The explosive allegations were reported by the Raw Story, based on a Politico interview with ex-CIA director George Tenet and former CIA counterterrorism centre chief Cofer Black.
As Tenet and Black told Politico, they held an emergency meeting on July 10, 2001, with Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser. They told her they had evidence of Al Qaeda planning an imminent, “spectacular” attack on the U.S. When Rice asked what the U.S. needed to do, Black apparently slammed his fist on the table and said “We need to go on a wartime footing now!”
However, nothing happened after the meeting. Rice recalled the meeting in her memoir but didn’t distinguish it from numerous others throughout her tenure.
Two months prior to this meeting, Tenet and Black pitched the U.S. government’s national security team with what they called the “Blue Sky paper.” The idea was to create a joint CIA and military campaign that would infiltrate Afghanistan, launch a paramilitary operation and “create a bridge with Uzbekistan.”
The response from the U.S. government was essentially “We’re not ready to consider this,” allegedly because it didn’t want to leave a paper trail. Black thinks the administration was “mentally stuck back eight years” and couldn’t process the urgency of the threat.
It was next month that Bush received what is widely considered the first piece of evidence that his administration shrugged off the threat of 9/11 — the “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.” brief.
When Politico’s Chris Wipple asked Tenet if he blamed himself for what eventually happened, Tenet replied, “Well, look, there … I still look at the ceiling at night about a lot of things. And I’ll keep them to myself forever. But we’re all human beings.”
