LOUDelf said: “You missed a critical situation the Bush administration faced: 9/11”.
And I did indeed miss 9/11. But the Bush team handled 9/11 similar to the way it handled many if not most of the major Bush team tasks. Lots of questions were generated but few answers were forthcoming from the Bush team. The legacy writers will likely have a difficult time with 9/11/2001.
Prior to 9/11/2001, pilots from the Middle East trained on American soil. It is difficult to believe that Middle East pilots training on American soil went unnoticed by America.
If field agents, concerned with the security of America did notice foreign pilots training on American soil, they likely would have passed that information on to their higher-ups. And, if that information was considered serious, their higher-ups would likely attempt to pass their concerns on the the White House. And that’s where events start to get murky.
Two Months Before 9/11, an Urgent Warning to Rice
The Washington Post
Sunday, October 1, 2006: Page A17
On July 10, 2001, two months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet met with his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, at CIA headquarters to review the latest on Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Black laid out the case, consisting of communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. It was a mass of fragments and dots that nonetheless made a compelling case, so compelling to Tenet that he decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately.
Tenet called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, from the car and said he needed to see her right away. There was no practical way she could refuse such a request from the CIA director.
For months, Tenet had been pressing Rice to set a clear counterterrorism policy, including specific presidential orders called “findings” that would give the CIA stronger authority to conduct covert action against bin Laden. Perhaps a dramatic appearance — Black called it an “out of cycle” session, beyond Tenet’s regular weekly meeting with Rice — would get her attention.
Tenet had been losing sleep over the recent intelligence he’d seen. There was no conclusive, smoking-gun intelligence, but there was such a huge volume of data that an intelligence officer’s instinct strongly suggested that something was coming. He and Black hoped to convey the depth of their anxiety and get Rice to kick-start the government into immediate action.
He did not know when, where or how, but Tenet felt there was too much noise in the intelligence systems. Two weeks earlier, he had told Richard A. Clarke, the National Security Council’s counterterrorism director: “It’s my sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is going to be the big one.” …
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/30/AR2006093000282.html
