CIA Official Claims Bush Administration Ignored Pre-9/11 Warnings

What I find interesting about 9/11 and the stories that surround the attack, is that even if you don’t believe the theories about controlled demolitions and remote-controlled aircraft, the Bush administration still looks like it shares culpability for that tragic event. At worse they knew it was going to happen and they did nothing to stop it, and at best they were grossly negligent.

Recent claims made by Cofer Black, the former CIA chief of counter terrorism, lean toward the latter of the two. He told Politico that the Bush administration was warned of an impending attack by Al Qaeda. “It was very evident that we were going to be struck, we were gonna be struck hard and lots of Americans were going to die,” he said, adding that “the information that we had compiled was absolutely compelling. It was multiple-sourced. And it was sort of the last straw.”

Black claims that the Bush administration wasn’t taking the threat seriously. “They were used to terrorists being Euro-lefties – they drink champagne by night, blow things up during the day, how bad can this be? And it was a very difficult sell to communicate the urgency to this.” His former boss, George Tenet, agreed and claimed that the first warnings came in the spring of 2001. At the time he and Black pushed for a plan to start a covert paramilitary operation in Afghanistan that would have wiped out Al-Qaeda, but the Bush administration didn’t want to start that operation because it would create a paper trail indicating that they had been warned.

So what do you make of this? Is the CIA just blowing smoke to cover their own butts, or did they genuinely try to warn the Bush Administration about an impending attack?