Word: ladens
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...Bush attacked Afghanistan in early 2001, as some say he should have, people like me would have protested furiously (I know I did when Clinton tried to). Obviously, it’s bad that Bush took a long vacation after reading a memo entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside U.S.” and that Attorney General Ashcroft proposed cuts in counterterrorism funding on 9/10. But it wouldn’t have been so bad if the White House had cooperated fully with the Commission and come out publicly with an honest message—something...
...days after Sept. 11 the nation didn't know what was in the CIA's files about terrorist plots to hijack a plane and fly it into the Eiffel Tower. Or about the secret memos that had been rocketing back and forth between intelligence agencies with titles like "Bin Laden Planning High-Profile Attacks" and "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly." Or that CIA chief George Tenet looked around in the summer of 2001 and saw that "the system was blinking red." Or that the FBI's chief of counterterrorism said he wished he had 500 analysts tracking the army...
...slow to report, if not detect, the jihadist army that was forming on the horizon in the 1990s. The commission reported that though al-Qaeda was formed in 1988, the CIA "did not describe" the organization comprehensively on paper until 1999. For years the agency believed that bin Laden was a financier rather than an engineer of terrorism--even after it received what a commission report called "new information revealing that bin Laden headed his own terrorist organization, with its own targeting agenda and operational commanders." And though the CIA drafted "thousands" of reports on aspects of al-Qaeda...
Still, what commissioners will no doubt ask is why, given the memo's strong assertions that bin Laden was bound and determined to strike inside the U.S., the warning didn't spur more action from the President. Commission member Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democrat, told TIME that he and like-minded panelists intend to press ahead with questions on "what occurred [inside the White House] between Aug. 6 and Sept. 11." Panel members will probably ask why the President didn't cut his vacation short or order emergency meetings with Robert Mueller, then the new FBI director. "Once...
...strategic goal. Iraq was to be liberated. The rest would fall into place. Last week Bush's neoconservative strategists seemed in desperate need of a few good tacticians--obsessive bureaucrats like Dick Clarke who live crisis to crisis, who have no bigger thoughts than chasing down bin Laden or getting the lights turned on in Baghdad...