This is John Batchel. Conversation with Liza Mundy, her book The Sisterhood, The Secret History of Women at the CIA,

highly recommended, comes up to date with the Bush administration, not recognizing the warnings that were

coming from the CIA, from the sisterhood, that there was an organization al-Qaeda that was dangerous transnationally

using technology against the U.S., such as flying airplanes into buildings, not listen to.

Here's the lies that to explain what didn't happen.

We know what did.

More of this later tonight. That's correct. Yes.

Yes. The Bush administration, many of them were old cold warriors, you know, or career long cold

warriors. And they really, this transition from the Clinton to the Bush administration was important.

I mean, it was an important, important and not in a good way, in that a whole new team had to be convinced,

national security team had to be convinced that this was a reality, that al-Qaeda was a real

threat. And, you know, and they had heard of established groups like Hamas and Hasbalah that

had state backing from a government.

But a shadowy network of fighters that didn't have an army, that didn't have their own technology,

the idea that they could turn America's technology against itself and fly American planes

into American buildings was something that the analysts were trying to, again, call

attention to, but the Bush administration national security team by and large really could not

get its head around this as a real important threat or figure out what to do about it, because

that was that

was a lot of very difficult discussions.