Ignoring CIA advice to keep immigrants out, President Bush toasts Mexican national a mere six days before September 11 attacks.

Politico reporter Chris Whipple writes that George W. Bush refused to implement wartime restrictions in July of 2001, mere months before the September 11 attacks on the United States by foreign Al Qaeda terrorist group.

“If President Bush had followed the advice of CIA counterterrorism chief Cofer Black on July 10 and took the United States to war half a year after taking office, we might have prevented the 9/11 attacks,” writes Whipple.

According to the Politico reporter, Richard Blee, head of the CIA’s Al Qaeda unit, told the Bush administration exactly how Al Qaeda’s attack would occur.

“We were just thinking about all of this and trying to figure out how this attack might occur,” [Black] recalls. “And I’ll never forget this until the day I die. Rich Blee looked at everybody and said, ‘They’re coming here.’ And the silence that followed was deafening. You could feel the oxygen come out of the room. ‘They’re coming here.’”

According to Politico, this was exactly the sort of specific intel necessary to prevent the attacks.

“The Bush administration should have immediately shut down all entry into the country,” writes Whipple. “And should have immediately begun expelling all recent immigrants.”

“Once the Bush administration knew Al Qaeda was ‘coming here’,” writes the Politico reporter, “they should have prevented any foreigners from ‘coming here’. It was criminal not to shut down our borders.”

Politico adds that the Bush administration should also have addressed illegal immigration to keep Al Qaeda from “coming here”.

“They should have built a wall on all of our borders, especially the Southern borders near San Diego and Texas,” writes Whipple. “There is simply no excuse for not building a wall and securing our borders following an intelligence warning that specific.”

The Politico reporter acknowledges that stopping illegal immigration into the United States would have been difficult, but the intel required it.

Tenet vividly recalls the White House meeting with Rice and her team. “Rich [Blee] started by saying, ‘There will be significant terrorist attacks against the United States in the coming weeks or months. The attacks will be spectacular. They may be multiple. Al Qaeda’s intention is the destruction of the United States.’” [Condi said:] ‘What do you think we need to do?’ Black responded by slamming his fist on the table, and saying, ‘We need to go on a wartime footing now!’”

According to Politico, going to wartime footing would have allowed the Bush administration to commandeer private industry to build the border wall that would have prevented the 9/11 attacks.

Whipple also notes that a wartime footing would have allowed the administration to deport all immigrants who had already crossed the border into the United States. “Under a wartime footing,” he writes in Politico, “the President could have nationalized the rail and airline industries and shipped all immigrants back to their country of origin.”

Politico notes that the deportations would, by necessity, include immigrants here legally, as the 9/11 attackers themselves entered, many during the previous administration, on student, tourist, and business visas.

“Certainly,” writes Whipple, “the news media would not have reported kindly on a mass deportation of legal immigrants, but a wartime footing would have allowed the administration to filter what the media reported.”

“This was actionable intel,” writes the Politico reporter. “All that the Bush administration needed to do was go to wartime footing, censor the news media, build a wall to secure our borders, deport all foreign nationals, and then, once that was completed, start a pre-emptive war in Afghanistan.”

“The CIA told them exactly what was happening—they’re coming here—and exactly what to do about it—go to wartime footing. It’s criminal that they didn’t act on this intel.”