Then-President George W. Bush failed to show the expected urgency after being informed of the threat posed by al-Qaida before 9/11, Business Insider reported.
Three weeks after a rough 31-page "memorandum" of 9/11 Commission members' 2004 interview with Bush and then-Vice President Dick Cheney was declassified, Business Insider reported that the memo showed that Bush failed to acknowledge the numerous warnings he'd been given about an impending attack by al-Qaida.
The Insider said then-CIA Director George Tenet had warned Bush more than once that al-Qaida could strike anywhere, at any time, and that all U.S. citizens were potential targets. There even was a CIA briefing headlined "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."
"I could never square in my mind CIA Director Tenet's intense preoccupation with the al-Qaida threat in the months leading up to 9/11, with his claim that he never briefed President Bush on the many clues the intelligence community had developed that bin Laden was planning to launch a 'spectacular' attack on the U.S. homeland," said 9/11 Commission member Richard Ben-Veniste, who was the Democrats' chief counsel on the Senate Whitewater Committee that investigated former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton.
The released memo compiled notes that commissioners took during the meeting, and quotes attributed to Bush are not verbatim transcript and "should not be read as capturing Bush's statements word for word," the Insider said.
The Insider report suggested Bush might have been evasive about information surrounding the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks because, at the time of the interview, he was running for reelection. The commission was close to finishing its written report, which would be released to the public less than four months before the 2004 election.
Former New Jersey Republican Gov. Thomas H. Kean, however, told the Insider that Bush "was well-briefed and answered our questions fully."
Bush did not respond to the Insider's request for comment. Tenet declined to be interviewed.
Insider said Tenet had warned Bush no fewer than 40 times during the spring and summer of 2001 that a major attack by al-Qaida was on the horizon. The Aug. 6 President's Daily Brief from the CIA included a direct warning that Osama bin Laden intended to strike inside the U.S.
The 9/11 Commission Report did not place blame on Bush.
"We chose not to assign individual responsibility for the failure to prevent 9/11," Ben-Veniste said. "But rather to lay out the facts we had uncovered and allow the public, and ultimately history, to make judgments based on that factual record. At the same time, we used our unanimity of purpose to prioritize our objective of getting Congress to enact our recommendations to make the country safer."
The Insider reported that Bush's take on the al-Qaida threat was that it mainly was "overseas," and that no one told him how, when, or where terrorists would strike.
He also didn't think it was productive to assign responsibility for pre-9/11 failures to individuals.
The Insider added that a 7,000-word report describing in detail all of the pre-9/11 al-Qaida warnings received by the Clinton and Bush administrations remains classified.
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