TRUMP, Donald. 2016 US presidential candidate: "They knew an attack was coming. George Tenet, the CIA director, knew in advance that there would be an attack. And he said so to the president, and he said so to everybody else that would listen. And that came out"

Donald Trump, Republican presidential candidate, saying that Bush was warned about 9-11, that Bush was mistaken to invade Iraq, that the US fueled and created ISIS and that nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation being “the world's great problem right now” (2015): “ OK. Well, first of all, it started much differently than this. Jeb at the debate -- and I wanted to be nice. I didn't want to be insulting, because it is his brother. And he's loyal to his family. Jeb is a very good person. I have to say that. And I've watched him. Even last night, they said, "If Trump wins, would you vote for him? And would you be with him?" He said, "Yes, I would be with him. I would be with the Republican Party." I mean, I thought it was a very classy answer, to be honest with you. So what -- this all started because Jeb made the statement that "under my brother, we were safe." Well, if he would have qualified by saying "after the attack," but he didn't do that. So I said the other day, because somebody brought up that statement. And I said in an interview, that you know, how can you say you were safe under his brother when we just had the worst attack in the history of our country? You can't say you were safe. You can say, yes, we did well after but then we also made mistakes there, because yes, were safe in a sense, but we went into Iraq, which was a disastrous decision. Not Afghanistan, because that's probably where we should have gone in the first place. But Iraq was a disastrous decision. So we go into Iraq, and we make a mistake. But -- and you can also say is that safe going into Iraq while we're losing thousands of soldiers? That's not safe either, when you get right down to it. But I simply said that you can't say that we were safe under -- He said, "Under my brother we were safe." You can't say that, because we had the worst attack in the history of this country, and I guess worse than Pearl Harbor. But that would be right up there. But we had our worst attack…

So I thought it was very -- I thought it was very obvious. And it got a lot of pushback. I didn't think it would be very, you know, controversial when I made it. I made the statement quite innocently, actually…

They knew an attack was coming. George Tenet, the CIA director, knew in advance that there would be an attack. And he said so to the president, and he said so to everybody else that would listen. And that came out. The other thing is, the FBI, the NSE and the CIA were not talking to each other. These are the three main agencies. And they weren't talking to each other and they weren't talking because they didn't like each other. And they had a lot of problems getting along. And that's leadership. You have to, you know -- you have to get your three main agencies to talk to each other. They had a lot of information that, if it could have been correlated, it would have been very, very helpful…

You know, as President Truman said, the buck stops here. Whether you like it or not, Truman would have said -- He wouldn't have been talking about after the attack. He would have said the buck stops here. But you had the FBI, NSE and the CIA, all three, they weren't talking to each other. Now, you know, say what you want. But then we went out and attacked the wrong country, because we went out and attacked Iraq. They had no weapons of mass destruction, as you know, and as we found out, and as we found out in spades. So they had no -- We destabilized the entire Middle East. I mean, this is all -- the Middle East is a mess right now because of Iraq, because we totally destabilized. And the two powers, Iraq and Iran, one got decapitated, and Iran now is taking over the Middle East, taking over Iraq, taking over the oil. And the other one that gets some of the oil is ISIS. OK? So we fueled and created ISIS out of this…

[re “October 6 about Afghanistan. You said, "We made a terrible mistake getting involved there in the first place"] OK. I never said that. Wouldn't matter. I never said it. Afghanistan is a different kettle. Afghanistan is next to Pakistan. It's an entry in, you have to be careful with the nuclear weapons. It' all about the nuclear weapons. By the way, without the nukes it's a whole different ball game. But it's all about the nuclear weapons. That's going to be -- when, you know, Bernie Sanders gets up and says global warming is our biggest problem, I've got news for him. The biggest problem is nuclear weapons, nuclear proliferation. That's the world's great problem right now. Believe me” (Donald Trump interviewed by CNN anchor Alice Cammerota, transcript, 20 October 2015: http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1510/20/nday.03.html ).

Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, blaming the 9-11 attacks on the inaction of US Government (2016): “The World Trade Center came down during the reign of George Bush. He kept us safe? That is not safe. That is not safe” (Donald Trump quoted in Alan Yuhas, “Donald Trump and 9-11: the lies, exaggerations and eye-popping claims”, Guardian, 12 September 2016: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/11/donald-trump-9-11-comments-since-2001 ).

Some unexpected Donald Trump quotes from a 9/11/2001 [11 September 2001] Donald Trump live phone interview with New York’s WWOR as reported by Politico and Mother Jones re his 71-story Trump Tower (2001): “40 Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan, and it was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest—and then, when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second-tallest. And now it’s the tallest” and

“It wasn’t architectural defect. The World Trade Center was always known as a very, very strong building. Don’t forget that took a big bomb in the basement [in 1993]. Now, the basement is the most vulnerable place because that’s your foundation, and it withstood that, and I got to see that area about three or four days after it took place because one of my structural engineers actually took me for a tour, because he did the building, and I said, ‘I can’t believe it.’ The building was standing solid and half of the columns were blown out, so this was an unbelievably powerful building. If you don’t know anything about structure, it was one of the first buildings that was built from the outside. The steel, the reason the World Trade Center had such narrow windows is that in between all the windows, you had the steel on the outside, so you had the steel on the outside of the building. That’s why when I first looked, and you had these big heavy I-beams, when I first looked at it, I couldn’t believe it because there was a hole in the steel, and this is steel that was… You remember the width of the windows of the World Trade Center, folks. I think you know if you were ever up there, they were quite narrow and in between was this heavy steel. I said how could a plane, even a plane, even a 767 or 747 or whatever it might have been, how could it possibly go through this steel? I happen to think that they had not only a plane, but they had bombs that exploded almost simultaneously, because I just can’t imagine anything being able to go through that wall. Most buildings are built with the steel on the inside around the elevator shaft. This one was built from the outside, which is the strongest structure you can have, and it was almost just like a can of soup. I just think that there was a plane with more than just fuel. I think, obviously, they were very big planes. They were going very rapidly, because I was also watching where the plane seemed to be not only going fast, it seemed to be coming down into the building. So it’s getting the speed from going down hill, so to speak. It just seemed to me that to do that kind of destruction is even more than a big plane, because you’re talking about taking out steel, the heaviest caliber steel that was used on the building. Well, these buildings were rock-solid, and you know it’s just an amazing, amazing thing. This country is different today and it’s going to be different than it ever was for many years to come” ( Linh Dinh, “Trump & 9/11”, Countercurrents, 28 September 2016: http://www.countercurrents.org/2016/09/28/trump-and-911/ and Truth Makes Peace, “Trump saw on 9/11/2001: bombs were used in WTC”, You Tube, 16 September 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt-ldMj9y9w ).

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