You really should go read a stunning article in Politico Magazine, which interviewed all living former CIA directors and other intelligence officers to answer the question “Did the Bush administration know that an attack was coming?”. And according to the CIA, the answer is an unequivocal yes. Not only did Dubya and his administration not want to hear about any potential terrorist attacks, they didn’t even want a paper trail to show that they had been warned. Rather than keeping us safe, they were more concerned about covering their collective asses.
George Tenet (the CIA director during the Clinton and Bush administration, including 9/11) says he warned the Bush administration repeatedly, telling them “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.”
Cofer Black, the then-chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, says they refused to do anything: “To me it remains incomprehensible still. I mean, how is it that you could warn senior people so many times and nothing actually happened?”
To me there are only two possibilities. The first is almost too frightening to imagine: that Dubya and his administration knew that 9/11 was going down, and just let it. The more believable possibility was that they were just too stupid and arrogant. As Black puts it, “I think they were mentally stuck back eight years [before]. They were used to terrorists being Euro-lefties — they drink champagne by night, blow things up during the day, how bad can this be? And it was a very difficult sell to communicate the urgency to this.”
Either way, this totally puts the lie to Jeb Bush’s assertion that his brother “kept us safe”. Between ignoring all the warnings about 9/11, and then afterwards getting us into an unrelated and unnecessary war in Iraq, which certainly encouraged (if not directly created) ISIS/ISIL, he did nothing of the kind. It also explains why Dubya’s dad, who is not only a former president but also one of those former CIA directors, recently tried to blame the mistakes made by his son’s administration on Cheney and Rumsfeld. It is called regret.
How many people died unnecessarily because of the Dubya’s administration? And yet the Republicans spend all their time screaming about Clinton and Benghazi.
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I can’t recall his name just now, but Bush’s first Treasury Secretary was quite outspoken about the early inner workings of that administration after his departure, especially on the topics of terrorism and Iraq.
I don’t think he discussed the CIA’s input, but I do remember him talking about how Richard Clark, the senior NSA staffer who had been Clinton’s powerful terrorism czar, was ridiculed when he repeatedly tried to get the new Bush people to take the Al Quaeda threat seriously. The Treasury guy said they thought terrorism was just nonsense.
Apparently the latest RWNM meme on this topic is something like “Clinton ignored it first — it’s his fault.” As a result, this week I’ve suddenly found myself recounting a bit of my own history.
Starting in 1998, the Clinton White House aggressively redirected the activities of the bureaucracy to address terrorist threats. I know, because the organization where I worked had to scramble like crazy to drop what we were doing and re-focus — we tried to weasel out of it, but the White House folks said, “This is serious — get it done!” So we, and hundreds of other parts of the Federal government, did. Until George Bush took over, when anything to do with terrorism “had cooties.”
Iraq war by Bush Jr. definitely created the chaos and ISIS. See an expert advising against removing Saddam:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YENbElb5-xY
And he mentions Syria and Kurds even..
this was all covered in “Bush’s War” by Bob Woodward Published in 2002. This is not new news.
speaking of wars: Lindsay Graham is ready to enlist. I’d love to see a cartoon made out of this statement from AP news:
“Added another GOP presidential hopeful, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.: “I want to fight them in their backyard, so we don’t fight them in our backyard.”
It’s a long road out of Eden.
Project for The New American Century – written in the early 90’s and signed by such luminaries as Cheney and Wolfowitz spelled it out quite forthrightly. It said that in order to mobilize America to get behind their their plans to dominate the world and control the oil fields that it might require a new Pearl Harbor type event. Do the google. You can still read the report.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century
so that is why JEB said “I still think invading Iraq was the right thing to do.” We all thought it was oil, but that was only part of it. We were supposed to take over the world. The World disagreed, just like Hitler tried and lost.