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Chapter 10 Today, Our Nation Saw Evil George W. Bush entered the White House in January 2001 after the most controversial election in four decades. Twenty-five days before the November elections, Al Qaeda suicide bombers aboard a small skiff blasted a hole in the USS Cole in a Yemeni port, killing seventeen U.S. sailors. President Clinton, who was fixated on a final peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians in the waning days of his presidency , did not retaliate for the Cole attack because the CIA could not give him proof positive of bin Laden’s hand in it. President Bush opted not to retaliate either, or even to pursue bin Laden. Bush gave higher priority to the deployment of a ballistic missile defense against an imaginary future threat than to the real and present danger of Al Qaeda. As the Bush administration moved to implement its agenda in the first year of the new millennium, Al Qaeda cells in the United States made the final preparations for the most lethal acts of terror in history. Reports of an impending Al Qaeda attack, most of them vague, inundated the CIA during the spring and summer. The Agency was aware that known Al Qaeda terrorists had entered the United States in the weeks after the millennium crisis, but for reasons that have never been adequately explained, it did nothing to alert the FBI or other federal agencies charged to protect the homeland. President Bush’s lack of a sense of urgency about the Al Qaeda threat slowed an already slow federal bureaucracy. The director of the CIA and the director of the Agency’s Counterterrorism Center personally warned the president’s national security advisor in July that an attack could occur with no warning. In August, while he was on vacation at his Texas ranch, the CIA briefed Bush on bin Laden’s determination to strike in the United States. But the president failed to take action because he did not deem the intelligence that came to him about a probable act of terror to be actionable. Bush’s negligence was catastrophic: Bin Laden struck the United States thirty-seven days later. 234 Chapter 10 The Operation Khalid Sheikh Mohammed joined Al Qaeda a decade after its birth in Afghanistan. He had resisted joining for three years after he first approached bin Laden with an idea for a cataclysmic attack on the United States in 1996, but then he came to the realization that he needed Al Qaeda’s funding, logistical support, and martyrs. Mohammed had dreamt about a mass casualty attack against Americans perhaps as early as 1987 when he graduated from an American college and trekked to Afghanistan to enlist in the jihad. Until the East Africa embassy bombings , Mohammed had come as close to any militant Muslim, except his nephew, to answering Omar Abdel Rahman’s and bin Laden’s call to kill Americans anywhere and everywhere. Mohammed had helped finance his nephew Ramzi Yousef’s 1993 attack on the World Trade Center and conspired with him to destroy U.S. planes over the Pacific in the years after the World Trade Center attack. But when Plan Bojinka—or the Manila Air Plot, as U.S. prosecutors called it—collapsed, Mohammed fled to Qatar to regroup. The FBI’s capture of his nephew in Pakistan only deepened Mohammed’s desire to convert U.S. planes into weapons of mass destruction. Mohammed proposed some version of what would become the 9/11 attack to bin Laden as early as 1996.1 Bin Laden rebuffed him, not because his idea did not hold the promise of immense destruction, but because Al Qaeda’s emir demanded allegiance to Al Qaeda and a personal oath of loyalty, bayat, to him. Mohammed held out until the end of 1998, after bin Laden’s fatwa and the African embassy bombings. By then, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed recognized their mutual interests: bin Laden, to mount a spectacular attack on U.S. soil as the culmination of a series of blows that began with the bombings in Africa; Mohammed, to realize his nephew’s dreams of bringing down the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and destroying U.S. planes in flight. In the spring of 1999, bin Laden summoned him to Kandahar for a conference. Mohammed Atef, Al Qaeda’s military commander, had already endorsed the concept. Atef understood the military logic behind sustained attacks and the escalation of violence. The embassy...

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