QandO

July 23, 2004

Are we safe?
Posted by McQ

Per the 911 report there were 9 opportunities that various agencies had to disrupt the 911 attacks. Having reviewed the 6 listed below in the Atlanta Journal Constitution this morning, and they're nothing new, I'd have to call the opportunites in name only.

They include:

1. Failing to put two of the al-Qaida operatives who took part in the Sept. 11 attacks on the terrorist watch list to keep them from entering the country. Terrorists Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar entered in January 2000 after they had been observed meeting with senior al-Qaida leaders in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, earlier that month. The government failed to track them down when they came, even though they used their own names.

[CIA/FBI]

2. Failing to link the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui in August 2001 with heightened warnings that a major attack was coming. Moussaoui is now awaiting trial for allegedly conspiring in the attacks.

[FBI/CIA]

3. Failing to discover false statements on visa applications or detect passports that were manipulated in a fraudulent manner.

[Immigration]

4. Failing to expand "no-fly lists" to include names from terrorist watch lists.

[CIA/FAA]

5. Failing to search passengers identified by the computer-based CAPPS screening system during a time described by CIA Director George Tenet when there were so many warnings that al-Qaida was about to attack that the "system was blinking red."

[CIA/FAA/Airport Security]

6. Failing to take steps to protect cockpit doors against entry by those bent on suicide hijackings despite warnings that al-Qaida was considering using airplanes as weapons to attack the United States.

[FAA]

I've put the agency or agencies I feel were responsible in those 6 "opportunities" underneath the item in brackets "[]".

1 and 2 are the result of preexisting problems with the CIA and FBI exchanging information. In short, they don't. And the result was when the surveilance and coordination should have gone from international to internal there was never a handover. The ball was dropped. 1 and 2 are the result of a systemic problem that's been identified (and was known to exist before 911, in fact its been known to exist for decades). They claim there's a mechanism in place now to do those sorts of exchanges in a timely manner. Fixed?

3. is a problem of an overwhelmed and inept bureaucracy which extended the visa, 6 months after his death, of one of the hijackers. Where we stand on fixing this sort of problem is a mystery, but I assume its not much better at this point than it was then unless major structural and procedural changes (and not just changing its name) have been implemented. Fixed?

4 and 5. More sharing of information snafus. Unless there's a mechanism in place for that information to be transfered quickly to the FAA's ATS department and acted upon swiftly, there's no reason to believe the system is any better today than it was then. Fixed?

6. I see this one as a matter more of complacency than incompetence. We hadn't had a hijacking in a decade. We were lulled into a false sense of security. This one actually is on the way to being fixed.

So 5 of the 6 major problems had to do with the sharing and coordination of information we had but didn't properly utilize. Much of that might have been sorted out if there was a single intelligence clearing house whose responsibilty was to gather input from all agencies and "connect-the-dots". And as you recall, "connect-the-dots" was a term in major use when all of this was being reviewed.

I've read and heard the arguments against an Intel Czar, and that may not be what we need. But we need some method of coordinating and disseminating intelligence gathered in a useful and timely manner. We need to have a group who's entire job is to work toward "connecting-the-dots". If that means grouping all agencies under an Intel Czar, so be it. But if so, he or she must not only be given the responsibility to coordinate intel, but also authority over all other agencies. Without both, the job won't get done.

I haven't yet made up my mind if that's the best route to go, but regardless of the route chosen its going to be a long and tough change. Intel agencies in existence are not going to want to give up their power easily nor are they going to want to submit to the direction of a super-agency. Bureaucracy 101.

But the possible catastrophic results of this continued insularity, lack of cooperation between agencies and failure to share information is foreordained.

Look at the list of those 6 opportunites above. Had we been coordinated, cooperating and sharing information between agencies before 911 there is a distinct possibility that they might actually have been opportunities, as we'd have actually had the mechanisms in place to identify and act upon the information gathered.

As it stood though, to call those "opportunities" in light of the problems which existed at the time is simply an exercise in hyperbole. There was no real opportunity at all to disrupt these people with the dysfunctional intel system we had in place at the time and to pretend there was is to give much to much credit to a system that doesn't deserve it. It also infers that the fix is easy. Its not.

So while they're nothing new until we can put "fixed" beside each one of those 6, I have to agree with the report, we may be "safer" than before 911, but we are far from safe. Until we see "fixed" by them, we shouldn't delude ourselves into believing we are.

UPDATE: I've tracked down two more of the 9 "opportunities" over at Fox.com:

7. Not sharing information linking individuals in the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole (search) in Yemen to al-Mihdhar, who had contacts with a longtime FBI informant. The Cole attack killed 17 American sailors.

[FBI/CIA]

8. Not taking adequate steps in time to find al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi in the United States.

[FBI]

9. Not recognizing that some hijackers' passports were fraudulent.

[Immigration]

Pretty much 'more of the same' concerning information sharing and a dysfunctional INS. Makes one realize why the dots were hard to connect.

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