wilwheaton:

The White House received a truly remarkable amount of warnings that al-Qaida was trying to attack the United States. From June to September 2001, a full seven CIA Senior Intelligence Briefs detailed that attacks were imminent, an incredible amount of information from one intelligence agency. One from June called “Bin-Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats” writes that “[redacted] expects Usama Bin Laden to launch multiple attacks over the coming days.” The famous August brief called “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike the US” is included. “Al-Qai’da members, including some US citizens, have resided in or travelled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure here,” it says. During the entire month of August, President Bush was on vacation at his ranch in Texas — which tied with one of Richard Nixon’s as the longest vacation ever taken by a president. CIA Director George Tenet has said he didn’t speak to Bush once that month, describing the president as being “on leave.” Bush did not hold a Principals’ meeting on terrorism until September 4, 2001, having downgraded the meetings to a deputies’ meeting, which then-counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke has repeatedly said slowed down anti-Bin Laden efforts “enormously, by months.”

The thing that I think a lot of people are missing when they read this story is that intelligence worked the way it was supposed to, but Bush the Incompetent didn’t pay attention, because he didn’t care. He was a lazy and stupid son of privilege who was too busy being on vacation to take his responsibilities as president seriously.

Consider this, though: all the laws passed in the aftermath of 9/11, including the PATRIOT Act, that we were told were absolutely necessary to save us from The Terrorists™ just aren’t. The system was working the way it was supposed to work, and the 9/11 plot should have been stopped, but we had an incompetent jackass president who didn’t take it seriously.