The US administration of George W. Bush repeatedly ignored warnings by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that the September 11, 2001 terror attacks were coming, a new report has revealed.
Starting in May, 2001, then CIA Director George Tenet and his deputies began warning the Bush administration about an imminent and “spectacular” attack on US soil, the Politico reported Thursday.
“There were real plots being manifested,” Tenet told the American news publication. “The world felt like it was on the edge of eruption. In this time period of June and July, the threat continues to rise.”
“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,” says Cofer Black, then chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center.
Similar unheeded CIA warnings were first reported by award-winning journalist Bob Woodward in 2006. Tenet also wrote about it in general terms in his 2007 memoir, but neither he nor Black have spoken about it publicly in such detail until now.
Black said the Bush team just didn’t get the new threat. “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.”
On July 10, Tenet and Richard Blee, the head of CIA’s al-Qaeda unit, arranged an urgent meeting at the White House with Bush’s National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
Tenet vividly recalls the White House meeting with Rice and her team. “Rich [Blee] started by saying, ‘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.’”
“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,” Black said.
After the 9/11 attacks, many observers criticized the US Intelligence Community for numerous "intelligence failures" as one of the major reasons why the attacks were not prevented.
The September, 11, 2001 attacks, also known as the 9/11 attacks, were a series of strikes in the US which killed nearly 3,000 people and caused about $10 billion worth of property and infrastructure damage.
US officials assert that the attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda terrorists but many experts have raised questions about the official account.
They believe that rogue elements within the US government orchestrated or at least encouraged the 9/11 attacks in order to accelerate the US war machine and advance the Zionist agenda.
A special review commission on 9/11 has found that disagreements still persist within the FBI over whether there was a broader conspiracy in the US to carry out the 2001 attacks.
Aspects of the continuing inquiry, which is the largest in FBI history, suggests that others inside the US had advance knowledge of the operation and supported the suicide hijackers.