Our Apathetic President and His Advisors

The Sydney Morning Herald has published a story entitled "They knew, but did nothing" about the 40 Presidential briefings in the nine months leading up to 9/11 that mentioned Osama bin Laden and his plan to attack America. The article is by Philip Shenon, author of a book to be released Monday under the title, The Commission -- The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation. Here's a quote:

[Warren] Bass told colleagues that he gasped when he found a memo written by [Richard] Clarke to [Condolezza] Rice on September 4, 2001, exactly a week before the attacks, in which Clarke seemed to predict what was just about to happen. It was a memo that seemed to spill out all of Clarke's frustration about how slowly the Bush White House had responded to the cascade of terrorist threats that summer. The note was terrifying in its prescience.

"Are we serious about dealing with the al-Qaeda threat?" he asked Rice. "Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the CSG [Counterterrorism Security Group] has not succeeded in stopping al-Qaeda attacks and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the US.

Bass's colleagues said he knew instantly that the September 4 email was so sensitive -- and potentially damaging, especially to Rice -- that the White House would never voluntarily release a copy to the commission or allow him to take notes from the room if they came close to reproducing its language. Under a written agreement between the commission and the White House, notes could not "significantly reproduce" the wording of a classified document.

Bass decided he would have to try to memorise it in pieces, several sentences at a time, and then rush back to the commission to bat them out on a computer keyboard.