Bush and many others in his war cabinet—including Cheney and the C.I.A.’s George Tenet—assumed reasonably that al-Qaeda must be planning follow-on attacks. When evidence surfaced that autumn that bin Laden had met with Pakistani nuclear scientists in Afghanistan, they even worried that al-Qaeda might have the capacity to pull off an atomic strike. “I could only imagine the destruction possible if an enemy dictator passed his WMD to terrorists,” Bush wrote later.[12]
