In Deep: The FBI, the CIA, and the Truth about America's "Deep State"

by David Rohde

On August 6, 2001, President Bush himself had been warned of a possible domestic attack by Al Qaeda in an article included in the President’s Daily Brief entitled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S.” Bush later told the 9/11 panel that he remembered the article but was never informed that a Qaeda cell was active inside the United States. Tenet told the 9/11 Commission that “the system was blinking red” during the summer of 2001, but no one in the American national security community saw what was coming. “The foreign intelligence agencies were watching overseas, alert to foreign threats to US interests there,” the commission found. “The domestic agencies were waiting for evidence of a domestic threat from sleeper cells within the United States. No one was looking for a foreign threat to domestic targets. The threat that was coming was not from sleeper cells. It was foreign—but from foreigners who had infiltrated into the United States.”