By Barton Gellman, Washington Post
May 16, 2002
On July 5 of last year, a month and a day before President Bush first heard that al Qaeda might plan a hijacking, the White House summoned officials of a dozen federal agencies to the Situation Room.
"Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon," the government's top counterterrorism official, Richard Clarke, told the assembled group, according to two of those present. The group included the Federal Aviation Administration, along with the Coast Guard, FBI, Secret Service and Immigration and Naturalization Service.
...
Tenet had been "nearly frantic" with concern since June 22, according to one frequent interlocutor, and a written intelligence summary for national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said on June 28: "It is highly likely that a significant al Qaeda attack is in the near future, within several weeks." By late summer, one senior political appointee said, Tenet had "repeated this so often that people got tired of hearing it."
...
But it is also true that Bush and his Cabinet advisers were not yet disposed to respond to al Qaeda as a first-tier national security threat. The alerts of the early and mid-summer -- described by two career counterterrorist officials as the most urgent in decades -- had faded to secondary concern by the time of Bush's extended Crawford vacation. As late as Sept. 9, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld threatened a presidential veto when the Senate proposed to divert $600 million to counterterrorism from ballistic missile defense.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A30176-2002May16¬Found=true
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