BEHIND THE BUSHES

WHO SAID WHAT WHEN TO WHOM DEPARTMENT

COX NEWS SERVICE - Bush got his first warnings about al-Qaeda from
Berger even before his election in November 2000. And three days before
his inauguration, Bush got this warning from Berger: "America is in a
deadly struggle with a new breed of anti-Western jihadists. Nothing less
than a war, I think, is fair to describe this."

In a new book by the Washington Post's Bob Woodward titled "State of
Denial," Woodward writes that on July 10, 2001, then-CIA Director George
Tenet and his counterterrorism chief at the time, J.Cofer Black, drove
over unannounced to the White House in an urgent attempt to meet with
Rice to alert her to the fact that intelligence agencies were receiving
communications indicating a terrorist attack was imminent. The two men
left the meeting feeling that Rice had given them "the brush-off,"
Woodward writes, after Rice told them a plan for action against bin
Laden was in the works.

The most famous warning came in the briefing Bush received at his
Crawford, Texas, ranch on Aug. 6, 2001, a little more than a month
before terrorists hijacked commercial airplanes and crashed them into
the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon
in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C.

The intelligence report to Bush that day said the FBI had detected
"patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with
preparations for hijackings." It was titled: "Bin Laden determined to
attack inside the U.S."

Bush said he "did not recall discussing the August 6 report with the
attorney general (then John Ashcroft) or whether Rice had done so." In
fact, it said it found "no indication of any further discussion before
September 11 among the president and his top advisers of the possibility
of a threat of an al-Qaeda attack in the United States."

Tenent told the commission that "the system was blinking red" during the
summer of 2001. But, there was "little evidence that the progress of the
plot was disturbed by any government action."

On Sept. 10, 2001, the National Security Agency intercepted a communique
from Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia stating, "Tomorrow is zero hour." It
was translated into English on Sept. 12.

http://www.gainesville.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061001/WIRE/
210010334/1117/news
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[One of the interesting things about this story is that the former CIA
terrorism chief is now working for war profiteer Blackwater]

PHILIP SHENON, NY TIMES - Members of the Sept. 11 commission said today
that they were alarmed that they were told nothing about a White House
meeting in July 2001 at which George J. Tenet, then the director of
central intelligence, is reported to have warned Condoleezza Rice, then
the national security adviser, about an imminent Al Qaeda attack and
failed to persuade her to take action. Details of the previously
undisclosed meeting on July 10, 2001, two months before the Sept. 11
terror attacks, were first reported last week in a new book by the
journalist Bob Woodward. . . Since release of the book, "State of
Denial," the White House and Ms. Rice have disputed major elements of
Mr. Woodward's account, with Ms. Rice insisting through spokesmen that
there had been no such exchange in a private meeting with Mr. Tenet and
that he had expressed none of the frustration attributed to him in Mr.
Woodward's book. . . Although passages of the book suggest that Mr.
Tenet was a major source for Mr. Woodward, the former intelligence
director has refused to comment on the book. Nor has there been any
comment from J. Cofer Black, Mr. Tenet's counterterrorism chief, who is
reported in the book to have attended the July 10 meeting and left it
frustrated by Ms. Rice's "brush-off" of the warnings. He is quoted as
saying, "The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we
were holding to her head." Mr. Black did not return calls left at the
security firm Blackwater, which he joined last year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/washington/01cnd-book.html?ei=5090&en=
beb29e8f20ad8f76&ex=1317355200&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print

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