Troublesome "facts?"

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Ned
Che, I failed to see the meeting Atta had with the Iraqi intelligent agent in the Czech Republic. This tells me something about the politics of this information.

But aside from that, it is clear that the US knew that OBL and al Qaida were a threat and that we had warnings galore about iminent attacks on the US. Congress even knew. Yet we failed to act to prevent them.

There definitely was an intelligence failure. Heads should role - particularly the guilty and not the scapegoats.

However, I do not subscribe to the notion that Bush was behind 9/11.

Nor do I. From what I've read in this article, it doesn't seem that the author believes so either.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by SpencerH
While the intel agencies may be incompetent, I'm not coddling them. I've known of their limitations for over 20 years. Your comments make it clear to me that you've been watching too many spy movies if you think that the intel community can (or wants to) work in that fashion.

I've been wathing too many spy movies if I think that given the number of warnings that the FBI could have been directed to take this threat as its top priority?

When you ask the question, what could have been done, you seem to think that prevention means putting anti-aircraft missiles around the targets and having fighters in the air to shoot hijacked planes down.

When I answer that question, I think, arrest the al-Qaeada operatives who were taking flying lessons that the FBI had information on. I fail to see the difficultly or fantasy of this. I mean, it's not like these flight school weren't going to the authorities saying something is awfully odd here. It's not as if a Pheonix FBI agent didn't write a huge memo about it. It's not as if one of the conspirators wasn't in custody.

As disconnected events, yes, I can see the easy possiblity of stuff getting lost in the paper shuffle. Given that the Administration had every reason to be concerned about terrorist hijackings and should have directed the FBI to look into it, I think it within the realm of possiblity that those disconnected events would have remained disconnected.

So let me take you through it carefully, maybe you can follow and point out my error.

1) Numerous warnings to the top of the Administration of hijackings and plane crashes beging directed against the US.

This should have lead to:

2) The Attorney General says to the FBI and CIA, find out everything you can about this and see if you can stop these guys.

Which might have lead to:

3) "Disconnected" info stopped and seperated by bureaucracy and policy is unstopped and integrated.

However, in the real world, we stopped at one. There was no two, so there was no possibility of a three.

It isn't the failure that I'm upset about. It's the not trying.

[JCG]

I generally agree with the conclusions you guys are reaching, I just don't think some of the pieces of "evidence" presented in that article are legitimate.

[Sikander]

The article is crap. It mixes wildly disparate information from sources of various repute, and reads like the stream of counscious ramblings of a paranoid, which in large part it is. I could exceed the single post limit just pointing out case by case the internal inconsistencies and provable falsehoods. That said, what about the few bits of pertinent information?

The worst charges are that several foreign agencies gave warnings which seemingly were not heeded. I say seemingly because we don't know whether anything was done or not, only that if something was done it didn't work. This is the most damaging because information from sources like these goes into the intelligence community at a much higher level than say a report from an FBI field agent who notices that a lot (relatively I suppose) of Arabs are taking flying lessons.

Where did this info go and what was done about it? This is the crucial question for any investigation. My guess is that some of the information was fumbled and some of it was acted upon within the limitations of the bureaucracy, and herein lies the real problem. The U.S. intelligence bureaucracy was designed for a completely different type of war. It's successes even for the sort of war it was designed to fight were not exactly legendary, and it is a completely insufficient tool for fighting what is a guerrilla intelligence war.

Consider for a moment the history of intelligence agencies in the U.S. It is a very short history, with no permanent foreign intelligence bureau until after WWII. The FBI, our internal security branch, is not even 100 years old. The CIA was created from the very limited experience of WWII to fight the Cold War, while the FBI has grown steadily from a internal crime fighting agency to an internal political police agency to a counterintelligence agency. This grafting of duties on to an existing bureau insures an extra measure of inefficiency as the personnel policies, structure and philosophy of an organization tend to retain less than ideal attributes for new the missions. Thus the stiff "uncorruptable" G-man who is good at hunting down bank robbers and organized crime lacks the ruthlessness, technical sophistication and imagination to be the ideal counter to the threat of the KGB, and is completely out of his element in trying to counter a threat as alien to his world as an Al Quaida cell.

The CIA for it's part has never been all that effective at it's primary task, which is to provide militarily and politically useful information about foreign governments. It's sideline, gathering enormous quantities of often unclassified information and subjecting it to rigorous analysis has been in large part a failure as well, for the same reason anyone tends to be less than accurate when trying to predict the future. Humanity is a complex system, and only a model as complex as the original will suffice to provide anything like infallibility. Why would the CIA know something about the Soviet Union that the KGB cannot? It has little chance of doing so.

When tasked to deal with the terrorism threat the CIA is in well over it's head. Though it's personnel are better suited to the mission than the FBI, it's internal organization is just as hopeless. It is designed as much for defense as offense, and the legacy of that fairly useful model for the Cold War is compartmentalization. In theory compartmentalization limits the damage that can occur when one state's intelligence organ is inevitably infiltrated by another state's intelligence organ. The price paid is that by limiting the flow of information between and within agencies one significantly degrades the amount, quality and timeliness of information that flows to people in a position to act on it. This is considered a fair trade off in the largely static world of state to state operations, where your enemy is hampered by a bureacracy as ponderous as your own, but it is fatal when your mission is to fight large numbers of small semi-independant cells who are under no such limitations.

These are the problems that every administration has had to deal with for years. It's a shame that for 10 years we haven't had a president with the energy and imagination to make this case to congress and suggest a viable alternative. Bush deserves his share of the blame, but it is a small share up to 9/11. Failure to make a concerted effort now falls on both congress and the administration. It is the administration that has to have the vision and take the first step by proposing it's program, and it is congress who has to have the courage to tell the bureaucracy where to get off. I suggest the next stop.

Now the administration has made an effort to upgrade the internal security effort by creating a new uber-agency (Office of Homeland Security) to oversee things. This is a half-measure at best. Yes it's good that we are going to worry less about compartmentalization and concentrate more on disseminating information quickly and much more widely. The problem is that we are only stripping the FBI of it's high level responsibilities in this regard while relying on it and an alphabet soup of other agencies to do the grunt work. This is clearly a recipe for finger-pointing and foot-dragging. Cabinet status is not enough to reign in the FBI if the efforts of the Department of Justice to do so over several decades are any indication. The FBI needs to concentrate it's efforts on fewer tasks which it can do more efficiently with far fewer people. Homeland Security needs more organic personnel selected specially for it's mission.

We also need a new group to take the war to the enemy by finding him wherever he is, infiltrating, harrassing, mind-fvcking, snatching, and killing him. A small but scary threat can do a lot of damage just by forcing the enemy to worry about his own security. The Israelis do a good job of this, so it's not like we have to reinvent the wheel here. What we should do though is cut the CIA in two. One part continues with the CIA's original mandate of mostly enemy state oriented activities, and it retains (or hopefully improves) it's counterintelligence defenses, while the new group cranks up to a wartime pace, takes chances, acts boldly by willingly sharing information internally and with the Office of Homeland security and by acting on whatever information it receives. This is wartime, and we have to take the bull by the balls.

[SpencerH]

Che

The problem with your analysis is that you're making a lot of assumptions about what the administration knew. There were no "numerous warnings to to the top of the Administration of hijackings and plane crashes being directed against the US". The non-specific warnings of various possible actions would have been passed to different Intel organizations not to the administration. Did you think that Putin picked up the phone and chatted with Bush about this issue? The Intel community is the conduit for any threat assessment to any officials in the administration. Info from foreign agencies and other pertinent data would have been passed to nameless analysts in a variety of organizations (who don’t normally speak to each other). They evaluate the info and notify their superiors of their assessments. Those assessments may be dismissed or accepted based on a judgment call made by each higher layer of bureaucracy within the Intel organization. Who knows what assessments got to the cabinet level? I think its likely that the threat of hijackings did, but what else?

In order for the administration to have given the type of order that you envision they would have to have been effectively briefed on and understood the seriousness of the threat. That may not have happened for a variety of reasons. The fact is that none of us know where the breakdown occurred (if what happened was a breakdown as opposed to the inertia that infects these huge agencies in peacetime). It may seem ridiculous (after the fact) that no one correctly assessed the data but given the size of these organizations and their rivalry its likely that no one person saw all the pertinent info.

The solution is to totally re-vamp the Intel community, but that isnt going to happen because of a lack of will to do so on the part of the administration and congress (and that failure is their responsibility).

[Sirotnikov]

Put real pressure on the Israelis to make peace with the Palestinians. [...] This, of course, would likely get me killed by a Mossad assassin.

Not at all.

These days they will just assign some uber-zionist teen to harass and annoy you by posting zionist propoganda

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by SpencerH
Did you think that Putin picked up the phone and chatted with Bush about this issue?

The warning was passed along in August. In August, Putin was in Texas, with Bush, at Bush's ranch. I don't think he needed to pick up a phone.

[SpencerH]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara

The warning was passed along in August. In August, Putin was in Texas, with Bush, at Bush's ranch. I don't think he needed to pick up a phone.

OK so lets assume that Putin has been briefed that this is a very serious matter and that the Russians think it'll happen soon etc etc , so he personally brings it up at a meeting with Bush. If all of that occurred (cos it aint necessarily so), now we have your scenario of what did the administration do from Aug to Sept 11 to deter this attack? I dont know, but I do know that its likely that anything of any intelligence importance would be a closely guarded secret so we wouldnt be aware of it. Thats just SOP.

[Kepler]

It would be interesting to really know how many warnings and tips roll into the CIA re: possible terrorist threats. My guess would be thousands per month; it might even be thousands per day. Meanwhile, I know somebody currently on their way to joining the CIA, and there is -- for example -- one person assigned for research for *all* of West Africa. You don't need conspiracy or incompetence charges to understand how genuine tips can get buried -- it's a simple matter of being understaffed and underfunded.

[Xeones]

re: what difference this information might have made to americans at large at the time ...

consider what happened to the flight that crashed in PA, passengers knew what was intended and minimized the damage. if people at large had been told of this type of stuff as it came up, perhaps those planes would not have made it to NY or the pentagon. its still not victory or prevention, but casualty numbers might have been thousands lower.

no i dont buy into a conspiracy, just colossal stupidity, and the utter failure of the intelligence community at large.

[MosesPresley]

Go Che!

Although Osama bin Goldstein was wanted dead or alive and any Arab with the slightest connection to al-Qaeda was being detained for interrogation, the bin Laden clan was allowed to fly out of the country with the help of the FBI, even though all flights had been grounded.

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020121&s=hitchens

excerpt follows from an article by Christopher Hitchens:

Consider the following. On September 11, you could not fly and I could not fly. The national airspace was locked down. But twenty-four members of the bin Laden family, living in the United States, were gathered by private jet under the auspices of Prince Bandar Bin-Sultan, the Saudi ambassador in Washington. With what he gratefully describes as the cooperation of the FBI, the Prince mustered all the bin Ladens, who at the first opportunity were taken under FBI escort to Boston's Logan Airport (departure point for two of the death squads) and then permitted to fly home with no questions asked. I do not think that any question of racial profiling would have been involved if members of the immediate bin Laden tribe had been inconvenienced to the extent of being asked a few questions. Boasting of this amazing coup on October 1, Prince Bandar told Larry King an affecting story about one of these privileged escapees:


"But you know what hurt me? A young man said to me, "Prince Bandar, I always couldn't understand why the American Japanese wanted a memorial. What's the big deal?" He said: 'Suddenly I realize: I'm a rich man, I'm in Harvard, and I have to leave my school, not because I was guilty, but because the emotions are high. That really touched me, Larry.'"