Crawford Tenet-Bush Pre-9/11 meeting descends into 'Small Talk'

[G_j]

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/22201
Tenet-Bush Pre-9/11 'Small Talk'

Submitted by davidswanson on Mon, 2007-05-07 03:32.
By Robert Parry, www.consortiumnews.com

In late August 2001, when aggressive presidential action might have changed the course of U.S. history, CIA Director George Tenet made a special trip to Crawford, Texas, to get George W. Bush to focus on an imminent threat of a spectacular al-Qaeda attack only to have the conversation descend into meaningless small talk.

Alarmed CIA officials already had held an extraordinary meeting with then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on July 10 to lay out the accumulating evidence of an impending attack and had delivered on Aug. 6 a special “Presidential Daily Brief” to Bush entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.”

“A few weeks after the Aug. 6 PDB was delivered, I followed it to Crawford to make sure the President stayed current on events,” Tenet wrote in his memoir, At the Center of the Storm. “This was my first visit to the ranch. I remember the President graciously driving me around the spread in his pickup and my trying to make small talk about the flora and the fauna, none of which were native to Queens,” where Tenet had grown up.

Tenet’s trip to Crawford – like the July 10 meeting with Rice and the Aug. 6 briefing paper for Bush – failed to shock the administration out of its lethargy nor elicit the emergency steps that the CIA and other counterterrorism specialists wanted.
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[magellan]

1. Oh, they took it seriously

Enough to warn their own off taking commercial flights. But no warnings to the airlines or public agencies.

Tenet is such a shill.

[G_j]

2. and a liar

In this case we know the memo existed, but
there is no particular reason to believe Tenet
:shrug: