Although there has been previous evidence suggesting that the Bush administration had warning of the 9/11 attacks, new details have emerged in a report from Politico that confirm that the Bush administration was made aware of several warnings of an impending attack.
In an interview with Politico, former counter-terrorism chief Cofer Black explain how they first warned President Bush and his administration in May of 2001 of a potential terrorist attack. Says Black: “It was very evident that we were going to be struck, we were gonna be struck hard and lots of Americans were going to die.”
Authors of the report interviewed 12 former CIA directors for a new documentary, The Spymasters. Black, along with former CIA director George Tenet, had presented a plan, “the Blue Sky paper”, that called for a joint CIA and military campaign to deal with the Al Qaeda threat. The administration’s response was that they wanted nothing to do with it. Not only did they not want to put the plan into place, they wanted no paper trail to show they had been warned.
Months later, on July 10, the CIA’s Al Qaeda unit presented to Black and Tenet concrete evidence from multiple sources about an attack that was going to happen in the coming weeks or months. Director Tenet immediately contacted National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice for an emergency meeting, and was shocked when the administration stood by their decision of inaction. Says Cofer Black:
“To me it remains incomprehensible still. I mean, how is it that you could warn senior people so many times and nothing actually happened? It’s kind of like The Twilight Zone.”
Rice states in her memoir that her “recollection of the meeting is not very crisp because we were discussing the threat every day” despite the fact that Black states she was told specifically that “there will be significant terrorist attacks against the United States in the coming weeks or months. The attacks will be spectacular. They may be multiple. Al Qaeda’s intention is the destruction of the United States.”
Among these two instances were several other unspecified warnings of attacks. While those working in the Bush administration maintain that they took sufficient action after each one, the evidence shows a clear stance of inaction, raising a question that should be on every American’s lips: Why did the Bush administration choose to ignore the threat of imminent attack, and what did it profit them?
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