One official who helped to prepare the briefing, which included a PowerPoint presentation, described it as a "10 on a scale of 1 to 10" that "connected the dots" in earlier intelligence reports to present a stark warning that al-Qaida, which had already killed Americans in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and East Africa, was poised to strike again.So it wasn't just Condi Rice who ignored Tenet and Cofer Blac that Summer. It was ALL the top Cabinet Officers.
Former CIA Director George Tenet gave the independent Sept. 11, 2001, commission the same briefing on Jan. 28, 2004, but the commission made no mention of the warning in its 428-page final report. According to three former senior intelligence officials, Tenet testified to commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste and to Philip Zelikow, the panel's executive director and the principal author of its report, who's now Rice's top adviser.
This can only have happened because Bush and/or Cheney were told and said to ignore the warnings. When Rice, Ashcroft and Rumsfeld all had the same information, they wouldn't have dared ignore it without direct instructions from Bush to do so. That's about the same time Ashcroft stopped flying on commercian airliners, too. Highly suggestive, even when we DIDN'T know he had gotten the CIA briefing telling him that on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 highest) the likelihood of al Qaeda attacing the U.S. homeland soon was a ten.
Why wouldn't they have ignored the warning? Because if they had done it on their own and the attack happened, they could have been thrown under the train as a scapegoat. Rice and Rumsfeld are each too smart to have not been aware of that.
That means it was policy of the U.S. government to ignore the CIA warnings of imminent action by al Qaeda. Any other conclusion is ludicrous.
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