Yet, the White House failed to take significant action. Officials at the Counterterrorism Center of the C.I.A. grew apoplectic. On July 9, at a meeting of the counterterrorism group, one official suggested that the staff put in for a transfer so that somebody else would be responsible when the attack took place, two people who were there told me in interviews. The suggestion was batted down, they said, because there would be no time to train anyone else.

Section V of Rebuilding America's Defenses, entitled "Creating Tomorrow's Dominant Force", includes the sentence: "Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor" (51).[14]

Though not arguing that Bush administration PNAC members were complicit in those attacks, other social critics such as commentator Manuel Valenzuela and journalist Mark Danner,[39][40][41] investigative journalist John Pilger, in New Statesman,[42] and former editor of The San Francisco Chronicle Bernard Weiner, in CounterPunch,[43] all argue that PNAC members used the events of 9/11 as the "Pearl Harbor" that they needed––that is, as an "opportunity" to "capitalize on" (in Pilger's words), in order to enact long-desired plans.

But, in order to unleash their foreign/military campaigns without taking all sorts of flak from the traditional wing of the conservative GOP, they needed a context that would permit them free rein. The events of 9/11 rode to their rescue. In one of their major reports, written in 2000, PNAC noted that "the process of [military] transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor."

The Bush Administration, which came to see 9/11 as an "opportunity," used 9/11 and the fear that it generated in the general populace as their cover for enacting all sorts of draconian measures domestically and as their rationalization for launching military campaigns abroad. The Patriot Act, drafted earlier, was rushed through a frightened Congress in the days following 9/11 and the mysterious anthrax attack; few members even had read the huge document. The Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) to go after al Qaida in Afghanistan now is hauled out by the White House to justify torture, domestic eavesdropping, and anything else the "commander-in-chief" wants to authorize during "wartime."