NPR's Mike Shuster reports that despite all the missed signals, poor intelligence and lousy communication between counter-terrorist agencies, politics did play a role in early 2001 in the inability of the U.S. government to anticipate al Qaeda attacks in the United States. Testimony before the commission investigating the government's actions before and after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks paints a picture of an incoming Bush administration unwilling to see the threat from al Qaeda as urgently as the outgoing Clinton administration did.
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