A lengthy excerpt from Woodward's "State of Denial" in today's Washington Post focuses on CIA Director George Tenet's assessment of a likely Al Qaeda attack in the months before 9/11and his inability to convince then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and the White House to focus on the threat. According to Woodward, "Tenet had been losing sleep over the recent intelligence. There was no conclusive, smoking-gun intelligence, but there was such a huge volume of data that an intelligence officer's instinct strongly suggested that something was coming.He did not know when, where or how, but Tenet felt there was too much noise in the intelligence systems."
In oder to convince Ms. Rice of the seriousness nature of the threat, Tenet and Black asked for and got an urgent meeting to tell her that Al-Qaeda was going to attack at home or abroad. But according to Woodward,"Tenet and Black felt they were not getting though to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off
According to Woodward:
Afterward, Tenet looked back on the meeting with Rice as a lost opportunity to prevent or disrupt the attacks. Rice could have gotten through to Bush on the threat, Tenet thought, but she just didn't get it in time. He felt that he had done his job and been very direct about the threat, but that Rice had not moved quickly. He felt she was not organized and did not push people, as he tried to do at the CIA.
Black later said, "The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head."
These revelations do not support the perennial partisan claims and public perceptions that Republicans--whether in the White House or in Congress--are better in dealing with terrorism and counterterrorism than are Democrats.
Nor does the history of anti-American terrorism of the last 25 years.
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