@corbinsmom Read this:
Richard Clarke was the National Security Terrorism Task Force director appointed by George HW Bush. He served the first Bush, then for eight years under Clinton, then for George W Bush. So, he's NON-PARTISAN.

He wrote a book called "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War On Terror". It's a great book, and you all should read it.

In that book, he details how it all went down. First, remember that Al Qaeda attacked the USS Cole in October of 2000. In the book, he says that the only way they could, at the time, go after Bin Laden was with a full-scale assault. Drones were only capable of surveillance. They didn't carry munitions, just cameras. So Clinton decided that, unless they had an opportunity arise, he would leave it to the next president to figure out, as he didn't want to strap the incoming president with a war.

I voted for Bush in 2000. After Bush won the SCOTUS case to be elected, he kept Clarke on. Clarke had been nominated by his dad, after all.

In the VERY FIRST National Security meeting, on Bush's Inauguration Day, Clarke specifically brought up Al Qaeda. Bush hushed him and insisted on talking about Iraq and the Israel/Palestine Conflict.

This pattern held true for EVERY National Security meeting prior to 9/11. Every single time, Clarke would bring up Al Qaeda, and Bush would insist on Iraq and Israel/Palestine.

Bush actually requested the Joint Chiefs create a plan to overthrow Saddam Hussein that was completed prior to 9/11.

Approximately two weeks before 9/11, both the CIA and the NSA specifically sent notifications directly to George W Bush, along with key cabinet members and National Security personnel, saying there was an "imminent attack from Al Qaeda".

Bush did NOTHING. He still refused to discuss Al Qaeda, except to ask, (paraphrasing) "Do we know what this attack is? Or is it just another goose chase?" Since they couldn't detail what the attack would be, Bush ignored it. He put no one on alert anywhere.

And FIVE HOURS after the attacks on 9/11, Rumsfeld had his aide write this memo. This is the EXACT note, written by Stephen Cambone:

www.coxmx.com/rummy.png

It says:

"Resume Statement: Best info fast. Judge whether good enough [to] hit SH at same time - not only UBL."

"SH" is Saddam Hussein and "UBL" is Usama/Osama Bin Laden.

It goes on to say:

"Need to move swiftly. Near-term target needs. Go massive - sweep it all up. Things related and not."

Then, they worked to create the intelligence to support the idea of "Weapons of Mass Destruction" which they WERE confident Hussein had, but did NOT have intel to support.

They doctored the Intel, believing they would find WMDs, and then didn't find them. They also made statements attempting to connect Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein.

Clarke said in the book that the primary reason Bush gave for focusing on Hussein (who had NOTHING to do with 9/11) instead of Bin Laden was that with Iraq, our military knew how to take down a government. But it didn't know how to take down a terrorist group with no official home or structure.

And six months after 9/11, Bush was already saying he wasn't interested in going after Bin Laden because he wasn't a threat anymore. Here's the video:

http://youtu.be/4PGmnz5Ow-o

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Clarke

"Within a week of the inauguration, I wrote to Rice and Hadley asking 'urgently' for a Principals, or Cabinet-level, meeting to review the imminent Al-Qaeda threat. Rice told me that the Principals Committee, which had been the first venue for terrorism policy discussions in the Clinton administration, would not address the issue until it had been 'framed' by the Deputies."

And more:

At the first Deputies Committee meeting on Terrorism held in April 2001, Clarke strongly suggested that the U.S. put pressure on both the Taliban and Al-Qaeda by arming the Northern Alliance and other groups in Afghanistan. Simultaneously, that they target bin Laden and his leadership by reinitiating flights of the MQ-1 Predators. To which Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz responded, "Well, I just don't understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden." Clarke replied that he was talking about bin Laden and his network because it posed "an immediate and serious threat to the United States." According to Clarke, Wolfowitz turned to him and said, "You give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don't exist."[10]

Clarke wrote in Against All Enemies that in the summer of 2001, the intelligence community was convinced of an imminent attack by al Qaeda, but could not get the attention of the highest levels of the Bush administration, most famously writing that Director of the Central Intelligence Agency George Tenet was running around with his "hair on fire".[10]

At a July 5, 2001, White House gathering of the FAA, the Coast Guard, the FBI, Secret Service and INS, Clarke stated that "something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon." Donald Kerrick, a three-star general who was a deputy National Security Advisor in the late Clinton administration and stayed on into the Bush administration, wrote Hadley a classified two-page memo stating that the NSA needed to "pay attention to Al-Qaida and counterterrorism" and that the U.S. would be "struck again."

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