I’m definitely with Eugene Oregon on this one. Like him, I’ve always more-or-less believed that there wasn’t much the White House could have done to prevent the terrorist attacks on 9/11. It was exceedingly difficult to “connect the dots,” the “chatter” didn’t tell our intelligence officials enough, the real threats were believed to be abroad, etc.
But the more we learn about the administration’s priorities and actions before 9/11, the more I change my mind. It’s not that the attacks were obvious; it’s that the Bush administration simply never cared enough to even try and prevent them. I’m definitely not saying the White House should be held accountable for the attacks. Osama bin Laden and al Queda are obviously to blame. I am saying, however, that the White House of 2001 looks increasingly negligent every day.
The web is buzzing with good cause about Fred Kaplan’s column yesterday about the 9/11 warnings that went ignored while Bush was on the ranch. It’s a great article that you should definitely read.
Noting George Tenet’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission, Kaplan paints a picture of what Bush learned while in Crawford and just how little was done about it.
The revelation came this morning, when CIA Director George Tenet was on the stand. Timothy Roemer, a former Democratic congressman, asked him when he first found out about the report from the FBI’s Minnesota field office that Zacarias Moussaoui, an Islamic jihadist, had been taking lessons on how to fly a 747. Tenet replied that he was briefed about the case on Aug. 23 or 24, 2001.
Roemer then asked Tenet if he mentioned Moussaoui to President Bush at one of their frequent morning briefings. Tenet replied, “I was not in briefings at this time.” Bush, he noted, “was on vacation.” He added that he didn’t see the president at all in August 2001. During the entire month, Bush was at his ranch in Texas. “You never talked with him?” Roemer asked. “No,” Tenet replied. By the way, for much of August, Tenet too was, as he put it, “on leave.”
And there you have it. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has made a big point of the fact that Tenet briefed the president nearly every day. Yet at the peak moment of threat, the two didn’t talk at all. At a time when action was needed, and orders for action had to come from the top, the man at the top was resting undisturbed.
Kaplan also puts the Aug. 6, 2001, PDB, which Bush received while he was on vacation in Crawford, in an important context. Not only was the intelligence community running around with their “hair on fire” at the time, but:
And now, we learn today, at this peak moment, Tenet hears about Moussaoui. Someone might have added 2 + 2 + 2 and possibly busted up the conspiracy. But the president was down on the ranch, taking it easy. Tenet wasn’t with him. Tenet never talked with him. Rice — as she has testified — wasn’t with Bush, either. He was on his own and, willfully, out of touch.
Keep in mind, Rice has insisted that Tenet had constant contact with Bush before the attacks. The White House points to this as evidence of Bush’s deep, personal interest in assessing threats, even before 9/11 happened. Rice said yesterday that Tenet “met with the president every morning. And so if he needed any more authority from us he would have been right there to ask the president.”
As Kaplan’s article notes, however, Rice’s argument is a fraud. Bush was in Crawford and Tenet never had any contact with Bush the entire month before the attacks.
And August 2001 wasn’t just any time. Everyone seemed to know that something catastrophic was about to happen, but no one was taking any action, in part because all of the key players were — you guessed it — on vacation.
Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer and the State Department’s counterterrorism chief from 1989-93, explained on MSNBC this afternoon, during a break in the hearings, why the PDB — let alone the Moussaoui finding — should have compelled everyone to rush back to Washington. In his CIA days, Johnson wrote “about 40” PDBs. They’re usually dispassionate in tone, a mere paragraph or two. The PDB of Aug. 6 was a page and a half. “That’s the intelligence-community equivalent of writing War and Peace,” Johnson said. And the title — “Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US” — was clearly designed to set off alarm bells. Johnson told his interviewer that when he read the declassified document, “I said ‘Holy smoke!’ This is such a dead-on ‘Mr. President, you’ve got to do something!’ ” (By the way, Johnson claimed he’s a Republican who voted for Bush in 2000.)
But Bush didn’t do anything.
The 9/11 commission has unveiled many critical problems in the FBI and the CIA. But the most critical problem may have been that the president was off duty.