Most stark warning to Rice unreported by 9/11 commission

Excerpts from Two Months Before 9/11, an Urgent Warning to Rice (Washington Post):

He did not know when, where or how, but [then CIA director] Tenet felt there was too much noise in the intelligence systems. Two weeks earlier, he had told Richard A. Clarke, the National Security Council’s counterterrorism director: “It’s my sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is going to be the big one.”

On June 30, a top-secret senior executive intelligence brief contained an article headlined “Bin Laden Threats Are Real.” Tenet hoped his abrupt request for an immediate meeting would shake Rice.

The July 10 meeting between Tenet, Black and Rice went unmentioned in the various reports of investigations into the Sept. 11 attacks, but it stood out in the minds of Tenet and Black as the starkest warning they had given the White House on bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Though the investigators had access to all the paperwork on the meeting, Black felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn’t want to know about.

Tenet left the meeting feeling frustrated. Though Rice had given them a fair hearing, no immediate action meant great risk. Black felt the decision to just keep planning was a sustained policy failure. Rice and the Bush team had been in hibernation too long. “Adults should not have a system like this,” he said later.

Rice, Rumsfeld, Bush et al are the kind of thinkers we are outsourcing Canadian foreign policy to. Comforting.