Bush rewrote the events leading up to the 9/11 attacks and the warnings he ignored, according to a secret 9/11 memo
President George W. Bush hosted a meeting of the 9/11 Commission on April 29, 2004. He was available for inquiries from the commission's members regarding the September 11, 2001 attacks. Bush disregarded warnings from his officials that Al Qaeda would soon launch an attack. George Tenet, head of the CIA, states that "The threat was overseas — that was what George said." The CIA briefed President George W. Bush under the heading "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US."
The 9/11 Commission's report contained many of Bush's justifications and poor attempts to rewrite history. Richard Ben-Veniste, one of the commissioners, says he is still uncertain about what Bush knew and when. The documentation demonstrates that the lack of urgency in addressing the domestic threat posed by Al Qaeda wasn't particularly complicated. Tenet exerted every effort to persuade Bush to concentrate on Al Qaeda. Bush had no interest.
The written report of the 9/11 commission, which would be made public in July, was almost complete. Bush rejected calls that the conference should end repeatedly. When a commissioner urged that a colleague keep things moving, Bush said, "It's my Oval Office." He answered their inquiries for more than three hours. President Bush discovered that Osama bin Laden intended to launch an attack inside the US on August 6, 2001.
Bush decided to take a "working vacation" in August, staying at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. The 9/11 Commission Report took pains to avoid accusing the sitting president. Reading the report of the commission, one can observe a deluge of warnings coming from the CIA and an increasing sense of dread within Bush's counterterrorism staff. The 9/11 commission, in contrast to Maureen Dowd, decided not to cast doubt on Bush's judgment. Institutional issues were blamed for Bush not hearing those blaring, repeated warnings.
The question of whether the commission had a choice to go after Bush directly merits some thought. In contrast to the recently declassified memo, their official account of history appears incomplete and whitewashed. The study omits Bush's retaliation and relentless attempts to downplay the warnings.
Former President George W. Bush discusses his awareness of Al Qaeda warnings before the 9/11 attacks in an Oval Office interview with the 9/11 Commission. He claims that there was no mention of danger on US soil and that the concern was nearly entirely "overseas." Bush's comments regarding the ambiguity of the warnings that reached his desk have some backing in the public record. According to George W. Bush's autobiography, the CIA alerted him that Al Qaeda might conduct an attack inside the US. It was the “loudest and most persistent warning in the history of the agency on any issue ever,” according to Michael Morell, Bush's principal CIA briefer.
According to Bush, it was clear after 9/11 that the intelligence community had overlooked something significant. In a 1999 Senate hearing, George Tenet stated in a repeat performance that "all Americans are targets." Tenet believed that the Al Qaeda threat existed everywhere and at all times, not just abroad. Anyone who has read the August 6 PDB will find it hard to take Bush's repeated claims that he was never notified of a particular threat on US territory seriously.
Bush testified before the 9/11 inquiry that George Tenet, the director of the CIA, forewarned him about Al Qaeda in August 2001. However, Morell, the former deputy director, claims he doesn't recall being briefed on Al Qaeda during that visit. Bush told the commission that he was unaware of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was eventually found guilty of planning a terrorist attack. The Crawford trip is mentioned in Tenet's memoir, although Tenet doesn't elaborate on its purpose. One of the specific leads the FBI and CIA had that, if investigated, might have revealed the 9/11 conspiracy was Moussaoui.
Bush's preoccupation with Saddam Hussein and Iraq has been a prominent theme of his presidency, and he had little use for warnings about Al Qaeda. Documenting the institutional issues that led to these near-misses was a good move by the commission. Bush's position on Al Qaeda and its subsequent impact on how cases like Moussasoui's were handled received less attention. Richard A. Clarke's failure to make domestic counterterrorism a priority for the White House does not exonerate Bush, although it tends to put Condoleezza Rice at fault. Clarke hoped that the cabinet level would treat counterterrorism seriously as a separate issue. According to the records, it was regarded as less urgent since it was an extension of US policy in the Middle East and South Asia.