The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [163]
Tenet, for his part, stumbled badly in an appearance before the Commission. He claimed in sworn testimony that he had not seen Bush in August. “I didn’t see the President,” he said. “I was not in briefings with him during this time.… He’s in Texas and I’m either here [in Washington] or on leave [in New Jersey].” “You never get on the phone or in any kind of conference with him to talk,” asked commissioner Tim Roemer, “through the whole month of August?” “In this time period,” replied Tenet, “I’m not talking to him, no.”
It seemed astonishing, and for good reason: it was not true. Hours after Tenet had testified, CIA spokesman Bill Harlow told reporters that the director had in fact briefed the President in person twice in August, at the Texas ranch on August 17 and in Washington on August 31.
Could Tenet possibly have forgotten his one trip to see Bush in August, the very first time he had visited the ranch, in the sweltering heat of Texas? Roemer thought it possible that Tenet had lied.
Writing in 2007, Tenet made no mention of the lapse. Instead, he said he had indeed traveled to Texas, “to make sure the President stayed current on events.” According to the known record, the director would not have known of the Moussaoui and Mihdhar-Hazmi developments on the 17th. Both were well under way, however, by the time he saw the President on the 31st. Would they not have fit within the frame of keeping the President “current on events”? In a private interview, Tenet told the Commission that he did “not recall any discussions with the President of the domestic threat during this period.”
“THE QUESTION,” Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff wrote in Newsweek, is in the end “not so much what the President knew and when he knew it. The question is whether the administration was really paying much attention.”
In her testimony to the Commission, Rice rejected any notion that the administration let things slide. “I do not believe there was a lack of high-level attention,” she said. “The President was paying attention to this. How much higher level can you get?”
Lawrence Wilkerson, a trusted aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell, worked with a colleague on the preparation of Rice’s testimony. The job, he said, had been “an appalling enterprise. We would cherry-pick things to make it look like the President had been actually concerned about al Qaeda.… They didn’t give a shit about al Qaeda. They had priorities. The priorities were lower taxes, ballistic missiles, and the defense thereof.”
Commissioner Ben-Veniste, for his part, came away from his work on the Commission drawing the gravest possible conclusion. “There was no question in my mind,” he has written, “that had the President and his National Security Advisor been aggressively attentive to the potential for a domestic terrorist attack, some of the information already in the possession of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies might have been utilized to disrupt the plot.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
HELLO JENNY,
Wie geht’s dir? Mir geht’s gut …
Wie ich Dir letze mal gesagt habe die Erstsemester wird in drei wochen beginn kein Aendrugen!!!!!! …
The start of a coded email message written in broken German that Atta sent to Binalshibh in the third week of August. It is phrased as though it were a letter to his girlfriend Jenny. Translated, the entire message reads:
DEAR JENNY,
How are you? I’m fine …
As I told you in my last letter, the first semester starts in three weeks. No changes!!!!!! Everything’s going well. There’s high hope and very strong thoughts for success!!! Two high schools and two universities … Everything is going according plan. This