Chance at Osama Pre 9/11, Says Book

TAKEN FROM THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, September 29, 2006
BY BILL HUTCHINSON, DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

The CIA'S top counterterrorism officials felt they could have killed Osama Bin Laden in the months before 9/11, but got the "brushoff" when they went to the Bush White House seeking the money and authorization.

CIA Director George Tenet and his counterterrorism head Cofer Black sought an urgent meeting with then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on July 10, 2001, writes Bob Woodward in his new book "State of Denial."

They went over top-secret intelligence pointing to an impending attack and "sounded the loudest warning" to the White House of a likely attack on the U.S. by Bin Laden.

Woodward writes that Rice was polite, but, "They felt the brushoff."

Tenet and Black were both frustrated.

Black later calculated that all he needed was $500 million of covert action funds and reasonable authorization from President Bush to go kill Bin Laden and "he might be able to bring Bin Laden's head back in a box," Woodward writes.

Black claims the CIA had about "100 sources and subsources" in Afghanistan who could have helped carry out the hit.

The details of the incident are emerging just days after Sen. Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton sparred with Rice over whether the Bush administration had tried to get Bin Laden before the terror attacks.

Woodward claims the intelligence Tenet and Black shared with Rice included communication intercepts indicating the likelihood of an Al Qaeda attack on U.S. soil.

Tenet said he had hoped the meeting would shock Rice into encouraging the President to take immediate action against Al Qaeda.

Black, looking back at the July 10, 2001, meeting with Rice, concludes, "The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her [Rice's] head."

Woodward says that Tenet described the meeting as a "tremendous lost opportunity to prevent or disrupt the 9/11 attacks."

Tenet also claims that his alarm over Bin Laden was downplayed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who asked, "Could all this be a grand deception?"

The book claims that two weeks before the July meeting with Rice, Tenet told Richard Clarke, the National Security Council's counterterrorism director, of his gut feeling about a likely attack.

"It's my sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is going to be the big one," the book quotes Tenet as telling Clarke.