Eyewitness to History: Reflections on September 11

As Paul notably transitioned.

We are going to get to the future of it all.

But I also want to talk about sort of the impact of some of the intelligence failures or operational failures, perhaps.

John McLaughlin was talking about how it was blinking red in the summer before.

And John Bellinger was talking about how the 9-11 Commission talked about the presidential daily briefing that was And you told me in the green room that you were the one who had to deliver that briefing that day.

What lessons, first of all, just tell us about that day and what lessons can be learned about the sort of silos between intelligence and law enforcement slash FBI slash operational intelligence?

So we heard a little bit of it this morning on the first panel with, you know, I think we know a lot of the failures, not all the failures, but some of the failures were just between the FBI and the CIA not connecting the dots.

CIA, foreign intelligence knew that bin Laden and Al Qaeda wanted to attack the United States.

And here we had the FBI learning about people turning to take off planes, but not to land them.

So I came into the White House in the beginning of 2001 and spent eight months spending a lot of time, I was the NSC general counsel, a lot of things to focus on, but on Al-Qaeda.

It was certainly senior Bush White House officials had been briefed by the Clinton administration, briefed by John McLaughlin, George Tenet at the CIA about the Al-Qaeda threat.

So knew it was a significant threat and we were working on sort of what to do about it.

So throughout the spring and summer, As this intelligence that John can talk more about was coming in and the threat was high, we were working on a strategy to do something about it.

And there was a series of, you can't just sort of go in and say, well, let's invade Afghanistan in February.

Now, what was interesting was that we did have a lot of very aggressive plans, which sadly came to a head and were approved by the NSC principals on September the 4th.

They were to be briefed to the president on September the 12th.

So we actually were ready because we had them all.

One of the things that I personally worked on, super secret at the time, now well known, was CIA had developed this nifty thing called a drone, which they promised us that the White House would work.

and that they found that there was, in fact, a tall man in white in Afghanistan who, looking down, they thought was bin Laden.

And they wanted us to take a shot at this guy.

My part of it was to develop the legal authority of, well, is this an assassination? Can you drop a drone in someone else's country? Can you attack terrorists in this way? We were building on actions that had been taken by the Clinton administration.

So the president was poised to approve this.

I have often wondered, of course the Bush administration was criticized, why didn't you act fast enough? Why didn't you do these things in the spring in response to the blinking red? And I've often thought, suppose the president had in fact authorized a drone strike on Bin Laden in the summer of 2001.

We all know that in fact, the hijackers were already well on their way.

And so in my view, what would have happened is if he had done that, whether we'd gotten Bin Laden or not Bin Laden, they probably would have been on their way.