In an op-ed in the New York Times a couple of days ago, Kurt Eichenwald claims to have seen excerpts from presidential daily briefs from throughout 2001, and says that the lone declassified one (“Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”) is nothing compared to those in the months beforehand. He says that the White House actively discredited strong, specific CIA warnings that Al Qaeda was planning a big attack in the U.S. for some time in the summer. On July 9, hen it became clear that Bush was going to completely ignore their warnings, the CIA counterterrorism group even talked about all leaving en masse so that they wouldn’t have to take the fall for the attack. Note that this is an op-ed—presumably it hasn’t been subjected to the Times’ rigorous fact-checking. →
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The big question, and I am by no means defending Bush or others, is how specific were the warnings?
Did the CIA say that the mode of attack would likely be multiple airplane hijacks?
report after report that warns of generic potential attacks does not leave the administration with much of specific response ability.
but if the CIA was specifically warning about airplane attacks and it was ignored then that info WOULD be damming.
Let me get this right Democrats are still blaming Bush for the economy almost 4 years later and now you want to blame Bush for September 11 ? Which happened less than 8 months after Bush took office.Well I quess if I were you id try to talk about something other than Obama’s many failures also.
This is all well known information, Richard Clark, Bush’s counter-terrorism adviser at the NSA has detailed most of it in “Against All Enemies”. It easily earns Bush the title of Worst President Ever, but what is really funny is that Republicans hate him for the bank bailout and never mention how he allowed the first ever foreign attack of America, or his disastrous Iraq fiasco.
Obama has offically beat out Carter as the worst president ever.
Yes, because clearly the Affordable Care Act is WAAAAY worse than, say, the Trail of Tears.
What a partisan hack.
“Note that this is an op-ed—presumably it hasn’t been subjected to the Times’ rigorous fact-checking.”
Of course, that didn’t stop you from blogging with the sensationalist headline “Bush White House actively ignored September 11 warnings.”
Careful, you’ll turn this blog into NLS.
I had forgot that Ben C. also reads this blog, but I’m glad to see his insightful comments here, as always.
It must be the election year that makes people freak out. While you are at it, see if you can’t dig up “facts” that blame Bush for Hurricane Katrina. Are you going to post the whole “inside job” theory on the terrorist attack next?
It surely doesn’t come as news to you that headlines are a very reductionist look at a story that inherently lack detail or nuance. I don’t think there’s a demographic that is looking at my website, reading the headlines, ignoring the blog entries, and drawing conclusions based on those. I don’t write for morons. :)
I didn’t “dig up” anything, Tom—this was a story featured in the New York Times, written by a famous, well respected, veteran reporter who has won the Polk Award twice and was finalist for a Pulitzer.
Did you fail to notice that I pointed out quite clearly that this story was likely not subject to the same fact-checking standards as most Times pieces? I surely had no obligation to do so. Instead I went out of my way to make sure that anybody reading this would understand this in its proper context, providing information that they wouldn’t have learned from reading the article itself. You should be thanking me, not accusing me of being a conspiracy theorist.