Truth - Al Franken [15]
By contrast, when President Bush received his fateful and historic warning of 9/11, he did not convene the National Security Council, did not bring together the FBI and CIA and other agencies with responsibility to protect the nation, and apparently did not even ask follow-up questions about the warning.
Of course, Al Gore had a dog in this fight. Maybe his view was jaundiced by the experience of having the presidency stolen from him. Better to hear it from a Republican-chaired, bipartisan, unanimous report based on thousands of hours of rigorous investigation. Don’t you think? So if you’re sick of partisan spin, here’s the real story—straight from the 9/11 Commission. As you’ll note, it’s the same as Gore’s, although more detailed and less angry.
In the period between December 1999 and early January 2000, information about terrorism flowed widely and abundantly. The flow from the FBI was particularly remarkable because the FBI at other times shared almost no information. That from the intelligence community was also remarkable, because some of it reached officials—local airport managers and local police departments—who had not seen such information before and would not see it again before 9/11, if then. And the terrorist threat, in the United States even more than abroad, engaged the frequent attention of high officials in the executive branch and leaders in both houses of Congress.
Like Gore, the 9/11 Commission contrasts this period with the months preceding the September 11 attacks:
In the summer of 2001, DCI Tenet, the Counterterrorist Center, and the Counterterrorism Security Group did their utmost to sound an alarm, its basis being intelligence indicating that al Qaeda planned something big. But the Millennium phenomenon was not repeated. FBI field offices apparently saw no abnormal terrorist activity, and headquarters was not shaking them up.
In other words, Clinton put the government on high alert and stopped a deadly attack. Bush did nothing.
Could 9/11 have been prevented? We’ll never really know. But if Bush had shaken the trees like Clinton had, Washington might have found out about the Phoenix memo, which warned of suspected terrorists enrolling in flight schools, or about the FBI agent in Minneapolis who tried to warn HQ that Zacarias Moussaoui might “take control of a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center.” The CIA and the FBI might have shared information about Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, who helped hijack American Airlines flight 77. The CIA had their photographs, but they were never put on the terror watch list and they were allowed to board the plane. In his book Intelligence Matters, former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham identified twelve instances when the 9/11 plot could have been discovered and potentially foiled.
Why did they achieve no better than a disappointing 0-for-12 hit rate in preventing 9/11? It’s because the Bush administration was focused on other national security matters.
Most of all, they loved Star Wars.
During the transition, Clinton personally told Bush that “by far your biggest threat is bin Laden and al Qaeda,” and Sandy Berger (Clinton’s national security adviser) told Condi Rice that she would spend more time on bin Laden and al Qaeda than on anything else. But despite these warnings, or maybe because of them, the Clinton-hating Bush team decided to shift its focus to missile defense.
In fact, Condi Rice was scheduled to give a speech on this very topic on September 11, 2001, at Johns Hopkins University. As the Washington Post reported on April 1, 2004, Rice’s speech was intended to address “the threats and problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday.” But the text of the speech, which was never delivered, contained not one word about the