March 24, 2004 - Responding to a question about Richard Clarke’s book the President said, "The facts are these, George Tenet briefed me on a regular basis about the terrorist threat to the United States of America, and had my administration had any information that terrorists were going to attack New York City on Sept. 11, we would have acted,"

Well. Mr. President, perhaps no one told you that at 9:00 AM on September 11, 2001 terrorists would fly an airplane into the World Trade Center but you surely knew that the Continental United States was a Al Qaeda target. You were, after all, devoting your attention to constructing your new administration when the lame duck Clinton Administration picked up the Al Qaeda bomber headed for LAX foiling the Millennium plot. About the same time an alert immigration agent in Miami turned away the man some suspect was the missing twentieth hijacker. I guess nobody told you.

We know that nobody told you about the arrest of the Al Qaeda operative in Minneapolis or the FBI agent’s concerns about the number of Middle-Eastern young men taking flight lessons or the two known Al Qaeda agents living in California. Nobody told you that there had been a foiled attempt by terrorists to fly a plane into the Eiffel Tower and nobody told you that the CIA had uncovered a plot to fly a bomb into Langley. Nobody told you that the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing told his guards that if he had enough explosives the Twin Towers would not be standing. Nobody told you so nobody acted.

But if somebody had told you, had somebody given you all those dots to connect it still would not have given you the information that the next targets would be the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and that the strike would come on September 11th. We know that you were told that the threat was high in the late summer of 2001. We do know that the FAA warned that there was a treat to civil aviation. We do know that Attorney General Ashcroft was warned not to fly commercial during that summer of threats. But nobody told you that the attack would come on September 11th and that the target would be in New York. Nobody told you so nobody acted.
Nobody told you that Osama Bin Laden, the brother of the men who had bailed you out at Harken, was under indictment for the Cole attack and the attacks on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and was roaming free in Afghanistan. Nobody told you but the rest of America knew it. Some of us do read newspapers or at least listen to some of the news on television. Nobody could imagine that an aircraft could be used as a terrorist weapon. Except that back in the 1970’s Thomas Harris did imagine it and wrote a book. In 1977 John Frankenheimer made the book into a film called “Black Sunday”. Maybe Osama saw the it and heard the fictitious terrorist say, "The American people have remained safe through all the cries of the Palestinian people. People of America, this situation is unbearable for us. From now on, you will share our suffering."

But nobody listened because it wasn’t Saddam. Nobody told you because it wasn't Saddam and nobody acted. Nobody, that is, except Mohammed Atta and his Al Qaeda comrades. They acted decisively and America is still paying the price because nobody told you.