The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [160]
If there had been a “serious concern” in the weeks before 9/11, Bush volunteered, he would have known about it. Ben-Veniste restrained himself from pointing out that the CIA brief of August 6 had been headed “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” Had the President not rated that as “serious”?
Ben-Veniste asked Bush whether, after receiving the PDB, he had asked National Security Adviser Rice to follow up with the FBI. Had she done so? The President “could not recall.” Nor could he remember whether he or Rice had discussed the PDB with Attorney General Ashcroft.
There is another, bizarre and unresolved, anomaly. Rice—and Bush—have said the national security adviser was not present during the August 6 briefing at the President’s ranch. She was in Washington, she said, more than a thousand miles away. CIA director Tenet, however, told the Commission in a formal letter that Rice was present that day.
Finally, and for a number of reasons, there is doubt as to whether the Agency produced the relevant section of the August 6 PDB because—as Rice indicated and Bush flatly claimed—he had himself “asked for it.”
Had he really requested the briefing? It is reliably reported that, having received it, Bush responded merely with a dismissive “All right. You’ve covered your ass now.” Ben-Veniste has made the reasonable point that if the President himself had called for the briefing, his response would hardly have been so flippant.
The President had indeed asked over the weeks whether available intelligence pointed to an internal threat, Director Tenet was to advise the Commission in a formal letter. But: “There was no formal tasking.”
According to Ben-Veniste’s account, the two analysts who drafted the PDB told him that “none of their superiors had mentioned any request from the President as providing the genesis for the PDB. Rather, said Barbara S. and Dwayne D., they had jumped at the chance to get the President thinking about the possibility that al Qaeda’s anticipated spectacular attack might be directed at the homeland.”
The threat, they thought, had been “current and serious.” CIA officials, sources later told The New York Times’s Philip Shenon, had called for the August 6 brief to get the White House to “pay more attention” to it.
The Agency analysts, Ben-Veniste reflected, “had written a report for the President’s eyes to alert him to the possibility that bin Laden’s words and actions, together with recent investigative clues, pointed to an attack by al Qaeda on the American homeland. Yet the President had done absolutely nothing to follow up.”
WHAT THEN of the time between August 6 and September 11, the precious thirty-six-day window during which the terrorists could conceivably perhaps have been thwarted? There were two major developments in that time, both of which—with adroit handling, hard work, and good luck—might have averted catastrophe.
The first potential break came on August 15, when a manager at the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Minneapolis phoned the local FBI about an odd new student named Zacarias Moussaoui. Thirty-three-year-old Moussaoui, born in France to Moroccan parents, had applied for a course at the school two months earlier, saying in his initial email that his “goal, his dream” was to pilot “one of these Big Bird.” That he as yet had no license to fly even light aircraft appeared to discourage Moussaoui not at all. “I am sure that you can do something,” he had written, “after all we are in AMERICA, and everything is possible.”
It happened on occasion that some dilettante applied to buy training time on Pan Am’s Boeing 747 simulator. Moussaoui himself was to say that the experience would be “a joy ride,” “an ego boosting thing.” The school did not necessarily turn