Trump, Bush, Rice and Tenet

I believe this is what Donald Trump was talking about when he said in the debate last night that Bush had advance warning of the attack on 9/11. This is from an interview with former CIA director George Tenet:

But the 9/11 Commission accused Tenet’s CIA of being bureaucratic and failing to recognize al Qaeda for the threat that it was.

“All these commissions, and all these reports never got underneath the feeling of my people. You know, to see us written about as if we’re idiots. Or if we didn’t understand this threat. As if we didn’t understand what happened on that day. To impugn our integrity, our operational savvy. You know, the American people need to know that’s just not so,” Tenet says. “We’re the ones that stand up and tell you the truth about when we’re wrong. It’s a great thing about this government. The only people that ever stand up and tell the truth are who? Intelligence officers. Because our culture is, never break faith with the truth. We’ll tell you, you don’t have to drag it out of us. You didn’t have to serve me a subpoena to tell me I didn’t watch list Hazmi and Midhar. We knew right away; and we told everybody. Truth matters to us.”

The truth of the CIA and al Qaeda starts before 9/11. Two years before the attacks, the CIA had officers on the ground in Afghanistan laying plans to overthrow the Taliban and take out bin Laden. But Tenet says neither Clinton nor President Bush would give him the go ahead. Then, by the summer of 2001, Tenet says he was so alarmed by intelligence that an attack was coming, he asked for an immediate meeting to brief then-National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice.

“Essentially, the briefing says, there are gonna be multiple spectacular attacks against the United States. We believe these attacks are imminent. Mass casualties are a likelihood,” Tenet remembers.

“You’re telling Condoleezza Rice in that meeting in the White House in July that we should take offensive action, in Afghanistan, now. Before 9/11,” Pelley remarks.

“We need to consider immediate action inside Afghanistan now. We need to move to the offensive,” Tenet says.

In his book, Tenet says that even though he told Rice an attack on Americans was imminent, she took his request to launch pre-emptive action in Afghanistan and delegated it to third-tier officials.

“You’re meeting with the president every morning. Why aren’t you telling the president, ‘Mr. President, this is terrifying. We have to do this now. Forget about the bureaucracy. I need this authority this afternoon,’?” Pelley asks.

“Right. Because the United States government doesn’t work that way. The president is not the action officer. You bring the action to the national security advisor and people who set the table for the president to decide on policies they’re gonna implement,” Tenet says.

“You thought you had some time,” Pelley remarks.

“Well, you didn’t know. Yeah, you thought you might have time,” Tenet says. “You can second guess me until the cows come home. That’s the way I did my job.”

So Condoleeza Rice blew Tenet off concerning his warning on what was to be the biggest attack on America since Pearl Harbor and Bush’s reaction was to elevate her to Secretary of State. She should have been fired.