Now that the anniversary of 9/11 is behind us and we have remembered and honored the lost souls and heroes of that day, it's now time to memorialize the president that failed to protect us.
George W. Bush and his foreign policy principals were first warned in January 2001 by CIA Director George Tenet and counter-terrorism czar Richard A. Clarke that they needed to take immediate action to counter terrorist groups such as Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda. Both Tenet and Clarke, holdovers from the Bill Clinton administration, felt that their warnings were not being taken seriously. Clarke sent national security adviser Condoleezza Rice a memo on January 25 requesting an urgent National Security Council meeting on tackling the al Qaeda threat with an outline of a plan to do so. But when such a meeting finally happened in April 2001, the nature of the threat was dismissed by Bush’s national security team. Instead, they suggested the focus should be on “Iraqi terrorism,” according to Clarke’s 2004 book, “Against All Enemies.”
In May, the CIA began to warn of an al Qaeda group inside the United States plotting attacks. On May 1, the CIA Daily Brief warned of a potential attack from “a group presently in the United States.” Another warning of an “imminent” attack came on June 22. Senior administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, dismissed these as a possible disinformation trick by al Qaeda, a Muslim militant group. The CIA continued to send warnings, including a June 29 memo and then another in the Daily Brief on June 30 titled “UBL [Usama Bin Laden] Threats Are Real.” Bush replied to this briefing with the infamous line, “All right. You’ve covered your ass.”
An August 6 President’s Daily Brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US” outlined historic intelligence on al Qaeda’s activities, including the thwarted millennium bomb plot and bin Laden’s alleged consideration of crashing hijacked planes into buildings before stating:
"FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."
This was the 36th time the CIA had warned Bush about imminent threats from bin Laden and al Qaeda, according to journalist Barton Gellman’s “Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency.”
Near the end of August, Tenet received a report titled “Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly.” Around this time, Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen later alleged to be the 20th 9/11 hijacker, was arrested for overstaying his visa in Minnesota after his flight instructor became suspicious of his desire to learn to pilot large commuter jets before gaining any other flying skills. One week later, the CIA warned embassies in Paris and London of “subjects involved in suspicious 747 flight training,” referring to Moussaoui as a potential “suicide bomber.” Aside from Moussaoui, another potential hijacker, Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi citizen, was denied entry to the U.S. on August 3.
Throughout that summer, many more warnings came from the CIA, the FBI, the Federal Aviation Administration and other agencies about an an imminent attack or other suspicious activity indicating the potential of a terrorist plot. By the beginning of September, the Bush administration eventually came around to discussing and elevating some of Clarke’s and Tenet’s concerns. But if they’d taken them seriously sooner, could the attacks have been prevented?
Even if it’s impossible to say the attack could have been prevented, history suggests something more could’ve been done. Journalist Peter Beinart examined whether the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented in 2016, after Trump blamed George W. Bush for failing to protect the United States on 9/11.
Beinart documented how Clarke’s warnings to the Clinton administration of imminent al Qaeda attacks in December 1999 led to daily meetings between the Attorney General, the CIA, FBI and ultimately to the Clinton administration's success in foiling the January 1, 2000, millennium plot to blow up Los Angeles International Airport and other international targets.
But Bush failed to maintain this vigilance when he came into office or act on specific intelligence when it was staring him in the face. To make matters worse, Bush's response to 9/11 proved to be even more disastrous. Bush's Justice Department began crafting legal justifications to create an illegal torture regime and an illegal surveillance state. The invasion of Afghanistan seemed to be a swift success, but the Bush administration’s decision to use a light force and rely on local militias to go after bin Laden at Tora Bora allowed the mastermind to escape.
The Bush administration then infamously use lies about weapons of mass destruction to fuel their push for a new war in Iraq. The U.S. would take on the “Axis of Evil” of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, none of which had anything to do with 9/11, and remake the world. New York Times columnist and Iraq War evangelist Thomas Friedman told PBS’s Charlie Rose that the purpose of the Iraq war was to tell the Muslim world to: “Suck. On. This. . . . We could have hit Saudi Arabia. We could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.”
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