Reply #9: On US antiterrorism, January 31 2001 CHANGED EVERYTHING--the best link [View All]

[ProgressiveEconomist]

I found in the MSM on the Clinton-Bush transition is a 2002 Newsweek article. Here's a snippet with a couple more items for your list, from http://foi.missouri.edu/terrorismfoi/whatwentwrong.html :
"WHAT WENT WRONG. The inside story of the missed signals and intelligence failures that raise a chilling question: did September 11 have to happen? By Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff; Newsweek May 27 2002

Back in July 2001, Bill Kurtz and his team hit pay dirt, and no one seemed to care. A hard-driven supervisor in the FBI�s Phoenix office, Kurtz was overseeing an investigation of suspected Islamic terrorists last July when a member of his team, a sharp, 41-year-old counterterrorism agent named Kenneth Williams, noticed something odd: a large number of suspects were signing up to take courses in how to fly airplanes....

But little of that seemed to make a difference back in Washington, where the Kurtz team suffered a fate even worse than Cassandra�s: not only were they not believed, they were ignored altogether.... under Attorney General John Ashcroft, the department was being prodded back into its old law-and-order mind-set: violent crime, drugs, child porn. Counterterrorism, which had become a priority of the Clintonites ... seemed to be getting less attention. When FBI officials sought to add hundreds more counterintelligence agents, they got shot down even as Ashcroft began, quietly, to take a privately chartered jet for his own security reasons.

The attorney general was hardly alone in seeming to de-emphasize terror in the young Bush administration. Over at the Pentagon, new Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld elected not to relaunch a Predator drone that had been tracking bin Laden, among other actions. In self-absorbed Washington, the Phoenix memo, which never resulted in arrests, landed in two units at FBI headquarters but didn�t make it to senior levels. Nor did the memo get transmitted to the CIA, which has long had a difficult relationship with the FBI„and whose director, George Tenet, one of the few Clinton holdovers, was issuing so many warnings that bin Laden was 'the most immediate' threat to Americans he was hardly heeded any longer...."

For more links, see another GD thread at http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x2098263