The Washington junta just wasn't interested in terrorism until September, 2001. They were only concerned about imaginary enemies, like those which would be the targets of their appalling star-wars-defense fantasy and their war-on-drugs fantasy.

The Bush administration sat on a Clinton-era plan to attack al-Qaida in Afghanistan for eight months because of political hostility to the outgoing president and competing priorities, it was reported yesterday.

....

The plan to take the counter-terrorist battle to al-Qaida was drafted after the attack on the warship the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000. Mr Clinton's terrorism expert, Richard Clarke, presented it to senior officials in December, but it was decided that the decision should be taken by the new administration.

[The Clinton White House outlined the threat in briefings they provided for Condoleezza Rice, George Bush's national security adviser, in January 2001, just before she and her team took over.]

However, Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, was more interested in the national missile defence plan, and the new attorney general, John Ashcroft, was more interested in using the FBI to fight the "war on drugs" and clamping down on pornography. In August, he turned down FBI requests for $50m for the agency's counter-terrorist programme.