On April 29, 2004, President George W. Bush hosted one of the most unusual meetings to ever take place inside the Oval Office. The 10 members of the 9/11 Commission got to ask him and Vice President Dick Cheney any question they wanted about the September 11, 2001, attacks. The words that were spoken in that room remained secret for nearly two decades. Now, we can finally read what Bush said. Earlier this month, after more than 18 years, the government declassified a 31-page "memorandum for the record," which compiles notes that the commissioners took during the meeting. The document shows the commissioners giving Bush multiple chances to acknowledge the numerous documented warnings he'd received from his own government of an impending attack by Al Qaeda. For the most part, Bush failed to do so. Instead, he passed the buck.
Perhaps the largest of Bush's evasions that day concerned his CIA director, George Tenet: "The threat was overseas — that was what George said." Bush's implication at the time is clear. He wanted the commission, and by extension the public, to think that no one could have anticipated Al Qaeda mounting a large-scale attack on US soil. But in fact, Tenet's CIA had warned Bush more than once that Al Qaeda could strike anywhere, at any time, and that all US citizens were potential targets. The most notorious warning that Bush received, but not the only one, was a CIA briefing headlined "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US."
Very little of Bush's excuse-making and clumsy attempts to rewrite history found their way into the 9/11 Commission's report. Indeed, one of the commissioners, Richard Ben-Veniste, told Insider he still had questions today about what Bush knew, and when.
"I could never square in my mind CIA Director Tenet's intense preoccupation with the Al Qaeda threat in the months leading up to 9/11, with his claim that he never briefed President Bush on the many clues the intelligence community had developed that bin Laden was planning to launch a 'spectacular' attack on the US homeland," Ben-Veniste said.
The commission report's approach to this mystery is to make the apparent disconnect between CIA and the Oval Office sound like something out of a Greek tragedy: "No one working on these late [Al Qaeda] leads in the summer of 2001 connected them to the high level of threat reporting … no analytic work foresaw the lightning that could connect the thundercloud to the ground."
What the new memo makes clear is that the White House's lack of urgency in facing down the domestic Qaeda threat wasn't all that complicated. Tenet, the record shows, did everything he could to get Bush to focus on Al Qaeda. Bush just wasn't interested.