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The 9/11 Commission's report made it very clear that members of the Bush administration received many warnings from the CIA that Osama bin Laden was preparing a big attack of some sort. In his recent book, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, author Philip Shenon goes even farther in documenting the clueless travesty that was the Bush White House's foreign policy team in 2001. Shenon shows conclusively that in 2001, the CIA repeatedly told the administration -- specifically, then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and President Bush -- that something big was on the way. The reports became more frequent and urgent in tone throughout that spring and summer as Sept. 11 approached, even warning Bush and Rice that hijacking and using airplanes as missiles was a possible terrorist tactic. The startling and sad truth is that Bush, Rice & Co., for whatever reasons, did absolutely nothing about the reports and treated them as a low priority.
Neither Rice nor Bush ordered any follow-ups or clarifications to the intelligence reports; no strategic teams were gathered; no coordination of the military, CIA and State Department was launched; no nothing. Neither Bush nor Rice seemed to care one way or another about terrorism, didn't consider it much of a threat and certainly did nothing to thwart it despite what became nearly daily warnings. Bush told one bearer of news about a possible attack, "OK, you've successfully covered your ass," and shuttled the guy out the Oval Office door. For her part, Rice actively discouraged the administration's domestic security expert, Richard Clarke, from bothering her with his insistent messages about possible disastrous terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Finally, Clarke became such a pest, Rice fired him. Turns out he was right. Oops.
2. The post-9/11 panic
Americans are fortunate in that no major wars have been fought on our soil since the Civil War. Unfortunately, that bit of luck also meant that the country and its leaders were utterly unprepared, historically or psychologically, for an attack of the 9/11 strikes' magnitude. So we panicked. For weeks, TV news announcers sat before banners proclaiming, "America Under Attack," "America At War," or in Comedy Central's too-true sign, "America Freaks Out." Suddenly, terrorists were behind every tree and in much of the frightened public's eyes, the U.S. government could do no wrong. Bush rammed the clearly unconstitutional Patriot Act (or, as a friend called it, the Fascism 101 Act) through an obedient Congress. The country, in general, gladly approved of mass arrests, as around 1,200 men, mostly of Middle Eastern descent, were detained by U.S. law enforcement agents in the frantic weeks after Sept. 11. None of those men were ever connected to terrorist groups. Tales of al-Qaeda "sleeper cells" in the United States, later completely discredited, swept through the country. Americans, in other words, were angry, vulnerable, scared and desperately eager to believe that the people in charge of the government knew what they were doing. Soon enough, the willingness to believe turned into gullibility, and a large majority of us lapped up the river of lies that soon flowed from the White House.
3. White House delusions
Bush's foreign affairs team was led by a group of old Cold Warriors, now called neo-conservatives, like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, all of whom thought almost exclusively in terms of nation states pitted against one another. They were convinced that no cave-dwelling terrorist group could have pulled off the 9/11 attacks without substantial help from a friendly government -- namely, the regime of Saddam Hussein, whose overthrow was the centerpiece of neo-conservative policy. The neo-cons had convinced themselves that post-Cold War America was so all-powerful, it could do whatever it wanted, including the violent overthrow of other governments, and other countries would just have to go along. Not only that, they believed that America could transform the world -- or at least the most ancient part of it -- into a wellspring of democracy, just by showing up there with an army.
Talk of an Iraqi invasion began in the White House on Sept. 12, 2001, even though the administration's terrorism expert, Richard Clarke, repeatedly reported that al-Qaeda and Hussein weren't connected. The neo-cons held fast to their delusions; in fact, when the intelligence they received didn't meet their preconceived notions, they convened their own private intel club, the Office of Special Plans, to second-guess CIA information and accumulate scattered pieces of data that would support their compulsion to attack Iraq -- no matter how many times that data had been discredited by professionals (think yellowcake uranium from Niger, for instance). Later, the Bushies would try to blame their lies on "faulty intelligence," when in reality they had cherry-picked snippets of discredited intelligence to make their case for the war. The word "hubris" doesn't even begin to match these folks' astonishing level of arrogance.