The issue, thus, isn’t that Bush had specific intel, which he did not. It’s that he may have ended increased scrutiny of Arab/Middle Eastern passengers at airports, because of his soft spot for a favored political constituency or his affinity for the Gulf royals, who are Muslim.
Read this:
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" The CIA had quite a bit of information about two of the hijackers and their presence in the United States before 9/11" ...
"An investigation by the CIA inspector general -- published in unclassified form in 2007 -- found that this was not the oversight of a couple of agency employees but rather that a large number of CIA officers and analysts had dropped the ball. Some 50 to 60 agency employees read cables about the two al Qaeda suspects without taking any action. "
And here's the CIA IG states the obvious conclusion:
"The CIA inspector general's report concluded that "informing the FBI and good operational follow-through by CIA and FBI might have resulted in surveillance of both al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi. Surveillance, in turn, would have had the potential to yield information on flight training, financing, and links to others who were complicit in the 9/11 attacks."
It's a dereliction of duty in light of these CIA reports to Bush:
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“Here is a representative sampling of the CIA threat reporting that was distributed to Bush administration officials during the spring and summer of 2001:
— CIA, “Bin Ladin Planning Multiple Operations,” April 20
— CIA, “Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent,” June 23
— CIA, “Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delays,” July 2
— CIA, “Threat of Impending al Qaeda Attack to Continue Indefinitely,” August 3
The failure to respond adequately to these warnings was a policy failure by the Bush administration, not an intelligence failure by the U.S. intelligence community. Federal judges at odds over NSA data collection “
http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/30/opinion/bergen-nsa-surveillance-september-11/
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I'd say both failed. Bush failed and the intelligence community failed.