Chris
July 28th 03, 06:57 PM
The Bush administration continues to fight, successfully, to prevent
public knowledge of what now-public intelligence information the
president was exposed to prior to 9/11. They claim this is a matter
of "national security." If anyone on this thread thinks they can
formulate a coherent argument for why the president's knowledge of
information already in the public domain needs to be kept secret in
the interests of the common defense, I would really, really like to
hear it.
Until then, I will continue to believe that this is just one more
cynical self-serving maneuver by a president facing reelection who
wants to protect himself from well-deserved political embarrassment
and condign public censure, and who wants to claim that he is really
just doing it for our own good.
Chris (USA)
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030804&s=dcorn
The 9/11 Investigation
By David Corn
TheNation.com
Thursday 24 July 2003
The attacks of September 11 might have been prevented had the
US intelligence community been more competent. And the Bush
Administration is refusing to tell the public what intelligence the
President saw before 9/11 about the threat posed by Al Qaeda.
These are two findings contained in the long-awaited, 800-page
final report of the 9/11 joint inquiry conducted the Senate and House
intelligence committees, which was released on July 24. As is
traditional in Washington, the contents of the report were selectively
leaked before it was officially unveiled. And several news outfits
noted that the report contained "no smoking guns" and concluded, as
the
Associated Press put it, that "no evidence surfaced in the probe...to
show that the government could have prevented the attacks." Those
reports were wrong--and probably based on information parceled out
by sources looking to protect the government and the intelligence
community.
In the report's first finding, the committees note that the
intelligence community did not have information on the "time, place
and specific
nature" of the 9/11 attacks, but that it had "amassed a great deal of
valuable intelligence regarding Osama bin Laden and his terrorist
activities," and that this information could have been used to thwart
the assault. "Within the huge volume of intelligence reporting that
was
available prior to September 11," the report says, "there were various
threads and pieces of information that, at least in retrospect, are
both relevant and significant. The degree to which the [intelligence]
community was or was not able to build on that information to discern
the bigger picture successfully is a critical part of the context for
the September 11 attacks." One Congressional source familiar with the
report observes, "We couldn't say, 'Yes, the intelligence community
had all the specifics ahead of time.' But that is not the same as
saying this attack could not have been prevented."
The final report is an indictment of the intelligence
agencies--and, in part--of the administrations (Clinton and Bush II)
that oversaw them. It notes, "The intelligence community failed to
capitalize on both the individual and collective significance of
available information.... As
a result, the community missed opportunities to disrupt the September
11 plot by denying entry to or detaining would-be hijackers; to at
least try to unravel the plot through surveillance and other
investigative
work within the United States; and, finally, to generate a heightened
state
of alert and thus harden the homeland against attack. No one will ever
know what might have happened had more connections been drawn
between these disparate pieces of information.... The important point
is that the intelligence community, for a variety of reasons, did not
bring together and fully appreciate a range of information that could
have greatly enhanced its chances of uncovering and preventing
Osama bin Laden's plan to attack the United States on September 11,
2001."
The committees' report covers many missed--and
botched--opportunities. It shows that warnings and hints were either
ignored or neglected. Some of this has been covered in interim reports
released last year and in media accounts. But the final report does
contain new information and new details that only confirm an ugly
conclusion: A more effective and more vigilant bureaucracy would
have had a good chance of detecting portions of the 9/11 plot. "The
message is not to tell the intelligence community," said the source
familiar with the report, "that you didn't have the final announcement
of the details of the September 11 attacks and therefore you could not
prevent it. We have to have an intelligence community that is able to
connect dots and put the pieces together and investigate it
aggressively."
An example: The FBI had an active informant in San Diego who had
numerous contacts on 2000 with two of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf
al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. And he may also have had more
limited contact with a third hijacker, Hani Hanjour. In 2000, the CIA
had information that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar--who had already been
linked to terrorism--were or might be in the United States. Yet it had
not placed them on a watch list for suspected terrorists or shared
this information with the FBI. The FBI agent who handled the San Diego
informant told the committees that had he had access to the
intelligence information on al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, "it would have
made a huge difference." He would have "immediately opened" an
investigation and subjected them to a variety of surveillance. It can
never be known whether such an effort would have uncovered their
9/11 plans. "What is clear, however," the report says, "is that the
informant's contacts with the hijackers, had they been capitalized on,
would have given the San Diego FBI field office perhaps the
intelligence community's best chance to unravel the September 11
plot. Given the CIA's failure to disseminate, in a timely manner, the
intelligence information on...al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, that chance,
unfortunately, never materialized." (The FBI's informant--who is not
named in the report--has denied any advance knowledge of 9/11,
according to the report, but the committees raise questions about his
credibility on this point, and the Bush Administration objected to the
joint inquiry's efforts to interview the informant.)
The CIA was not the only agency to screw up. So did the FBI. In
August 2001, the bureau did become aware that al-Mihdhar and
al-Hazmi were in the United States and tried to locate them. But the
San Diego field office never learned of the search. The FBI agent who
was handling the informant in San Diego told the committees, "I'm
sure we could have located them and we could have done it within a
few days." And the chiefs of the financial crime units at the FBI and
the Treasury Department told the committees that if their outfits had
been
asked to search for these two terrorists they would have been able to
find them through credit card and bank records. But no one made
such a request.
The final report notes that the CIA and other intelligence
agencies were never able to develop precise intelligence that would
have
allowed a US attack on bin Laden before 9/11. And it reveals that
there were even more warnings than previously indicated that Al Qaeda
was
aiming to strike at the United States directly. In an interim report
released last year, the committees provided a long list of
intelligence reports noting that Al Qaeda was eager to hit the United
States and
that terrorists were interested in using airliners as weapons. The new
material in the report includes the following:
§ A summer 1998 intelligence report that suggested bin Laden was
planning attacks in New York and Washington.
§ In September 1998 Tenet briefed members of Congress and told
them the FBI was following three or four bin Laden operatives in the
United States.
§ In the fall of 1998 intelligence reports noted that bin Laden
was considering a new attack, using biological toxins in food, water
or
ventilation systems for US embassies.
§ In December 1998 an intelligence source reported that an Al
Qaeda member was planning operations against US targets: "Plans
to hijack US aircraft proceeding well. Two individuals...had
successfully evaded checkpoints in a dry run at a NY airport."
§ In December 1999 the CIA's Counter terrorism Center concluded
that bin Laden wanted to inflict maximum casualties, cause massive
panic and score a psychological victory. To do so, it said, he might
seek to attack between five and fifteen targets on the millennium,
including several in the United States.
§ In April 2001 an intelligence report said that Al Qaeda was in
the throes of advanced preparation for a major attack, probably
against an
American or Israeli target.
§ In August 2001 the Counter terrorism Center concluded that for
every bin Laden operative stopped by US intelligence, an estimated
fifty operatives slip through, and that bin Laden was building up a
worldwide infrastructure that would allow him to launch multiple and
simultaneous attacks with little or no warning.
Despite these warnings, the intelligence bureaucracy did not act
as if bin Laden was a serious and pressing threat. A CIA briefing in
September 1999 noted that its unit focusing on bin Laden could not
get the funding it needed. In 2000 Richard Clarke, the national
coordinator for counter terrorism, visited several FBI field offices
and asked what they were doing about Al Qaeda. He told the committees,
"I got sort of blank looks of 'what is al Qaeda?" Lieut. Gen. Michael
Hayden, director of the National Security Agency, said that in 2001 he
knew that the NSA had to improve its coverage of Al Qaeda but that he
was unable to obtain intelligence-community support and resources
for that effort.
According to the report, an FBI budget official said that counter
terrorism was not a priority for Attorney General John Ashcroft prior
to
9/11, and the bureau faced pressure to cut its counter terrorism
program to satisfy Ashcroft's other priorities. (The report did not
state
what those other priorities were.) In a particularly damning
criticism,
the report notes, "there was a dearth of creative, aggressive analysis
targeting bin Laden and a persistent inability to comprehend the
collective significance of individual pieces of intelligence."
One crucial matter is missing from the report: how the White
House
responded to the intelligence on the Al Qaeda threat. That is because
the Administration will not allow the committees to say what
information reached Bush. The Administration argued, according to a
Congressional source, that to declassify "any description of the
president's knowledge" of intelligence reports--even when the content
of those reports have been declassified--would be a risk to national
security. It is difficult to see the danger to the nation that would
come
from the White House acknowledging whether Bush received any of
the information listed above or the other intelligence previously
described by the committees. (The latter would include a July 2001
report that said bin Laden was looking to pull off a "spectacular"
attack
against the United States or US interests designed to inflict "mass
casualties." It added, "Attack preparations have been made. Attack
will
occur with little or no warning. They are waiting us out, looking for
a
vulnerability.")
It is unusual--if not absurd--for an administration to claim that
the
state of presidential knowledge is top-secret when the material in
question has been made public. But that's what Bush officials have
done. Consequently, the public does not know whether these
warnings made it to Bush and whether he responded.
The White House also refused to release to the committees the
contents of an August 6, 2001, President's Daily Brief (PDB) that
contained information on bin Laden. In May 2002 National Security
Adviser Condoleezza Rice claimed this PDB only included information
about bin Laden's methods of operation from a historical perspective
and contained no specific warnings. But the joint inquiry appears to
have managed to find a source in the intelligence community who
informed it that "a closely held intelligence report" for "senior
government officials" in August 2001 (read: the PDB prepared for
Bush) said that bin Laden was seeking to conduct attacks within the
United States, that Al Qaeda maintained a support structure here and
that information obtained in May 2001 indicated that a group of bin
Laden supporters were planning attacks in the United States with
explosives. This is quite different from Rice's characterization of
the
PDB. Did she mislead the public about it? And presuming that this
"closely held intelligence report" was indeed the PDB, the obvious
question is, how did Bush react? But through its use--or abuse--of the
classification process, the Administration has prevented such
questions from inconveniencing the White House.
The committees tried to gain access to National Security Council
documents that, the report says, "would have been helpful in
determining why certain options and program were or were not
pursued." But, it notes, "access to most information that involved
NSC-level discussions were blocked...by the White House." Bush has
said, "We must uncover every detail and learn every lesson of
September the 11th." Just not those details about him and his
National Security Council.
One big chunk of the report that the Administration refused to
declassify concerns foreign support for the 9/11 hijackers. Of these
twenty-seven pages, all but one and a half have been redacted. The
prevailing assumption among the journalists covering the
committees--and it is well founded--is that most of the missing
material concerns Saudi Arabia and the possibility that the hijackers
received financial support from there. Is the Bush Administration
treading too softly on a sensitive--and explosive--subject? "Neither
CIA
nor FBI officials," the report says, "were able to address
definitively the
extent of [foreign] support for the hijackers globally or within the
United
States or the extent to which such support, if it exists, is knowing
or
inadvertent in nature. Only recently, and at least in part due to the
joint
inquiry's focus on this issue, did the FBI and CIA strengthen their
efforts to address these issues.... [T]his gap in US intelligence
coverage is unacceptable." At one point in the final report, the
committees reveal that a July 2002 CIA cable included a CIA officer's
concerns that persons associated with a foreign government may
have provided financial assistance to the hijackers. "Those
indications
addressed in greater detail elsewhere in this report obviously raise
issues with serious national implications," the report notes. But
these
"indications" are not addressed elsewhere in the report. The
Administration would not declassify the material.
The report does include a list of quotes from unnamed US
officials
each of whom says that Saudi Arabia has been reluctant to cooperate
with the United States on matters related to bin Laden. "In May 2001,"
according to the report, "the US government became aware that an
individual in Saudi Arabia was in contact with a senior al Qaeda
operative and was most likely aware of an upcoming operation." The
following sentences--which likely cover how the United States
responded to this intelligence and what the Saudis did or did not
do--is deleted from the report, thanks to the Bush Administration.
It's a pity that the committees were, on a few matters, rolled by
the
White House, and that Bush has gotten away with concealing from the
public what he knew and when, and what he did (or did not do) about
a serious threat to the nation. But for seven months, the joint
inquiry
has been engaged in trench warfare with the Administration over the
declassification of this report. It is a credit to the joint inquiry
and its
staff director, Eleanor Hill, that the committees squeezed as much out
of the Administration as they did. The joint inquiry has done far
better
in this regard than the average Congressional intelligence committee
investigation.
The report is a good start in establishing the historical record.
It
reads at times like tragedy, at other times almost as farce. The signs
were there. Few paid attention. Two, if not more, of the hijackers
were
within reach of US law enforcement, but nobody saw that. Five days
after the attacks, Bush said, "No one could have conceivably imagined
suicide bombers burrowing into our society." And in May 2002, Rice
said, "I don't think anyone could have predicted these people would
take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center." Actually,
the
report has proof that the attacks of 9/11 were foreseen. Not in terms
of
date and time. But intelligence reporting indicated and terrorism
experts warned that Al Qaeda was interested in mounting precisely
these types of attacks. Yet the US government--the Bush II and Clinton
administrations--did not prepare adequately. The attacks were far less
outside the box than Bush and his aides have suggested. Thwarting
them was within the realm of possibility.
The Administration has yet to acknowledge that--let alone reveal
how--Bush responded to the intelligence he saw. The joint inquiry's
work provides a solid foundation for the 9/11 independent
commission, which is now conducting its own inquiry. Perhaps that
endeavor will be able to learn even more and address the questions
the Bush Administration did not allow the committees to answer.
public knowledge of what now-public intelligence information the
president was exposed to prior to 9/11. They claim this is a matter
of "national security." If anyone on this thread thinks they can
formulate a coherent argument for why the president's knowledge of
information already in the public domain needs to be kept secret in
the interests of the common defense, I would really, really like to
hear it.
Until then, I will continue to believe that this is just one more
cynical self-serving maneuver by a president facing reelection who
wants to protect himself from well-deserved political embarrassment
and condign public censure, and who wants to claim that he is really
just doing it for our own good.
Chris (USA)
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030804&s=dcorn
The 9/11 Investigation
By David Corn
TheNation.com
Thursday 24 July 2003
The attacks of September 11 might have been prevented had the
US intelligence community been more competent. And the Bush
Administration is refusing to tell the public what intelligence the
President saw before 9/11 about the threat posed by Al Qaeda.
These are two findings contained in the long-awaited, 800-page
final report of the 9/11 joint inquiry conducted the Senate and House
intelligence committees, which was released on July 24. As is
traditional in Washington, the contents of the report were selectively
leaked before it was officially unveiled. And several news outfits
noted that the report contained "no smoking guns" and concluded, as
the
Associated Press put it, that "no evidence surfaced in the probe...to
show that the government could have prevented the attacks." Those
reports were wrong--and probably based on information parceled out
by sources looking to protect the government and the intelligence
community.
In the report's first finding, the committees note that the
intelligence community did not have information on the "time, place
and specific
nature" of the 9/11 attacks, but that it had "amassed a great deal of
valuable intelligence regarding Osama bin Laden and his terrorist
activities," and that this information could have been used to thwart
the assault. "Within the huge volume of intelligence reporting that
was
available prior to September 11," the report says, "there were various
threads and pieces of information that, at least in retrospect, are
both relevant and significant. The degree to which the [intelligence]
community was or was not able to build on that information to discern
the bigger picture successfully is a critical part of the context for
the September 11 attacks." One Congressional source familiar with the
report observes, "We couldn't say, 'Yes, the intelligence community
had all the specifics ahead of time.' But that is not the same as
saying this attack could not have been prevented."
The final report is an indictment of the intelligence
agencies--and, in part--of the administrations (Clinton and Bush II)
that oversaw them. It notes, "The intelligence community failed to
capitalize on both the individual and collective significance of
available information.... As
a result, the community missed opportunities to disrupt the September
11 plot by denying entry to or detaining would-be hijackers; to at
least try to unravel the plot through surveillance and other
investigative
work within the United States; and, finally, to generate a heightened
state
of alert and thus harden the homeland against attack. No one will ever
know what might have happened had more connections been drawn
between these disparate pieces of information.... The important point
is that the intelligence community, for a variety of reasons, did not
bring together and fully appreciate a range of information that could
have greatly enhanced its chances of uncovering and preventing
Osama bin Laden's plan to attack the United States on September 11,
2001."
The committees' report covers many missed--and
botched--opportunities. It shows that warnings and hints were either
ignored or neglected. Some of this has been covered in interim reports
released last year and in media accounts. But the final report does
contain new information and new details that only confirm an ugly
conclusion: A more effective and more vigilant bureaucracy would
have had a good chance of detecting portions of the 9/11 plot. "The
message is not to tell the intelligence community," said the source
familiar with the report, "that you didn't have the final announcement
of the details of the September 11 attacks and therefore you could not
prevent it. We have to have an intelligence community that is able to
connect dots and put the pieces together and investigate it
aggressively."
An example: The FBI had an active informant in San Diego who had
numerous contacts on 2000 with two of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf
al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. And he may also have had more
limited contact with a third hijacker, Hani Hanjour. In 2000, the CIA
had information that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar--who had already been
linked to terrorism--were or might be in the United States. Yet it had
not placed them on a watch list for suspected terrorists or shared
this information with the FBI. The FBI agent who handled the San Diego
informant told the committees that had he had access to the
intelligence information on al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, "it would have
made a huge difference." He would have "immediately opened" an
investigation and subjected them to a variety of surveillance. It can
never be known whether such an effort would have uncovered their
9/11 plans. "What is clear, however," the report says, "is that the
informant's contacts with the hijackers, had they been capitalized on,
would have given the San Diego FBI field office perhaps the
intelligence community's best chance to unravel the September 11
plot. Given the CIA's failure to disseminate, in a timely manner, the
intelligence information on...al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, that chance,
unfortunately, never materialized." (The FBI's informant--who is not
named in the report--has denied any advance knowledge of 9/11,
according to the report, but the committees raise questions about his
credibility on this point, and the Bush Administration objected to the
joint inquiry's efforts to interview the informant.)
The CIA was not the only agency to screw up. So did the FBI. In
August 2001, the bureau did become aware that al-Mihdhar and
al-Hazmi were in the United States and tried to locate them. But the
San Diego field office never learned of the search. The FBI agent who
was handling the informant in San Diego told the committees, "I'm
sure we could have located them and we could have done it within a
few days." And the chiefs of the financial crime units at the FBI and
the Treasury Department told the committees that if their outfits had
been
asked to search for these two terrorists they would have been able to
find them through credit card and bank records. But no one made
such a request.
The final report notes that the CIA and other intelligence
agencies were never able to develop precise intelligence that would
have
allowed a US attack on bin Laden before 9/11. And it reveals that
there were even more warnings than previously indicated that Al Qaeda
was
aiming to strike at the United States directly. In an interim report
released last year, the committees provided a long list of
intelligence reports noting that Al Qaeda was eager to hit the United
States and
that terrorists were interested in using airliners as weapons. The new
material in the report includes the following:
§ A summer 1998 intelligence report that suggested bin Laden was
planning attacks in New York and Washington.
§ In September 1998 Tenet briefed members of Congress and told
them the FBI was following three or four bin Laden operatives in the
United States.
§ In the fall of 1998 intelligence reports noted that bin Laden
was considering a new attack, using biological toxins in food, water
or
ventilation systems for US embassies.
§ In December 1998 an intelligence source reported that an Al
Qaeda member was planning operations against US targets: "Plans
to hijack US aircraft proceeding well. Two individuals...had
successfully evaded checkpoints in a dry run at a NY airport."
§ In December 1999 the CIA's Counter terrorism Center concluded
that bin Laden wanted to inflict maximum casualties, cause massive
panic and score a psychological victory. To do so, it said, he might
seek to attack between five and fifteen targets on the millennium,
including several in the United States.
§ In April 2001 an intelligence report said that Al Qaeda was in
the throes of advanced preparation for a major attack, probably
against an
American or Israeli target.
§ In August 2001 the Counter terrorism Center concluded that for
every bin Laden operative stopped by US intelligence, an estimated
fifty operatives slip through, and that bin Laden was building up a
worldwide infrastructure that would allow him to launch multiple and
simultaneous attacks with little or no warning.
Despite these warnings, the intelligence bureaucracy did not act
as if bin Laden was a serious and pressing threat. A CIA briefing in
September 1999 noted that its unit focusing on bin Laden could not
get the funding it needed. In 2000 Richard Clarke, the national
coordinator for counter terrorism, visited several FBI field offices
and asked what they were doing about Al Qaeda. He told the committees,
"I got sort of blank looks of 'what is al Qaeda?" Lieut. Gen. Michael
Hayden, director of the National Security Agency, said that in 2001 he
knew that the NSA had to improve its coverage of Al Qaeda but that he
was unable to obtain intelligence-community support and resources
for that effort.
According to the report, an FBI budget official said that counter
terrorism was not a priority for Attorney General John Ashcroft prior
to
9/11, and the bureau faced pressure to cut its counter terrorism
program to satisfy Ashcroft's other priorities. (The report did not
state
what those other priorities were.) In a particularly damning
criticism,
the report notes, "there was a dearth of creative, aggressive analysis
targeting bin Laden and a persistent inability to comprehend the
collective significance of individual pieces of intelligence."
One crucial matter is missing from the report: how the White
House
responded to the intelligence on the Al Qaeda threat. That is because
the Administration will not allow the committees to say what
information reached Bush. The Administration argued, according to a
Congressional source, that to declassify "any description of the
president's knowledge" of intelligence reports--even when the content
of those reports have been declassified--would be a risk to national
security. It is difficult to see the danger to the nation that would
come
from the White House acknowledging whether Bush received any of
the information listed above or the other intelligence previously
described by the committees. (The latter would include a July 2001
report that said bin Laden was looking to pull off a "spectacular"
attack
against the United States or US interests designed to inflict "mass
casualties." It added, "Attack preparations have been made. Attack
will
occur with little or no warning. They are waiting us out, looking for
a
vulnerability.")
It is unusual--if not absurd--for an administration to claim that
the
state of presidential knowledge is top-secret when the material in
question has been made public. But that's what Bush officials have
done. Consequently, the public does not know whether these
warnings made it to Bush and whether he responded.
The White House also refused to release to the committees the
contents of an August 6, 2001, President's Daily Brief (PDB) that
contained information on bin Laden. In May 2002 National Security
Adviser Condoleezza Rice claimed this PDB only included information
about bin Laden's methods of operation from a historical perspective
and contained no specific warnings. But the joint inquiry appears to
have managed to find a source in the intelligence community who
informed it that "a closely held intelligence report" for "senior
government officials" in August 2001 (read: the PDB prepared for
Bush) said that bin Laden was seeking to conduct attacks within the
United States, that Al Qaeda maintained a support structure here and
that information obtained in May 2001 indicated that a group of bin
Laden supporters were planning attacks in the United States with
explosives. This is quite different from Rice's characterization of
the
PDB. Did she mislead the public about it? And presuming that this
"closely held intelligence report" was indeed the PDB, the obvious
question is, how did Bush react? But through its use--or abuse--of the
classification process, the Administration has prevented such
questions from inconveniencing the White House.
The committees tried to gain access to National Security Council
documents that, the report says, "would have been helpful in
determining why certain options and program were or were not
pursued." But, it notes, "access to most information that involved
NSC-level discussions were blocked...by the White House." Bush has
said, "We must uncover every detail and learn every lesson of
September the 11th." Just not those details about him and his
National Security Council.
One big chunk of the report that the Administration refused to
declassify concerns foreign support for the 9/11 hijackers. Of these
twenty-seven pages, all but one and a half have been redacted. The
prevailing assumption among the journalists covering the
committees--and it is well founded--is that most of the missing
material concerns Saudi Arabia and the possibility that the hijackers
received financial support from there. Is the Bush Administration
treading too softly on a sensitive--and explosive--subject? "Neither
CIA
nor FBI officials," the report says, "were able to address
definitively the
extent of [foreign] support for the hijackers globally or within the
United
States or the extent to which such support, if it exists, is knowing
or
inadvertent in nature. Only recently, and at least in part due to the
joint
inquiry's focus on this issue, did the FBI and CIA strengthen their
efforts to address these issues.... [T]his gap in US intelligence
coverage is unacceptable." At one point in the final report, the
committees reveal that a July 2002 CIA cable included a CIA officer's
concerns that persons associated with a foreign government may
have provided financial assistance to the hijackers. "Those
indications
addressed in greater detail elsewhere in this report obviously raise
issues with serious national implications," the report notes. But
these
"indications" are not addressed elsewhere in the report. The
Administration would not declassify the material.
The report does include a list of quotes from unnamed US
officials
each of whom says that Saudi Arabia has been reluctant to cooperate
with the United States on matters related to bin Laden. "In May 2001,"
according to the report, "the US government became aware that an
individual in Saudi Arabia was in contact with a senior al Qaeda
operative and was most likely aware of an upcoming operation." The
following sentences--which likely cover how the United States
responded to this intelligence and what the Saudis did or did not
do--is deleted from the report, thanks to the Bush Administration.
It's a pity that the committees were, on a few matters, rolled by
the
White House, and that Bush has gotten away with concealing from the
public what he knew and when, and what he did (or did not do) about
a serious threat to the nation. But for seven months, the joint
inquiry
has been engaged in trench warfare with the Administration over the
declassification of this report. It is a credit to the joint inquiry
and its
staff director, Eleanor Hill, that the committees squeezed as much out
of the Administration as they did. The joint inquiry has done far
better
in this regard than the average Congressional intelligence committee
investigation.
The report is a good start in establishing the historical record.
It
reads at times like tragedy, at other times almost as farce. The signs
were there. Few paid attention. Two, if not more, of the hijackers
were
within reach of US law enforcement, but nobody saw that. Five days
after the attacks, Bush said, "No one could have conceivably imagined
suicide bombers burrowing into our society." And in May 2002, Rice
said, "I don't think anyone could have predicted these people would
take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center." Actually,
the
report has proof that the attacks of 9/11 were foreseen. Not in terms
of
date and time. But intelligence reporting indicated and terrorism
experts warned that Al Qaeda was interested in mounting precisely
these types of attacks. Yet the US government--the Bush II and Clinton
administrations--did not prepare adequately. The attacks were far less
outside the box than Bush and his aides have suggested. Thwarting
them was within the realm of possibility.
The Administration has yet to acknowledge that--let alone reveal
how--Bush responded to the intelligence he saw. The joint inquiry's
work provides a solid foundation for the 9/11 independent
commission, which is now conducting its own inquiry. Perhaps that
endeavor will be able to learn even more and address the questions
the Bush Administration did not allow the committees to answer.