NY Daily News, via ThinkProgress
“The CIA’S top counterterrorism officials felt they could have killed Osama Bin Laden in the months before 9/11, but got the ‘brushoff’ when they went to the Bush White House seeking the money and authorization,” Bob Woodward reports in his new book. In an “urgent” July 2001 meeting with Condi Rice, CIA Director George Tenet and his counterterrorism head Cofer Black “went over top-secret intelligence pointing to an impending attack and ’sounded the loudest warning’ to the White House of a likely attack on the U.S. by Bin Laden. Woodward writes that Rice was polite, but, ‘They felt the brushoff.’
[...]Woodward claims the intelligence Tenet and Black shared with Rice included communication intercepts indicating the likelihood of an Al Qaeda attack on U.S. soil.Tenet said he had hoped the meeting would shock Rice into encouraging the President to take immediate action against Al Qaeda.
Black, looking back at the July 10, 2001, meeting with Rice, concludes, "The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her [Rice's] head."
Woodward says that Tenet described the meeting as a "tremendous lost opportunity to prevent or disrupt the 9/11 attacks."
Tenet also claims that his alarm over Bin Laden was downplayed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who asked, "Could all this be a grand deception?"
The book claims that two weeks before the July meeting with Rice, Tenet told Richard Clarke, the National Security Council's counterterrorism director, of his gut feeling about a likely attack.
"It's my sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is going to be the big one," the book quotes Tenet as telling Clarke.
Suddenly ABC's silly "Path to 9/11" makes infinitely more sense, as does Clinton's push back this past weekend. The truth is out there, and it is being discovered. In this case, as with the direct quotes from Tenet and others, it is being told by those who made it.
Another twist here? Apparently Rumsfeld's incompetence knows no ends. He worked to dismiss the claims from the intelligence community that and attack was coming. Then, having been proven disastrously wrong, he worked to dismiss the claims of the intelligence community on Iraq. Wonderful.
Actually, now that I think about it, it occurs to me that this might even help explain Bush's seven missing minutes during "My Pet Goat." If they all knew... If they all had been warned... that look could very easily be the look of a man who knew he had been demonstrated to be spectacularly wrong. And since then, it would also explain why he has worked hard to ensure that the truth about his actions before the attack never come to light.
People who underestimate the power of the truth always amaze me. As spectacularly capable as we humans are of self-deception, we are equally incapable of keeping secrets. Perhaps in the past, when information truly could embargoed or destroyed, it was possibly to truly deceive. But now the best one can hope for is to confuse and obfuscate. There simply are far, far too many avenues down which the truth can find its way to light. One would think Watergate would have taught politicians that lesson. Then again, to learn that lesson, one would have to learn history. And that, with this administration at least, never seems to have happened.
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