If you are ostensibly the most powerful man in the world, there is a huge range of information that will claim your attention during a busy working day. It is George W. Bush’s difficulty that on Aug. 6, 2001, the daily intelligence briefing he received made it clear that Al-Qaeda was expected to mount an attack, possibly a hijacking, in the United States.
The full text of that briefing has now been made public, save three amendments, we are told, to protect sources. What has not been revealed are the details of all the other briefings Bush had been receiving in the six months since he had taken over the Oval Office. Had the president concluded, like some of his predecessors, that he was simply receiving “too much information” and not enough fact? Possible Al-Qaeda attacks in revenge for the Clinton administration’s missile assault on its Afghan facilities probably did not seem of any higher priority than all the other possible security alerts the US faced at home and abroad.
This anyway might have been the explanation to the Sept. 11 senate commission looking into how America was caught so unprepared by the 2001 attacks. But although the administration has tried to promote this line, the fact is that this initiative has only come now, after it has been discovered that such concerns existed and a briefing had been prepared for the president himself.
At hardly any stage in this enquiry process — from the initial idea of setting up the bipartisan Senate commission through to the reluctance to have National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice give testimony in public and the release of documentation like the Aug. 6 press briefing — has the White House seemed enthusiastic. The vigor, not to say venom, with which officials sought to belittle and rubbish the controversial testimony of former security aide Richard Clarke startled many neutral observers. Clarke, a respected senior analyst who had served both Bush’s father and Bill Clinton, gave the same sort of warnings as the president received on Aug. 6. But he claimed that the White House was not interested, preferring to focus on the opportunity to oust Saddam and finish George Bush senior’s Gulf War. Clarke was sidelined.
But if he was ignored, why should not the contents of the Aug. 6 briefing have been ignored as well? Far from being too vague, as the administration hints, this warning about Al-Qaeda was rejected since it had no interest for George W. Bush because it was not about Saddam Hussein. Or that would seem to be the scenario. The administration’s nervousness may be the greater because it may yet prove to have known even more about Al-Qaeda’s plans and failed to act. The truly unthinkable option is that someone in the White House saw the planned outrage as the excuse to re-attack Saddam but never imagined that the attacks would be so devastating.
