U.S. Government Quietly Declassifies Post-9/11 Interview With Bush and Cheney & FORESIGHT-AND HINDSIGHT National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States

 "Blair allegedly told Bush that if the president had said “before 9/11 that he wanted to put forces in Afghanistan, he — Blair — would have been floored. ‘I would have looked at you like a nut,’ Blair said. There was an appetite for a ‘throat slit’ (killing Bin Ladin), not a war footing.” With no apparent sense of the lethal irony present, Bush told the commissioners, “A president can’t force preemptive war without a cause. The country didn’t like war. ‘I don’t like it either,’ the President said.”

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THE INTERCEPT

U.S. Government Quietly Declassifies Post-9/11 Interview With Bush and Cheney

In a newly declassified interview conducted in 2004, Bush shows not a glimmer of awareness of the destruction and carnage he had unleashed on the world.

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"Considering what was not done suggests possible ways to institutionalize imagination. To return to the four elements of analysis just mentioned:

1. The CTC did not analyze how an aircraft, hijacked or explosives-laden, might be used as a weapon. It did not perform this kind of analysis from the enemy's perspective ("red team" analysis), even though suicide terrorism had become a principal tactic of Middle Eastern terrorists. If it had done so, we believe such an analysis would soon have spotlighted a critical constraint for the terrorists-finding a suicide operative able to fly large jet aircraft.They had never done so before 9/11.
2. The CTC did not develop a set of telltale indicators for this method of attack. For example, one such indicator might be the discovery of possible terrorists pursuing flight training to fly large jet aircraft, or seeking to buy advanced flight simulators.
3. The CTC did not propose, and the intelligence community collection management process did not set, requirements to monitor such telltale indicators.Therefore the warning system was not looking for information such as the July 2001 FBI report of potential terrorist interest in various kinds of aircraft training in Arizona, or the August 2001 arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui because of his suspicious behavior in a Minnesota flight school. In late August, the Moussaoui arrest was briefed to the DCI and other top CIA officials under the heading "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly."24 Because the system was not tuned to comprehend the potential significance of this information, the news had no effect on warning.
4. Neither the intelligence community nor aviation security experts analyzed systemic defenses within an aircraft or against terrorist-controlled aircraft, suicidal or otherwise. The many threat reports mentioning aircraft were passed to the FAA.While that agency continued to react to specific, credible threats, it did not try to perform the broader warning functions we describe here. No one in the government was taking on that role for domestic vulnerabilities.

   Richard Clarke told us that he was concerned about the danger posed by aircraft in the context of protecting the Atlanta Olympics of 1996, the White House complex, and the 2001 G-8 summit in Genoa. But he attributed his awareness more to Tom Clancy novels than to warnings from the intelligence community. He did not, or could not, press the government to work on the systemic issues of how to strengthen the layered security defenses to protect aircraft against hijackings or put the adequacy of air defenses against suicide hijackers on the national policy agenda.

The methods for detecting and then warning of surprise attack that the U.S. government had so painstakingly developed in the decades after Pearl Harbor did not fail; instead, they were not really tried. They were not employed to analyze the enemy that, as the twentieth century closed, was most likely to launch a surprise attack directly against the United States."

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National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States

FORESIGHT-AND HINDSIGHT