Day of reckoning | 3 September 2011

No one could say that we didn’t have warning of these events in the most specific terms. A month before 11 September 2001, the President’s daily intelligence brief was headed ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.’ Other official warnings from this time and earlier were so specific, and so specifically ignored, that a former National Security Adviser at the White House, Sandy Berger, would on four separate occasions in 2002 and 2003 abstract official top secret documents from the National Archives by stuffing them in his socks. (Because of Berger, we now don’t know what these warnings consisted of).

There were any number of commentators, too, who saw exactly what was coming. Peggy Noonan wrote in Forbes magazine in 1998 that terrorists agreed that the great city of the United States is … the dense 10-miles-long island called Manhattan … If someone does the big terrible thing to New York or Washington, there will be a lot of chaos … it could happen tomorrow.