When the President arrived back at the White House on September 11th, he was told that the FBI had identified the names of two known al-Qaeda agents Khalid al Mihdhar and Nawaf al Hazmi on the passenger list of the plane that hit the Pentagon. "The President became aware that night that there had been a mistake involving CIA and FBI and their sharing of information. He had the same attitude that I did, which was outrage. I was flabbergasted, I couldn't imagine that the FBI knew the names of people in this country who were al-Qaeda and yet these people were allowed to get on airplanes under those names, not using false identity. I was just mind boggled. Why hadn't the FBI told the transportation department that they were looking for these people? Why weren't they on the do-not-board list? On 9/11 that wasn't the day or time to spend a lot of effort to try and answer that question," remembers counterterrorism director Richard Clarke.

That same afternoon, Ben Sliney discovered that FAA headquarters had issued a terrorist hijack alert three months earlier. He was shocked, "That highjack alert wasn't transmitted to air traffic control. That highjack alert was transmitted to airlines. And I say with dismay, I think we would have reacted, I believe in my heart we would have reacted so much quicker to that. You would have had 16 thousand sets of ears and eyes and very inquisitive minds looking at everything that could possibly be suspicious with that type of information in our heads."

On the evening of September 11th, Richard Clarke drove home through the deserted streets of Washington. He stopped and gazed at the smoldering Pentagon, "It's sort of the kind of hockey game where if the other team scores one goal you've lost the game. And when they launched that attacked on September 11th, we all felt that they had won and we had lost." "It used to be that America felt our oceans protected us, that we were somehow a little less vulnerable to perhaps those types of attacks than other countries across the world. But that day our entire view of America's security changed. And it caused our national security team and the President to reevaluate America's security in light of this very different threat in the world," says Karen Hughes senior advisor to President Bush.

From the beginning of the Bush Administration, Richard Clarke says that he did everything in his power to coax them into action against al-Qaeda without success. In the twenty-four hours following 9/11, the Bush team was ready to go to war.

But Mr. Clarke says they picked the wrong target, "Well, in meetings on September 11th and on September 12th, the defence department officials, including Secretary Rumsfeld, began talking about the need to attack Iraq. I first thought that they were kidding and it became clear that they weren't. Rumsfeld said, well yeah, we could attack Afghanistan but there aren't very many targets to bomb in Afghanistan and they're not worth very much. So we should bomb Iraq where there are much better targets. I thought there's no connection between what just happened and Iraq. That didn't seem to bother them. I said well attacking Iraq actually will make it more difficult for us to get the kinds of support we need in the world particularly in the Muslim world. That didn't seem to bother them. Secretary Powell tried to have a restraining influence on this discussion. Secretary Powell said look the world is not going to understand if we don't go after Afghanistan. That's where the attack of September 11th was launched from. So reluctantly, during the course of the week, the defence department came around to a consensus and the consensus was called Afghanistan first that's what the President approved, an Afghanistan first policy. It was very clear what was second, and what was second was Iraq."

Condoleezza Rice explains that there were no warnings.

There has been a lot of controversy about the Bush Administration's truthfulness about 9/11. Even eight months after the attack, Condoleezza Rice maintained that there had been no warnings, "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Centre, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon. That they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."

James Steinberg, former Deputy National Security Advisor disagrees, "One could not, not have known about that. There were known plans to us to fly a plane into the CIA. We certainly knew about other operations in other parts of the world involving flying a plane into a target. So it was on everybody's radar screen and I don't accept the argument somehow that this couldn't have been imagined. It was very much something that people understood was a potential method of attack."

From the 1995 Intelligence Estimate, which predicted terrorists would use airplanes as weapons to attack U.S. landmarks, to the hijacking threats that were communicated to the President in August 2001 there were a lot of warnings on the path to 9/11. Many of them came through the counterterrorism chief at the White House. Richard Clarke testified as the star witness before the 9/11 Commission hearings in March 2004. In a statement, Clarke apologized to all the families who lost relatives on 9/11, "Your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you, failed you. And I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter, because we failed."

Kean, co-chair of the 9/11 Commission agrees, "This is a failure of government right down the line. Whether it's the intelligence agencies, whether the immigration people, whether it's the FAA, whether, you name the agency, they all shared here in culpability. There's nobody who worked for the United States government in that period, who doesn't share some part of the responsibility."

Richard Clarke testifies at the 9/11 hearings.

Richard Clarke quit his job as counterterrorism director in the Bush Administration. At the end of his long war against al-Qaeda, he was left with an overwhelming feeling of guilt. "I think everybody involved in the counterterrorism effort prior to September 11th feels guilty that they didn't do more. Or if they don't feel that way, they ought to."