Ex-CIA director, staff condemn Bush White House for failing to stop 9/11

In his first interview in eight years, former CIA director George Tenet revealed the multiple warnings he and his staff gave to the Bush administration in the months leading up to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. As Cofer Black, Tenet's chief of counterterrorism, told Politico, by May 2001, "it was very evident that we were going to be struck, we were gonna be struck hard, and lots of Americans were going to die."

Tenet and Black pitched "the Blue Sky paper" to Bush's security team in spring 2001, calling for a "covert CIA and military campaign to end the al Qaeda threat." "The word back was 'we're not quite ready to consider this. We don't want the clock to start ticking,'" Tenet said, which meant the administration "did not want a paper trail to show that they had been warned," Politico suggests.

Things came to a boiling point in July 2001, when multiple sources confirmed the threat of an attack. Tenet arranged a meeting with Bush's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice:

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There's even more to the story — read it all in Politico, or look for The Spymasters: CIA in the Crosshairs on Showtime November 28th, at 11 p.m. EST.