"This [Bush] administration has the support to go forward in a way we did not," insisted Mrs. Albright, adding that the Clinton administration lacked the intelligence to link bin Laden's network to repeated terrorist attacks against the United States.

"You got my blood boiling this morning with the excerpt from Madeleine Albright," reacts CIA career veteran Anne Allen. "Albright didn't happen to mention, did she, Clinton's disastrous Executive Order, prohibiting the CIA from dealing with shoddy informants.

"As a 37-year CIA veteran, recently retired, I see that as the most devastating blow to intelligence gathering in decades. And she didn't happen to mention, did she, the many steps short of military action, which could have been taken to prepare this country for unknown but certain threats — linking FBI lists with airline manifests, providing for vaccines against bio threats, securing our borders, linking intelligence information to visa issuance, to name only a few.

"These are not steps known only in retrospect; we had repeated and ignored warnings throughout the 90s," the CIA veteran counters. "National security is the primary job of a federal administration. This was a disaster in the Clinton administration, and now they don't even have the grace to keep their mouths shut."