On Tuesday, May 14, it was only a question of dubious fund-raising practices. "The president called for the nation to rise above politics after Sept. 11, and then we find the Republican Party selling a picture from Sept. 11 to $150 donors," Larry Noble, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics told the New York Times. "It strikes a lot of people as in bad taste, and is just at odds with two claims of the Bush administration: that they were going to change the tone of fund-raising, and that Sept. 11 wasn't about politics." Noble's comments came as Republican party officials revealed they were hawking a photograph of Dubya on the phone to Vice President Dick Cheney -- or "his adult supervisor" in Maureen Dowd's words -- shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Coming on the same day that Republicans broke political fundraising records with their last grasp at unregulated donations before the new restrictions on campaign financing kick in, the picture-peddling momentarily eclipsed reports by the New York Post and Newsweek that an FBI agent in Minneapolis had speculated in mid-August that French Moroccan flight student Zacarias Moussaoui might be planning to "fly something into the World Trade Center." Then on Wednesday night, CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin reported that Bush had been warned that Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network might hijack U.S. passenger planes. As Washington Post media watcher Howard Kurtz remarked, the "Bush Knew" story "promises to make the fundraising flap over the use of that Bush photo on Air Force One look like a tea party."

"Specially commissioned, individually numbered and matted, this limited edition series is yours free for serving as an honorary co-chairman of the 2002 President's Dinner with your gift of $150 or more, " read the letter to potential Republican contributors. Democrats and others objected that for months any wavering from the Bush party line on terrorism was branded by the administration as unpatriotic, while now they were blatantly attempting to exploit the terrorist attacks for their own partisan purposes. An exchange between ABC News reporter Terry Moran and press secretary Ari Fleischer, at the May 14 press briefing:

Q ...You say that these are pictures of the President doing his job for the American people. On 9/11, that job was one of those moments where he's acting not as a Republican or the leader of his party, but as the Commander-in-Chief, at a moment when he's the focus of the hopes and fears in the country. Why isn't he concerned that now selling this photograph to raise money for Republicans could undermine something that he frequently says, which is that the war and its prosecution and the commitment to it should be above and beyond partisan politics. Why isn't he concerned that deploying this photograph for partisan politics undermines that?
 
MR. FLEISCHER: Terry, every day that the President does his job for the American people is a day that the President tries to bring the nation together. That doesn't stop, in the President's opinion, the rights of the American people, if they so choose, to participate in our democracy through the party committees. The same question could be asked of a State of the Union. The same question could be asked of any picture ever taken by the President of the United States in the course of doing his duties.
 
What the Democrats are really saying is, once somebody is elected President, they should never be allowed to have any pictures taken of them for any purpose at any time in the course of their administration for the purposes of helping to build a Republican Party, or in the case of the Democrats, a Democratic Party. Every day the President --
 
Q But 9/11 --
 
Q What Democrats --
 
MR. FLEISCHER: -- every day the President -- every day the President is doing his job for the American people in a variety of settings, in a variety of ways. And it's the right of people to participate in our democratic system through their political parties, as they see fit, to support the President.
 
Q Isn't the war a special case, though, as he himself reminds the country, very frequently?
 
MR. FLEISCHER: The fact of the matter is, Terry, any picture taken of the President in that context is a reminder of how this President has brought the nation together, Democrats and Republicans alike.

Nita Lowey, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, called the mailing "a shameless fundraising ploy. ... They have chosen to politicize the tragic events of Sept. 11." Bill Maher, host of the ABC late-night talk show "Politically Incorrect" quipped, "It's the inaugural photo that is exploiting a tragedy."

At last year's big fund-raiser Bush pledged to change the tone in Washington and end "excessive partisanship."

The fund-raising memento was not the first time Bush exploited the September 11 events for personal or partisan political benefit. Bush's visit to the World Trade Center site on September 14 interrupted work on the site for hours, at a time when survivors might still have been pulled from the building wreckage. As reported by NPR's Jim Zarroli on the program All Things Considered for September 14:

... volunteers were told to get new identification cards so they could get past police barricades along Canal Street. One construction worker who has been at the site for three days complained that the requirement took valuable time away from the rescue. "They pulled everybody out, hundreds of people digging in the rubble, passing buckets, passing buckets, bringing the dogs in, bringing the radar with the sonar, and they stopped the whole operation to send people over to some street, to a company -- Bovis -- to get ids, because they want tight security so the President can come. Makes no sense at all. I'm aggravated, man. I'll see you later."

With the CBS News report on May 15, the media and critics turned to the question of whether anything more than incompetence had prevented the administration from discerning a connection among repeated warnings of terrorist attacks. The White House admitted that intelligence reports received last summer suggested the possibility of attacks against the U.S., perhaps involving a hijacking.

For the first time in months, Democrats began to question White House handling of the war on terror. Some family members of those killed in the attacks, and even some Republicans expressed concern and anger that the government had not passed along specific warnings to the public. Stephen Push, whose wife was killed aboard the American Airlines jet that crashed into the Pentagon, said "I think it's shameful that they didn't warn the American people." Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, the senior Republican member of the Intelligence Committee, complained about the delay in releasing information. "The fact that they've waited this long to get it out is troubling."

Republicans and Democrats disagreed as to whether members of congress had received the information contained in the White House briefing. Sen. Bob Graham, chair of the intelligence committee said that he and Democratic colleagues had been provided with less detail than was in the White House briefing, and that no information about hijackings was included. Some members of the House and Senate intelligence committees said that they had not been informed at all.

A brief review of some relevant events from last year:

On June 28, 2001, CIA Director George Tenet wrote in an intelligence summary for National Security Adviser Rice, "It is highly likely that a significant al Qaeda attack is in the near future, within several weeks." A senior White House official is told the Washington Post that Tenet "repeated this so often that people got tired of hearing it."

Richard Clarke, the Bush administration's top counter-terrorism official, was concerned enough about an imminent terrorist attack that he called representatives of a dozen federal agencies together in the White House situation room on July 5, 2001. "Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon," he said, according to two officials present at the meeting, who spoke recently to the Washington Post. Agencies in attendance included the Federal Aviation Administration, the Coast Guard, FBI, Secret Service and Immigration and Naturalization Service. Clarke ordered every counterterrorism office to cancel vacations, defer travel and exercises, and put rapid-response teams on shorter alert. The government's entire counterterrorism infrastructure was placed on the highest state of alert.

Five days later the Phoenix office of the FBI transmitted a five-page document to headquarters, reporting a connection between suspected Middle Eastern terrorists and the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona. The report suggested that the FBI investigate flight schools for information on other Middle Eastern students, and speculated that Osama bin Laden might be training agents to infiltrate the aviation industry.

On July 26, CBS news reported that Attorney General John Ashcroft had quietly begun traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines. An FBI spokesman told CBS "There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines," but would not specify what the threat was. Likewise, a CIA official said he was not aware of "specific threats against any Cabinet member." Ashcroft himself was evasive. "I don't do threat assessments myself and I rely on those whose responsibility it is in the law enforcement community, particularly the FBI. And I try to stay within the guidelines that they've suggested I should stay within for those purposes."

The FAA was still urging U.S. airlines to maintain a "high degree of alertness" on July 31.

Bush received his now notorious briefing -- "not a warning briefing, but an analytic report," according to National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice -- on August 6. By then, scarcely a month later, the Richard Clarke's high alert had apparently waned. Plans for combating Al Qaeda were still mired in an interagency policy review panel where they had languished for half a year. It would be another month before Bush's cabinet-level advisers would have their first meeting on terrorism, one week before the September 11 attacks.

By September 11 all the FAA heightened alert levels had been dropped.

In her news conference Thursday, May 16, National Security Adviser Rice emphasized that intelligence officials had been focused on threats to U.S. interests overseas. She also took pains to clarify that, although the August 6 report "mentioned hijacking, but hijacking in the traditional sense, and in a sense, said that the most important and most likely thing was that they would take over an airliner, holding passengers and demand the release of one of their operatives." Earlier in the day, press secretary Ari Fleischer had strained to imply that the use of airplanes as suicide bombs was a new development in the history of terrorism.

information about hijackings in the pre-9/11 world is totally different from information about hijackings in the post-9/11 world. Traditional hijackings prior to September 11th, it might as well be a different word and a different language from what we've all, unfortunately, come to know about the post-9/11 world. For decades, governments have taken steps about warnings on hijackings. Never did we imagine what would take place on September 11th, where people used those airplanes as missiles and as weapons.

Fleischer told reporters that the title of the August 6 memo was "Bin Laden Determined to Strike the United States," consistent with the implication that the primary threat was to U.S. interests abroad. On May 18, however, the Washington Post reported that memo was actually titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," and "underscored that Osama bin Laden and his followers hoped to 'bring the fight to America.'" Sources told the Post that the document focused on possible domestic targets of terrorism, including a discussion of plans for attacking Los Angeles airport during the 2000 millennium celebration, and noted that Al Qaeda members were known to live and travel in the U.S. The Post also reported the existence of a document prepared by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress in 1999 for the National Intelligence Council, a CIA-related think tank. The report contradicted Rice's assertion that no one "could have predicted that these people . . . would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."

The WTC bombing may also have been a harbinger of more destructive attacks of international terrorism in the United States....
 
Al-Qaeda's expected retaliation for the U.S. cruise missile attack against al-Qaeda's training facilities in Afghanistan on August 20, 1998, could take several forms of terrorist attack in the nation's capital. Al-Qaeda could detonate a Chechen-type building-buster bomb at a federal building. Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaeda's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House. Ramzi Youssef had planned to do this against the CIA headquarters.
 
Whatever form an attack may take, bin Laden will most likely retaliate in a spectacular way for the cruise missile attack against his Afghan camp in August 1998.

• On September 5, 1986 four terrorists associated with the Abu Nidal group attempted to hijack a PanAm 747 at Karachi airport in Pakistan. The crew escaped through the cockpit escape hatch, but at least 16 passengers died from gunfire and grenade explosions. It was subsequently revealed that the terrorists had planned to crash the airliner into the city of Tel Aviv.
• In 1994 the Armed Islamic Group hijacked an Air France plan in Algiers, with the intent of crashing it into the Eiffel tower.
• In 1995 Filipino security services notified the FBI that "Middle Eastern pilots were training at U.S. flight schools and at least one had proposed dive-bombing a jetliner into a federal building." The information was uncovered during interrogation of Abdul Hakim Murad, who was arrested in Manila, Philippines, in connection with a suspicious chemical fire. Murad indicated that a specific plan had not been developed, but that targets such as the CIA building and the Pentagon had been considered. According to a Filipino police report, " “Murad's idea is that he will board any American commercial aircraft pretending to be an ordinary passenger, then he will hijack said aircraft, control its cockpit and dive it at the CIA headquarters.... There will be no bomb or any explosive that he will use in its execution. It is a suicidal mission that he is very much willing to execute."
• In 1999, University of Pennsylvania terrorism expert Stephen Gale, joined by security professionals from Exxon Corp. and naval intelligence, warned the FAA of a potential threat to domestic security involving the use of commercial airliners as missiles to destroy skyscrapers.
• In July last year, Italian and U.S. security agencies received information from Egypt that followers of Osama bin Laden had threatened to attempt to kill George W. Bush by crashing an airliner into the summit meeting of industrialized nations in Genoa. Italian authorities took the threat seriously enough that they closed the airspace over Genoa and installed missiles. U.S. officials considered the warning "unsubstantiated."

Incompetence "remains the most plausible explanation for the Bush administration's failure to prevent the terrorist atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001," says Joe Conason in his recent piece for Salon.com The conspiracy, he suggests, was and is the administration's efforts to conceal its "tragic errors" from Congress and the public. Mainstream media widely reported a call from Dick Cheney to Tom Daschle, in January after Democrats gained control of the Senate, urging Daschle to limit the investigation of the events of September 11. Bush reiterated the request in a private meeting with congressional leaders on January 29. Reports at the time suggested Cheney characterized such an investigation as partisan interference with the "war on terrorism."

FBI Director Mueller said on September 17, 2001 that "there were no warning signs that I'm aware of that would indicate this type of operation in the country." It now appears that both he and possibly Attorney General Ashcroft had been told of the Phoenix report "soon after the attacks."

"Republicans have repeatedly claimed that the former administration was less diligent in guarding America against such attacks than Mr Bush," observes The Economist of London. Recent revelations, they suggest, makes it clear this is "a broad libel against Bill Clinton." Intelligence officials who worked for both administrations told the Economist that "this is rubbish." Security adviser Rice and like-minded members of the Bush administration were "much more concerned about missile treaties than obscure Afghans." The Economist goes on to suggest that "one reason why Mr Bush kept George Tenet, the CIA 's director, in his job after the worst intelligence failure since Pearl Harbour was because Mr Tenet could have pointed out that Mr Bush was no better than Mr Clinton). But this has more to do with public relations than with what really went wrong."

The White House response to widespread criticism of its handling of terrorism intelligences has been to increase the volume of warnings. Speaking on NBC News' Meet the Press on May 19, Dick Cheney reiterated vague warnings.

We don’t know if it’s going to be tomorrow or next week or next year.... But the prospect of another attack against the United States is very, very real.... [B]ut again, it’s non-specific.

A "senior administration official with knowledge of U.S. intelligence and White House strategy" acknowledged to the Associated Press that the warnings were politically motivated. The current warnings are "designed to give Americans better notice and protect Bush against second guessing in the event of another attack...." A "top White House aide" described a two-pronged political response to the recent criticism: (1) accuse Democrats of playing politics with the issue, and (2) remind voters that America is still a target. Officials admitted that while discussion of an attack had increased in the intelligence community, it was likely because of "increased U.S. access to documents and terrorist suspects — or that terrorists are disseminating false information."

The key players in the administration's current defensive maneuvering -- Rice, Cheney, Fleischer -- were among those who insisted for weeks that Bush's flight from Washington was justified by a "credible threat" that Al Qaeda's hijacked jets would attack Air Force One. Gullible journalists, including, notably, William Safire, happily promoted this falsehood, until it was finally exposed by the Associated Press and CBS News. At a minimum, administration critics inside and outside the beltway now have ample justification for re-examining "many of the events of last year ... for further evidence of what the Bush administration knew or should have known."

The Dots that Weren't Connected

1986	Four terrorists attempt to hijack a PanAm 747 from the airport at Karachi, Pakistan. Up to 22 passengers are killed. Subsequently it is revealed that the hijackers planned to fly the plane to Tel Aviv and crash it.
1994	French authorities foil an attempt by Algerian hijackers to slam a plane into the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
1996	Philippine authorities notify the United States that Ramzi Youssef -- the man behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing -- was plotting to hijack an aircraft and crash it into CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
October 1997	During the trial of Ramzi Youssef in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Secret Service agent Brian Parr testifies that Youssef bragged that he hoped the explosion would topple one tower into the other, killing thousands of Americans.
1998	During the investigation of the bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, FBI investigators approach Essam al Ridi, a naturalized American of Egyptian descent, who attended flight schools in Texas. Al Ridi, who was a star witness for the prosecution at the 2001 trial of four men accused of the 1998 bombing, testified that he bought a Saber-40 military aircraft in Arizona for Osama bin Laden, and flew it to Sudan. Ihab Ali Nawawi, an unindicted co-conspirator in the embassy bombings who had trained at a flight school in Norman, OK, was also identified in court documents as a bin Laden contact.
1999	Terrorism experts meeting with FAA security officials describe the scenario of using a commercial airliner as a missile, flying it into skyscrapers, bridges, etc.
December 1999	The National Security Agency learns from electronic eavesdropping that there is going to be a meeting in Kuala Lumpur of possible bin Laden associates.
January 2000	The CIA tracks Nawaf Alhazmi, one of the Kuala Lumpur meeting attendees, to Los Angeles. Later they learn that another attendee, Khalid Almihdhar, arrived on the same flight.   The CIA sends a cable concerning Almihdhar to FBI field offices overseas, including the information that Almihdar had a multiple-entry visa for the U.S. (It would later be revealed that Almihdar and Alhazmi were on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.)
March 2000	The FBI's Carnivore system (now called DCS-1000) intercepts email messages involving Osama bin Laden's network, but a technician destroys them because messages from "non-covered targets" are picked up, as well. Bureau policy was that the collected emails should have been held under seal.
December 2000	U.S. intelligence starts "reporting [an] increase in traffic concerning terrorist activities," according to National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice in a news conference Thursday, May 16, 2002.
January 2001	Peggy Chevrette, manager of the now defunct Jet-Tech flight school, in Phoenix, AZ, contacts the FAA repeatedly about her concern that Hani Hanjour, then a student at the school, lacked the flying skills and English-language facility required for the pilot license he already held. The FAA inspector reportedly checked Hanjour's license, and monitored one of his classes at the Phoenix school, but "observed nothing that warranted further action." (Hanjour is believed to have piloted the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001).
February 2001	CIA Director George Tenet warns that Osama bin Laden poses the "most immediate and serious threat" to the United States. "As we have increased security around government and military facilities, terrorists are seeking out 'softer' targets that provide opportunities for mass casualties"
April-May 2001	Effectively ignoring the work of the Gilmore Commission and the Hart-Rudman Commission, Bush announces that Dick Cheney will oversee development of a plan for responding to terrorist attacks in the United States, and assigns to FEMA, headed by his former campaign advisor, Joe Allbaugh, responsibility for coordinating federal programs in response. Cheney, already occupied with congressional liaison and developing the administration's energy plan, is directed to present recommendations in October.   Between March and May 2001, Egyptian intelligence officials inform the CIA station chief in Cairo that they have penetrated Osama bin Laden's organization.   U.S. authorities report "specific" threats that "al Qaeda attacks against U.S. targets or interests ... might be in the works," according to Rice. "There was a clear concern that something was up, ... but it was principally focused overseas.... The areas of most concern were the Middle East, the Arabian Peninsula and Europe."
Early- to Mid-June 2001	New threats are revealed in the millennium bombing trial, which relates to a terrorist plot in Seattle and Los Angeles set for New Year's Eve 1999 and ends with the conviction of two Algerian nationals. According to Rice, participants in the millennium plot said al Qaeda deputy Abu Zubaydah hinted "there might be interest in attacking the United States."
Late June 2001	After a spike in terrorist threats, the State Department reissues its caution to Americans traveling abroad. The Federal Aviation Administration, mindful of threats such as airline hijackings, informs "private carriers ... saying that we have a concern," said Rice. At the end of June, a federal group known as the Counterterrorism Security Group, or CSG, begins a series of meetings aimed at identifying threats and coordinating a plan of action in case of a terrorist attack.
July 2, 2001	The FBI releases a message saying that "there are threats to be worried about overseas. While we cannot foresee attacks domestically, we cannot rule them out," the bureau letter said, according to Rice. The FAA, meanwhile, issues a message of its own saying convicted millennium bomb plotter Ahmed Ressam told authorities "there was an intention of using explosives in an airport terminal."
Mid- to Late-July 2001	On July 18, the FBI reiterates its July 2 warning in another message, Rice said. The new message said, "We're concerned about threats as a result of the millennium plot conviction" -- a reference to a Mokhtar Haouari's July 13 conviction for supporting a plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. The bureau issues a similar message on August 1. Later in July, the FBI's Phoenix office sends a memo urging headquarters to investigate Middle Eastern men who were students in U.S. flight schools. The memo said bin Laden followers could be planning to use the training for some sort of terrorism. Around this time, the FAA reissues its own message. The communication says: "There's no specific target, no credible info of attack to U.S. civil aviation interests, but terror groups are known to be planning and training for hijackings, and we ask you therefore to use caution." The memo does not reach the desk of David Frasca, who heads the FBI's Radical Fundamentalist Unit, until after September 11.
August 6, 2001	In what Rice later characterizes as "not a warning briefing, but an analytic report," authorities discuss bin Laden's history and methods of operation. The briefing mentions hijacking -- "but hijacking in a traditional sense," not using hijacked planes as targeted bombs, as was done on September 11. "There was no specific time, place or method mentioned."
Mid- to Late-August 2001	The secret FBI "Director's Report," which assesses capabilities of each field office, is delivered to FBI leadership. The report warns that the bureau faces significant terrorist threats from groups like Al Qaeda, but lacks resources to meet them. Acting director Tom Pickard meets with Attorney General Ashcroft, seeking supplemental funding for counterterrorism, but is turned down.   On August 16, the FAA issues a message on "disguised weapons," said Rice. "They were concerned about some reports that the terrorists had made breakthroughs in cell phones, key chains and pens as weapons," she said.   Acting on a tip from a Minnesota flight school, authorities arrest Zacarias Moussaoui August 17, on a visa violation. A French citizen of Moroccan descent, Moussaoui wanted to learn how to fly, but not land, a 747 airliner. In a handwritten message, a Minneapolis-based FBI agent writes that Moussaoui was the "type of person that could fly something into the World Trade Center," according to FBI Director Robert Mueller. Like the July memo from the Phoenix office, the Minnesota memo is sent to the Radical Fundamentalist Unit at FBI headquarters.   Later in August, French intelligence services inform their U.S. counterparts that Moussaoui had trained at an al Qaeda camp in 1998 and had been in contact with al Qaeda members in Europe. Subsequently a 20-page document in which Moussaoi's brother confirms the information is also delivered.   The Minneapolis office of the FBI, finding the French report credible, asks headquarters to obtain a court order a court order under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for permission to search Moussaoui's laptop computer. A supervisor at FBI headquarters modifies the warrant application to downplay the significance of the information provided by the French, according to Coleen Rowley, an agent and counsel in the Minneapolis office, and the application is not pursued.   Moussaoui is held at an INS facility in Minneapolis, and is turned over to the FBI only after September 11.
September 4, 2001	Egyptian intelligence warns the CIA chief in Cairo that Osama bin Laden is in the advanced stages of executing a significant operation against an American target.
September 10, 2001	The National Security Agency intercepts Arabic-language communications between Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, involving at least one suspected Al Qaeda operative. One message refers to the next day as "the big match" and another "zero hour." The messages are not read by analysts until September 12.
September 11, 2001	Nineteen men of Middle Eastern descent linked to al Qaeda hijack four commercial airliners and crash them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a rural Pennsylvania field. More than 3,000 civilians die in the terrorist attacks.

Portions of the chronology table are derived from CNN.com "Timeline: Events Leading Up to 9/11."