“We Are at War.” It is perhaps the most ridiculous memo ever written by a government bureaucrat, with neither the authority or the army to so declare. And it made no difference.
On the evening of December 3, CIA director George Tenet “furiously drafted” a longhand memo declaring war and telling his staff that “I wanted no resources or people spared in the effort to go after al Qaeda.”
“We must now enter a new phase in our effort against Bin Ladin,” Tenet wrote in the top-secret memo that circulated the next day. “We all acknowledge that retaliation [for American cruise missile attacks] is inevitable and that its scope may be far larger than we have previously experienced.”
Tenet later writes: “I want [deputy CIA director] Charlie Allen to immediately chair a meeting with NSA, NIMA, CITO [our clandestine information technology organization] and others to ensure we are doing everything we can to meet CTC’s [Counterterrorist Center] requirements.”
“The 9/11 Commission later said that I declared war but that no one showed up. They were wrong.” (At the Center of the Storm, pp. 118–119)