and from Clarke personally. But she did not take them seriously and took no action to maintain the level of priority, let alone upgrade it.

Rice received clear warnings about the imminent nature of the al-Qaida threat of planning terrorist spectaculars against the U.S. homeland as late as Aug. 26, 2001 -- only 16 days before the attacks took place.

Now, Rice and her team are working overtime to deny, discredit, or at least blur Clarke's testimony. Stephen Hadley, Rice's deputy on the NSC, has flatly denied Clarke's allegation that the Bush administration ignored the ominous intelligence chatter in the summer of 2001. "All the chatter was of an attack, potential al-Qaida attack overseas," he told CBS' "60 Minutes." Bush, Hadley maintained, "got concerned about whether there was the possibility of an attack on the homeland. He asked the intelligence community: 'Look hard. See if we're missing something about a threat to the homeland.' And at that point various alerts went out from the Federal Aviation Administration to the FBI saying the intelligence suggested a threat overseas ... So the president put us on battle stations." Hadley then insisted that Clarke was "just wrong" in stating that the administration did not go to "battle stations."

However, Hadley's veracity was demolished by "60 Minutes'" Leslie Stahl, who confronted him with two independent witnesses who had testified that another encounter Clarke described with the president had actually happened -- that Bush on Sept. 12 demanded that Clarke find evidence of Iraq's involvement in 9/11 -- even though Hadley denied that the incident took place.

After 9/11, Rice went along enthusiastically with every effort by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz -- and his fellow neoconservative hawks running the Department of Defense -- to demonize Iraq and its leader Saddam Hussein as the masterminds or key allies behind al-Qaida. She did not raise a single objection to their obsessive drive for war with Iraq, even though this automatically meant shifting enormous U.S. materiel and intelligence resources away from the priority goal of hunting down and destroying al-Qaida.

Rice's role was especially egregious on the issue of the entirely false report that Saddam Hussein had sought "yellowcake" uranium in Niger. On Jan. 23, 2003, she published an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times titled "Why We Know Iraq was Lying," in which she claimed Iraq's then-recent declaration of weapons "fails to account for or explain Iraq's efforts to get uranium from abroad." Five days later, Bush included the bogus allegation in his State of the Union speech. On June 8, 2003, Rice admitted on ABC's "This Week," "Clearly that particular report, we learned subsequently, was not credible." On July 9, 2003, then White House press secretary Ari Fleischer admitted, "This information should not have risen to the level of a presidential speech."

At no point has Rice played the wise and moderate "vicar" of national security policy, reining in the neocons and playing the moderate but crucial "swing" role between neocon hawks and old internationalist veteran Republicans in the administration. On the contrary, she has repeatedly opposed and undermined that "moderate" wing, led by Secretary of State Powell and his right-hand man, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, at every stage.

Her confounding of Powell did not start after 9/11. It has been true from the day the Bush administration took office. And it was largely overlooked for a variety of reasons, all boiling down to the same root cause. Even more than Wolfowitz, who affects a moderate, low-key gentlemanly demeanor in public but whose memoranda and policy papers have been notorious over more than a decade for their wild and risky recommendations, Rice always appears ladylike, low key and genteel. Her demeanor and charm are always impeccable. And this belies the reckless overconfidence of the policies she has in fact supported.

Will any or all of this come back to haunt Rice? If the president wins reelection, it certainly will not. Her access to Bush and her standing in his eyes remain unparalleled. As James Mann noted in his excellent new book on the Bush foreign policy team, "The Rise of the Vulcans," Bush has always felt more comfortable with Rice than with Wolfowitz. Bush and his political strategist Karl Rove still love the idea of countering their almost universal rejection by black America by having a black secretary of state. Since Powell has made clear he does not wish to endure a second term of consistent isolation, backstabbing and undermining, that leaves the way potentially clear for Rice to fill his chair.

The way therefore remains open for Rice to follow the path pioneered by her predecessors Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell in ascending from the National Security Council to become secretary of state. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a close buddy of Rumsfeld and associate of the neocon hawks who urged the invasion of Iraq, and who is a member of the Defense Policy Board, has salivated after the job, but his star has dimmed. Until the revelations and accusations this week, Rice seemed sure to face little competition in a second Bush term to be the second black and second female secretary of state. Now, however, it is a different story.

No wonder, therefore, that Richard Clarke now faces the same immense attack machine of discrediting that has been used on others like Paul O'Neill and Joe Wilson before him. For the president and Rice in their ambitions are joined at the hip. Clarke has hit them both where it hurts them the most. They must stand their ground, discredit him or politically bleed. In the face of this stark choice, no moderation or compromise is possible.

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