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Like anyone who writes regularly, whether professionally or just in a blog, I’m guilty of leaving in the odd spelling mistake in something I write. It pains me when I find them later, especially in something I thought I’d checked. Lord knows newspapers are guilt of it all the time, but it's often understandable that one or two get through when you consider the time crushing deadlines they have to work to (but of course, that depends on how charitable you are towards the particular brand of newspaper. For example, I’m sure Richard Waghorne hops with unrestrained glee and shouts “Aha, I gotcha!!” every time he spots one in the Irish Times).

I found one today in that most esteemed of American newspapers, the Washington Post and I only mention it now because the typo accidentally creates a pun that unwittingly undermines the argument that the politician being reported on is trying to make.

The article, called “Rice Disputes Report CIA Warned Her About Attack”, is all about how Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is vehemently denying the charges made against her by the veteran Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward. In his new book “State of Denial”, Bob is roundly accusing Rice of complacency when informed by intelligence experts during a meeting on the 10th of July 2001 that a terrorist attack on US soil was imminent.

The informers were none other than George J. Tenet, the then-CIA Director and CIA counterterrorism chief J. Cofer Black. According to the WP however, ‘the book describes both men as frustrated by Rice's polite but inattentive response, allegedly brushing them off’.

Rice, as part of her defence says that she thought they were talking about attacks somewhere in the Middle East, ‘Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Israel, Jordan’, someplace like that. If she was told about an attack on US soil, she would have sat upright and paid attention, no doubt. The intelligence was ‘nebulous’, she said, shadowy - full of suggestions and dark hints – not firm and hard, which is the way she usually likes her intelligence. So rather than do anything specific, she argues, while talking to reporters in a stop-off in Shannon today, she got other people to read it, such as ‘then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft’ and the FBI, etc etc.

It was as they reported her description of the intelligence being ‘nebulous’ that the Washington Post makes their telling slip.

“The central problem was that the intelligence reporting on the potential threat was "very nebulous . . . And so, when you're dealing with nebulous information that doesn't direct you toward a particular attack at a particular place at a particular time, you have to try board efforts," she countered”.

I just hope I didn't miss any this time.