Elizabeth Drew: How much is George W. Bush responsible for 9/11?

[Human101948]

1. About 90%...

On April 10, 2004, the Bush White House declassified that daily brief —
and only that daily brief — in response to pressure from the 9/11 Commission,
which was investigating the events leading to the attack. Administration
officials dismissed the document’s significance, saying that, despite the jawdropping
headline, it was only an assessment of Al Qaeda’s history, not a
warning of the impending attack. While some critics considered that claim
absurd, a close reading of the brief showed that the argument had some
validity.
That is, unless it was read in conjunction with the daily briefs preceding
Aug. 6, the ones the Bush administration would not release. While those
documents are still not public, I have read excerpts from many of them, along
with other recently declassified records, and come come to an inescapable
conclusion: the administration’s reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the
weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence
than has been disclosed. In other words, the Aug. 6 document, for all of the
controversy it provoked, is not nearly as shocking as the briefs that came
before it.
The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack
began in the spring of 2001. ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/opinion/the-bush-white-house-was-deaf-to-9-11-warnings.html