https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna6856550
I would like to plainly say something that is likely unpopular: the CIA has been relatively great in the last 30 years for the USA, and the world. They do real research, state facts, and even speak out against political dumbass-ness. They are often circumvented and ignored due to politics.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/11/us/politics/cia-sept-11-i... (gift article)
This and the parent comment might be correct, but also, the US has one of the largest intelligence agencies in the world and the US defence budget dwarfs everyone else’s.
They failed spectacularly in the role they exist to perform. This deserves criticism.
'Keeping Americans safe' is not on their agenda. If it were, they wouldn't be sticking America's hand into Middle Eastern quagmires, like the one that radicalized OBL and provided a training ground for his friends and allies. If it were, they wouldn't be working half as hard in demonstrating to hundreds of millions of people that yes, America does, in fact, mean them harm, and is happy to inflict that harm on them.
Not really.
When you look back, seeing how things turned out, history looks different than it almost certainly felt to most people at the time.
It took 250-300 years for the Roman Empire to collapse. You could make a pretty strong argument that the US has been in decline for decades, and that cracks in Pax Americana were already forming during the Vietnam War era.
They did a reorg, and Richard Clarke, who was the terrorism and Bin Laden “guy” was in effect demoted and lost access to the president.
The timing was bad for the US. Clinton was deeply personally engaged in this stuff. Bush was an arms length guy who delegated. Personally, I think Bin Laden and his cronies had a really good read or an instinct in this dynamic.
To be useful, information doesn't just have to have a good false negative rate, it also has to have a good false positive rate, and be specific. Otherwise its useless as you can't persue every possible lead.
That's not fair, they happily hand over intelligence briefings to people with no clearances or vetting whatsoever.
[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/president...
There is one PDB per day. One. It is a presentation, not just a sheet of paper. And it's assembled by a team who are producing something for someone who (normally) is the most scheduled person alive save astronauts, who are well aware of that person's fixed resources in terms of time and attention.
Acting like the amount of information presented, especially to someone with extensive executive experience as the governor of Texas, is somehow overwhelming, is beyond disingenuous.
The important context missing here is that Bush was infamous for treating the PDBs like a hassle he didn't want to have to deal with.
The important context missing here is that the terrorists practically put up a neon flashing sign saying "WE WANT TO HIJACK AIRLINERS." They literally told instructors they only cared about specific phases of flight - I think one said "we don't need to know how to land." You know, the hardest part of flying a plane?
The important context missing here is that the WTC attack was used to justify a massive amount of domestic spying.
The last important context missing is that the current president has a very similar attitude toward almost any form of briefing, and entered us into a war largely because he didn't understand nuclear weapons treaties and did not listen to anyone who told him that a weapons treaty having an end date is normal - so the treaty can be revised and renegotiated to meet changes in both countries and the rest of the world. You-know-who thought it was a weakness and the US was getting screwed.
The important context missing here is that Bush was only president for about 8 months when 9/11 happened, and most of the released PDBs were presented to his predecessor, Clinton.
> Acting like the amount of information presented, especially to someone with extensive executive experience as the governor of Texas, is somehow overwhelming, is beyond disingenuous.
First of all, the vast majority of the released files were under Clinton's tenure - it had nothing to do with who was president.
Secondly, to your point these would have been in the form of small snippets in much larger briefings. If only 1-2 paragraphs of a 20 page PDB are related to a fringe terror cell in Afghanistan, it's obviously not going to get the same attention as the other 19 pages. And we're only talking about 71 PDBs over 3 years. It's not about being unable to ingest the information, it's about the massive amount of noise you have to deal with.
Thirdly, you can read for yourself in these documents that there was never any such large neon flashing sign except in retrospect. Planes and suicide attacks were not mentioned until August - less than a month before the attacks. And until then they were completely viewing it as a hostage or conventional bombing attack.
You don't have to predict exactly what's gonna happen to surveil or interfere with known terrorists you let into your own country, who you know are engaged in some sort of training having to do with aircraft hijackinng, and keep that from happening.
You should watch the Tucker Carlson 9/11 series. He does a good job picking up where Michal Moore left off in the mid 2000s (though they'd both probably be offended to hear me say that) and does so with the hindsight of 20yr of declassification and general hindsight that hadn't yet happened in the mid 2000s
The various agencies knew something was gonna happen. Nobody knew what or when or where exactly because the pieces hadn't been put together. They were all looking through their own little keyholes. They all should have seen enough to take action. But why didn't they? But it's pretty clear that the CIA and maybe some other intel agencies either through blunder or neglect or hubris had something to do with it.