Not if you were paying attention to any of the players involved before 9/11. Or even after for that matter.
That 9/11 was used as a pretext for things the people involved wanted for other reasons and had been seeking for years (in some cases decades) without any connection to terrorism was pretty obvious. These were in some cases the very same people that were openly upset while serving in the Ford Administration against the legislative constraints that were placed in the wake of abuses by Nixon.
It was never believably about terrorism, it was always about restoring overwhelming executive power.
I agree with you when you say that it was never about terrorism but rather increasing executive power, though. There certainly was a trend toward increased surveillance for many years before, but the entrance of surveillance into the new world-dominating media of the internet is a story in and of itself, I think.
The great thing about hyperbole is that it rebuts itself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intellige...
What about parallel construction, putatively started to help with terrorists but now usually used in drug investigations in order to sidestep civil rights safeguards?
You'll find that what Bush started, Obama has drastically developed, distributed, and expanded.
Under Bush we had increasing levels of surveillance which were undesirable, but the veneer that it was still all about terrorism could at least be believed. Now, we know it's targeted specifically at us for the purposes of exploitation and domination of us.