To: i-node who wrote (718468 ) 5/30/2013 12:44:26 AM From: puborectalis 1 Recommendation Respond to 1. Bush had plenty of reasons to go on alert says Massimo Calabresi at TIME . Then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and others insisted that, despite vague warnings, there was "no actionable intelligence" that could have helped defuse the threat. Eichenwald's reporting shows there was "plenty the administration could have been doing to disrupt the plot without knowing the specifics of time and place." Nobody will argue that the Bush administration "distinguished itself in the summer of 2001," says David Frum at The Daily Beast , but Eichenwald is only telling a sliver of the story. The CIA failed both to cooperate with the FBI in blocking the conspirators from entering the U.S., and to share their watch lists with local police — a Maryland state trooper pulled over hijacking pilot Ziad Jarrah for speeding two days before the attacks, and let him go. The "worst mistakes" occurred before Bush ever got his briefings, "and they occurred within the national security agencies themselves."2. Bush neocons were more worried about Iraq than al Qaeda says Adam Clark Estes at The Atlantic . He says that neoconservative leaders at the Pentagon convinced the White House early on that "the C.I.A. had been fooled" into believing that al Qaeda was plotting an attack. The neocons thought bin Laden was trying to distract the Bush administration from Saddam Hussein, "whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat." Intelligence officials said that was "ridiculous," as an Islamist fundamentalist like bin Laden wouldn't cooperate with a secularist dictator like Hussein, and the CIA presented an analysis essentially pleading with the White House to accept that bin Laden posed a real threat, but the neocons kept the spotlight on Iraq.3. Officials were so frustrated they considered quitting says Paul Campos at Salon , and still "the Bush administration did nothing." According to Eichenwald, officials at the CIA's Counterterrorism Center "grew apoplectic, and at one meeting even discussed putting in for transfers "so that somebody else would be responsible when the attack took place." The suggestion was dismissed, as nobody thought there would be time before an attack to train replacements.
