"Who Blew It?"

"Last October, urging Congress to get tough on the obvious suspects, the leggy blonde commentatrix Ann Coulter declared: "Americans aren't going to die for political correctness." They already have." (Mark Steyn)

News and commentary on supposed intelligence failures leading up to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

2002
"Probe: U.S. Knew of Jet Terror Plots" (Ken Guggenheim, AP/Yahoo! News, 2002/09/18)
"Could 9/11 Have Been Prevented?" (Michael Elliott, TIME, 2002/08/04)
"Stereotyping and the Decline of Common Sense" (Paul Hollander, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/07/19)
"Visas for Suspected Terrorists?" (Joel Mowbray, National Review, 2002/07/17)
"September 11, 1998" (James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal/Best of the Web Today, 2002/07/17)
"It's terrorism, stupid" (Dick Morris, NY Post, 2002/06/11)
"In Years of Plots and Clues, Scope of Qaeda Eluded U.S." (Judith Miller and Don van Natta Jr., The New York Times, 2002/06/09)
"Bush Seeks Security Department" (Mike Allen and Bill Miller, The Washington Post, 2002/06/07)
"Leahy blocked key anti-terror reforms" (Paul Sperry, WorldNetDaily, 2002/06/05)
"A 'Final Exam' Begins for Security Agencies" (Dana Priest, The Washington Post, 2002/06/04)
"Who Blew It?" (Mark R. Levin, National Review, 2002/06/03)
"The Hijackers We Let Escape" (Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman, Newsweek, from the 2002/06/10 issue)
"Does political correctness kill?" (Mark Steyn, National Post, 2002/05/31)
"Liberal Reality Check" (Nicholas D. Kristof, The New York Times, 2002/05/31)
"Mueller: Clues Might Have Led To Sept. 11 Plot" (Dan Eggen and Susan Schmidt, The Washington Post, 2002/05/30)
"Terrorism Focus Set for FBI" (Susan Schmidt, The Washington Post, 2002/05/29)
"How the FBI Blew the Case" (Romesh Ratnesar and Michael Weisskopf, TIME, 2002/05/25)
"Time for an Investigation" (William Kristol and Robert Kagan, The Weekly Standard, from the 2002/05/27 issue)
"No one knew enough" (John Podhoretz, New York Post, 2002/05/18)
"No Hint of Sept. 11 in Report in August, White House Says" (David E. Sanger and Elisabeth Bumiller, The Washington Post, 2002/05/17)
"What Bush Knew Before Sept. 11" (CBS News, 2002/05/17)

"Probe: U.S. Knew of Jet Terror Plots" (Ken Guggenheim, AP/Yahoo! News, 2002/09/18)
"Intelligence agencies failed to anticipate terrorists flying planes into buildings despite a dozen clues in the years before the Sept. 11 attacks that Osama bin Laden or others might use aircraft as bombs, a congressional investigator told lawmakers Wednesday as they began public hearings into the attacks. Just a month before the attacks, intelligence agencies were told of a possible bin Laden plot to hit the U.S. Embassy in Kenya or crash a plane into it. The preliminary report by Eleanor Hill, staff director of the joint House and Senate intelligence committee investigation of the terrorist strike, showed authorities had many more warnings about possible attacks than were previously disclosed. The reports were generally vague and uncorroborated. None specifically predicted the Sept. 11 attacks. But collectively the reports "reiterated a consistent and critically important theme: Osama bin Laden's intent to launch terrorist attacks inside the United States," Hill said." (See also the preliminary report: "Joint Inquiry Staff Statement, Part 1." (Eleonor Hill, Staff Director, Joint Inquiry Staff/The Washington Post, 2002/09/18))

"Could 9/11 Have Been Prevented?" (Michael Elliott, TIME, 2002/08/04)
"The saga of a lost chance" is a chronicle of how al Qaeda was handled by the Clinton and the pre 9/11 Bush administrations: "As the battle raged, Clarke's plan awaited Bush's signature. Soon enough, the Northern Alliance would get all the aid it had been seeking-U.S. special forces, money, B-52 bombers, and, of course, as many Predators as the CIA and Pentagon could get into the sky. The decision that had been put off for so long had suddenly become easy because a little more than 50 hours after Massoud's death, Atta, sitting on American Airlines Flight 11 on the runway at Boston's Logan Airport, had used his mobile phone to speak for the last time to his friend Al-Shehhi, on United Flight 175. Their plot was a go.That morning, O'Neill, Clarke's former partner in the fight against international terrorism, arrived at his new place of work. He had been on the job just two weeks. After Atta and Al-Shehhi crashed their planes into the World Trade Center, O'Neill called his son and a girlfriend from outside the Towers to say he was safe. Then he rushed back in. His body was identified 10 days later."

"Stereotyping and the Decline of Common Sense" (Paul Hollander, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/07/19)
"The precipitous decline of common sense in our times, associated with a politically correct solicitousness toward some minorities was also revealed in the recent case of a Muslim woman in Florida who insisted on her right to wear the type of veil (niqab) that covered her entire face except her eyes in the photograph used in her driver's license. The picture, needless to say, is completely useless for the purpose it is supposed to serve, namely the visual identification of the driver. ... The Florida case makes it clear that multiculturalism carried to its logical, politically correct conclusion is incompatible with the existence of a modern secular society in which the laws apply equally to everybody regardless their religious beliefs. By the same token the pretense that everybody flying, or hanging around nuclear power plants has an equal likelihood of committing terrorism is as absurd as to insist that no differences exist among the many human groups, or that members of particular social, national or ethnic groups have nothing in common. At the root of both of these beliefs we find the type of multiculturalism that harbors relentless hostility toward American society and Western values and extends sympathy to every group that questions or rejects these values."

"Visas for Suspected Terrorists?" (Joel Mowbray, National Review, 2002/07/17)
"The State Department is fighting a terrorism task force's recommendation that suspected terrorists be denied visas - this is the same department that wants to hold onto the visa-issuance power in a time of war when our enemies want nothing more than entry into the United States. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage responded to the recommendation by writing to the Justice Department that "[believing that] an applicant may pose a threat to national security... is insufficient [grounds] for a consular officer to deny a visa." No, this letter wasn't written before last year's tragedy; it was written on June 10, 2002, one day shy of the nine-month anniversary of 9/11."

"September 11, 1998" (James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal/Best of the Web Today, 2002/07/17)
Taranto quotes from the summary of the Terrorism and Homeland Security Subcommittee of the House Intelligence Committee report on pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failures: "'Prophetically, IC [intelligence community] leadership concluded at a high-level offsite [meeting] on September 11, 1998 that 'failure to improve operations management, resource allocation, and other key issues ..., including making substantial and sweeping changes in the way the nation collects, analyzes, and produces intelligence, will likely result in a catastrophic systemic intelligence failure.''' (See also PDF version of the summary: "Counterterrorism Intelligence Capabilities and Performance Prior to 9-11 - A Report to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the Minority Leader" (FindLaw, July 2002) and "Intelligence agencies need overhaul, report says" (CNN.com, 2002/07/17): "The devastating terrorist attacks of September 11 underscore the need for major changes in the nation's three main intelligence-gathering agencies, according to a summary of a critical congressional report. While the summary, released Wednesday, does not conclude that last year's attacks could have been prevented, it does fault the CIA for failing to act on information that "proved to be directly relevant to 9-11" and said counterterrorism gaps existed before then.")

"It's terrorism, stupid" (Dick Morris, NY Post, 2002/06/11)
"While The New York Times is preoccupied with the "swirling" investigation into the warnings about 9/11 and liberal commentators zealously focus on potential invasions of our civil liberties, voters are solidly behind tough measures to combat terror even at the expense of an erosion of certain civil liberties. The danger they see is another terrorist attack. The Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll of June 6 reflects the true priorities of most Americans. By 63 percent to 24 percent, they support "expanding law-enforcement powers to catch suspected terrorists, even if it requires sacrificing some personal civil liberties." ... By 54 percent to 34 percent, voters approve of "using racial profiling to screen Arab-male airline passengers." ... A very real and specific fear of new terror preoccupies America's mind. Half of all Americans believe that "terrorists will detonate a nuclear device on U.S. soil" within the next 10 years - and 16 percent expect it within the next 12 months. ... To read the media is to see an America turning on itself frothing with questions about who knew what and when did they know it. To read the polls is to find a nation united and committed to taking the next steps to battle terror. Largely trusting of the government, it is quite willing to see common-sense actions to fight and prevent terror, even if they outrage the civil libertarian purists in our midst."

"In Years of Plots and Clues, Scope of Qaeda Eluded U.S." (Judith Miller and Don van Natta Jr., The New York Times, 2002/06/09)
"A re-examination of years of terrorist plots and attacks around the world, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, suggests that American intelligence agencies profoundly underestimated Al Qaeda's reach and aspirations for more than a decade as it grew from obscurity into a global terrorist threat, lawmakers and investigators said this week. ... Government officials and analysts say the tentacles of what later became Al Qaeda first appeared in the United States as early as 1986 - the same year the C.I.A. established its counterterrorism center to enhance the sharing of information among the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the other agencies that collect and analyze intelligence information. ... None of the country's intelligence agencies accurately perceived the threat posed by Al Qaeda until the mid-1990's, officials say. Osama bin Laden remained a shadowy figure who built a multinational terror network whose scope was largely undetected until 1998, when Al Qaeda bombed the embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania."

"Bush Seeks Security Department" (Mike Allen and Bill Miller, The Washington Post, 2002/06/07)
"President Bush, outlining the most ambitious reorganization of the government's national security structure in a half-century, urged Congress last night to create a Department of Homeland Security to coordinate intelligence about terrorism and tighten the nation's domestic defenses. The department would absorb a huge swath of the executive branch, including all of the Coast Guard, Secret Service, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Immigration and Naturalization Service and Customs Service, as well as the new agency in charge of airport security, the Transportation Security Administration. Only the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs would have more employees." (See also: "Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation" (The White House, 2002/06/06))

"Leahy blocked key anti-terror reforms" (Paul Sperry, WorldNetDaily, 2002/06/05)
"Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy Thursday will take the FBI to task for missing terror warnings before Sept. 11. But it was Leahy, Hill sources say, who in 2000 blocked FBI and other reforms that might have prevented the attacks. The amazingly prescient reforms were first proposed in a 64-page counterterrorism report delivered June 5, 2000, to Congress. ... Yet Leahy and other Democrats bristled at many of the key proposals, which they viewed as too intrusive and discriminatory toward foreigners, and the entire final report – "Countering the Changing Threat of International Terrorism" – collected dust on Capitol office shelves. ... The bipartisan panel warned that religiously motivated groups, namely al-Qaida, were hellbent on inflicting "mass casualties on American soil." ... Spaulding, who also praised Kyl's efforts, says Democrats were also swayed by media reports that "mischaracterized" the tracking of foreign students as "spying." ... Woolsey says universities also fought the proposal. "From the uproar from university lobbyists, you would have thought we had proposed jackbooted SS agents following foreigners around on campus," he said." (See also: "Countering the Changing Threat of International Terrorism." (National Commission on Terrorism, 2000/06/05))

"A 'Final Exam' Begins for Security Agencies" (Dana Priest, The Washington Post, 2002/06/04)
"In scope and importance, the congressional intelligence inquiry that begins today behind closed, soundproof doors on the Capitol's top floor rivals the 1975 hearings chaired by Idaho Sen. Frank Church (D) that curbed spying on U.S. citizens and prompted stricter oversight of covert operations overseas. But facing an elusive terrorist enemy based both abroad and in the United States, the bipartisan panel of Senate and House intelligence committee members that meets today is poised to undo nearly three decades of restraints aimed at curbing CIA and FBI abuses and safeguarding civil liberties. ... The committee, co-chaired by Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), is trying to answer three interwoven questions: What did the intelligence agencies know about the 19 al Qaeda hijackers before the Sept. 11 attacks? What did these agencies do with the information? And how can the system be improved to ensure that planning for such an assault does not slip past the $30 billion-a-year U.S. intelligence apparatus again?"

"Who Blew It?" (Mark R. Levin, National Review, 2002/06/03)
"During the last three or four weeks, we've seen a cycle of leaks and spin intended to assign blame for supposed intelligence failures leading up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. At first, the culprit was President Bush, then the FBI, and most recently the CIA. But how credible are these news stories? The first attempt was a leak to CBS News about an August 6, 2001 intelligence briefing in which Bush received generic information about the possibility of terrorists hijacking U.S. airliners. Upon receiving that information, the relevant federal agencies were put on alert. Immediately, members of Congress, in particular Democratic Senate Leader Tom Daschle and House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt, claimed that Bush had not shared this information with Congress. ... There was nothing to this story. And to the best of my knowledge, there are no news reports even suggesting that Bush (or for that matter, Congress) had information predicting, with any specificity, the Sept. 11 attacks."

"The Hijackers We Let Escape" (Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman, Newsweek, from the 2002/06/10 issue)
"What happened next, some U.S. counterterrorism officials say, may be the most puzzling, and devastating, intelligence failure in the critical months before September 11. A few days after the Kuala Lumpur meeting, Newsweek has learned, the CIA tracked one of the terrorists, Nawaf Alhazmi, as he flew from the meeting to Los Angeles. Agents discovered that another of the men, Khalid Almihdhar, had already obtained a multiple-entry visa that allowed him to enter and leave the United States as he pleased. (They later learned that he had in fact arrived in the United States on the same flight as Alhazmi.) Yet astonishingly, the CIA did nothing with this information. Agency officials didn't tell the INS, which could have turned them away at the border, nor did they notify the FBI, which could have covertly tracked them to find out their mission. Instead, during the year and nine months after the CIA identified them as terrorists, Alhazmi and Almihdhar lived openly in the United States, using their real names, obtaining driver's licenses, opening bank accounts and enrolling in flight schools - until the morning of September 11, when they walked aboard American Airlines Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon."

"Does political correctness kill?" (Mark Steyn, National Post, 2002/05/31)
"In August, 2001, no one at the FBI or FAA or anywhere else wanted to be seen to be noticing funny behaviour by Arabs. Thousands of Americans died, at least in part, because of ethnic squeamishness by federal agencies. ... So it's not oil, but rather that even targeting so obvious an enemy as the Saudis is simply not politically possible. Cries of "Islamophobia" and "racism" would rend the air. The Saudis discriminate against Americans all the time: American Jews are not allowed to enter the "Kingdom," nor are American Episcopalians who happen to have an Israeli stamp in their passports. But even after September 11th the West can't revoke the fluffy myth that all cultures are equally nice and so we must be equally nice to them, even if they slaughter large numbers of us and announce repeatedly their intention to slaughter more. Last October, urging Congress to get tough on the obvious suspects, the leggy blonde commentatrix Ann Coulter declared: "Americans aren't going to die for political correctness." They already have."

"Liberal Reality Check" (Nicholas D. Kristof, The New York Times, 2002/05/31)
"As we gather around F.B.I. headquarters sharpening our machetes and watching the buzzards circle overhead, let's be frank: There's a whiff of hypocrisy in the air. One reason aggressive agents were restrained as they tried to go after Zacarias Moussaoui is that liberals like myself - and the news media caldron in which I toil and trouble - have regularly excoriated law enforcement authorities for taking shortcuts and engaging in racial profiling. As long as we're pointing fingers, we should peer into the mirror. The timidity of bureau headquarters is indefensible. But it reflected not just myopic careerism but also an environment (that we who care about civil liberties helped create) in which officials were afraid of being assailed as insensitive storm troopers. So it's time for civil libertarians to examine themselves with the same rigor with which we are prone to examine others. ... But let's be realistic: Young Arab men are more likely to ram planes into nuclear power plants than are little old ladies, and as such they should be more vigorously searched - though with no less courtesy."

"Mueller: Clues Might Have Led To Sept. 11 Plot" (Dan Eggen and Susan Schmidt, The Washington Post, 2002/05/30)
"The FBI's embattled director acknowledged for the first time yesterday that investigators might have been able to uncover part of the Sept. 11 plot if the FBI had properly put together all the clues in the possession of the bureau and other agencies. FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III told reporters that the Minnesota arrest of alleged Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui and warnings from a Phoenix FBI agent about terrorists at aviation schools would not, on their own, have led investigators to the Sept. 11 plot. But if the FBI had connected those two cases with other evidence that Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network was keenly interested in aviation, Mueller said, "who is to say" what could have been discovered. "I can't say for sure that there wasn't the possibility that we would have come across some lead that would have led us to the hijackers," he said."

"Terrorism Focus Set for FBI" (Susan Schmidt, The Washington Post, 2002/05/29)
"The FBI will shift 480 agents from drug and other criminal investigations to counterterrorism posts and plans to more than double the bureau's anti-terror forces under a major reorganization that FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III is scheduled to announce today. Mueller's plan, as outlined by law enforcement officials, would permanently devote 2,600 agents – nearly a quarter of the bureau's 11,500-agent workforce – to counterterrorism units, which were staffed by 1,000 agents before the Sept. 11 attacks."

"How the FBI Blew the Case" (Romesh Ratnesar and Michael Weisskopf, TIME, 2002/05/25)
"The product of months of gathering frustration, [Coleen] Rowley's memo - a full copy of which was obtained by Time - unspools in furious detail how, in the weeks leading up to the hijackings, officials at FBI headquarters systematically dismissed and undermined requests from Rowley's Minneapolis field office for permission to obtain a warrant to wiretap and search the computer and belongings of Zacarias Moussaoui, the French-Moroccan operative arrested in Minnesota last August and facing trial this fall as the sole person charged with conspiring in the attacks. Rowley asserts that the FBI didn't "do much" to share information about Moussaoui with other government agencies or to match the evidence that Moussaoui took pilot lessons with an earlier report from a Phoenix field agent raising suspicions about Middle Eastern men enrolled in flight school. In Rowley's view, bureaucratic incompetence stalled an investigation that may have led closer to the black heart of Osama bin Laden's plot. "It's at least possible we could have gotten lucky and uncovered one or two more of the terrorists in flight training prior to Sept. 11," Rowley writes. 'There is at least some chance that ... may have limited the Sept. 11th attacks and resulting loss of life.'" (See also: "Coleen Rowley's Memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller" (TIME, 2002/05/25))

"Time for an Investigation" (William Kristol and Robert Kagan, The Weekly Standard, from the 2002/05/27 issue)
"Isn't it possible that some people should be reprimanded, or even lose their jobs, when 3,000 Americans are killed in a terrorist attack? For the past eight months the Bush administration has essentially been saying that everything and everyone worked just fine. That is absurd and unsustainable. ... Surely the first step in fixing the system - and thereby defending ourselves against the next attack - is to identify what went wrong or who performed badly. Isn't anyone troubled by the fact that if the failure stemmed partly from incompetence, then the incompetent people are still at their vitally important posts? Isn't President Bush troubled? If it was the system that failed, then should that same system be left in place because no one is willing to take a hard look at how and why it failed?"

"No one knew enough" (John Podhoretz, New York Post, 2002/05/18)
"The Pearl Harbor intelligence failure has been a subject of intense study for six decades. The scope of the Sept. 11 intelligence failure is just now coming clear. But the parallels are remarkable. Both involve the inability of government officials to bring together information from different agencies that would have revealed the enemy's true purpose. And sadly, there's reason to believe that, like Pearl Harbor before it, 9/11 will give rise to noxious conspiracy theories blaming the government of the United States for the mass murder of its citizens. That's not surprising. What is surprising, and shocking, is that it appears Democrats on Capitol Hill are willing to encourage such despicable conspiracy theories for their own narrow partisan purposes."

"No Hint of Sept. 11 in Report in August, White House Says" (David E. Sanger and Elisabeth Bumiller, The Washington Post, 2002/05/17)
"Confronting a political uproar over its disclosure that President Bush was cautioned last August that Osama bin Laden might be planning a hijacking, the White House said today that the assessment was in a C.I.A. report that was not based on specific intelligence that terrorists were planning the Sept. 11 attacks. In a detailed briefing this afternoon, Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, said the government had received numerous reports of terrorist threats last summer, but she emphasized that the information seemed general and pointed toward potential attacks overseas."

"What Bush Knew Before Sept. 11" (CBS News, 2002/05/17)
"President Bush was told in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks that Osama bin Laden's terrorist network might hijack U.S. passenger planes - information which prompted the administration to issue an alert to federal agencies - but not the American public. CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin says the warning was in a document called the President's Daily Brief, which is considered to be the single most important document that the U.S. intelligence community turns out. The document did not, however, mention the possibility of planes being flown into buildings." (See also:"'99 Report Warned Of Suicide Hijacking" (CBS News, 2002/05/17): "Exactly two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal report warned the executive branch that Osama bin Laden's terrorists might hijack an airliner and dive bomb it into the Pentagon or other government building. "Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al Qaeda's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House," the September 1999 report said. The report, entitled the "Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?," described the suicide hijacking as one of several possible retribution attacks al Qaeda might seek for the 1998 U.S. airstrike against bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan.")

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