From ABC News
How serious was this SNAFU? Who or what deserves the blame? E.g.,
– Louis Freeh
– Janet Reno
– Bill Clinton
– The entire FBI
– The cult of political correctness
– Prosecutorial burdens
Also, what other government agencies were feckless at that time? Are they still feckless, today? How should this be fixed?
I blame Loki, that trickster!
Sua
It’s the FBI, although to be fair, it’s easy to lay the blame thick and say that before 9/11 they were too slow to chase leads, and after 9/11 they’re too quick to prejudge. But there is an undeniable pattern.
From the article:
So it’s the fault of the feckin’ International Terrorism Unit!
Or, no, wait:
So it’s the fault of the feckin’ Saudis and the feckin’ Suits!
It’s a Saudi-Suit Conspiracy! [insert emoticon of Tinfoil Hat]
Or, no, wait:
So it’s the fault of the feckin’ Muslims!
End of discussion.
Yes, it’s the end, IF you believe the FBI comment. However, I am not convinced by a brief quote from an unidentified FBI spokesperson merely claiming their handling was “appropriate at the time,” without even trying to explain why their handling was appropriate.
I admire Harry Truman. His adage, The buck stops here, suggests that Freeh, Reno and Clinton cannot avoid blame.*
Regardless of blame, I hope someone does a good analysis of why this malfeasance took place, so the underlying problem(s) can be solved before 3000 more people are murdered.
[sub]*If asked, I suspect the three of the them would say, “Buck? What buck?” [/sub]
I also admire Harry Truman. However, in the interest of fairness shouldn’t we also apply the adage to the current president ? After all, Truman’s remark implies that the president, not his underlings, should bear ultimate responsibility; and Bush was de-emphasizing the threat of terrorism in the months immediately prior to 9/11.
Squink: I also admire Harry Truman. However, in the interest of fairness shouldn’t we also apply the adage to the current president ?
Hmmm, that would make Bush blamable for, among other things, the INS’s approval of Mohammad Atta’s visa six months after his death, the failure to prevent the attacks of 9/11, and the failure to capture Osama bin Laden. Hey, they all happened on his watch, and that’s where the buck stops, right?
Ahh, but it is a bad suggestion. Your premise is that the U.S. government/FBI/DOJ is worthy of blame for all preventable harmful acts. That is a ludicrous premise.
Given an infinite amount of time and resources (plus an infinite number of monkeys), the U.S. government could indeed prevent all harmful acts. But since the U.S. government does not have such time and resources, it must prioritize.
What did the government have? Suspicions. Most leads, rumours, etc. don’t pan out, and so law enforcement makes decisions about which ones to pursue. And, prior to 9/11, no one would place ‘preventing airliners from ramming into buildings’ high on their priority list, and justifiably so.
Sua
Yes, I think we should blame the Feds for the Mailbox Bomber (he shouldn’t have been allowed to buy materials so easily–more regulation needed!), the Washington Snipers (they shouldn’t have been allowed to have a high-powered sniper rifle, plus the one was in the Army or something ferchrissakes, they should have known he was a psycho, plus the little one was an illegal wasn’t he, what was the INS thinking of?), and the Tennessee tornados (more funding for NOAA and bigger Doppler radar and better early warning systems!).
That was Kimstu’s implicit interpretation of my premise. However, I think the FBI leadership (& their leaders’ leadership) was responsible for what the FBI did. As far as I can see, it was wrong for them to forbid this investigation. It was wrong to allow agent Abdel-Hafiz to disobey orders without consequence. I don’t know whether a proper investigation would have prevented 9/11, but it was the wrong way to conduct the investigation, regardless.
The agents directly involved considered it an important investigation, so one wonders what the actual reason was for squelching it. If the FBI made a sound decision, because the case was merely based on rumors, etc., or if the agents were switched to something clearly more vital, then your point is valid. The trouble is, I have not seen any evidence of that. The comment, “I think it’s just better to let sleeping dogs lie,” doesn’t seem consistent with your hypothesis.
As you point out, everything changed after 9/11. However, the FBI did have the embassy bombings to deal with.
Furthermore, one reason everything changed after 9/11 was Bush’s decision to proclaim and conduct a “war on terrorism.” OTOH Clinton chose to interpret the embassy bombings as a problem of law-enforcement problem related to specific terrorists, thus encouraging a “business-as-usual” attitude at the FBI.
P.S. to Kimstu: How do you know that bin Laden hasn’t been killed?
Have you bothered to look?
Sua
december: How do you know that bin Laden hasn’t been killed?
Well, considering that his death or capture has been formally recognized as a major US “War on Terrorism” priority since 9/11, I’m assuming that if the government knew he’d been killed we would have heard about it.
(Did this question sound rather peculiar to anybody else? “If we appear to have failed in a major policy objective, how do you know we haven’t secretly achieved it but just aren’t telling?” Hey, maybe we can use this strategy to settle the vexing “regime change” issue in Iraq! How do you know that Saddam Hussein isn’t already dead and purported recent pictures of him aren’t just cleverly faked? Mission accomplished! Hot damn, this might turn out to be a handy little strategy.)
IIRC,
The FBI’s handling of anti-terrorism under Deputy Director John O’Neill is a classic example of bureaucratic bumbling, back-stabbing, and careerism that made September 11 inevitable.
O’Neill was one of the few FBI managers who was certain that Al Queda would strike the U.S. again in a spectacular manner. However, O’Neill’s team was constantly frustrated in collecting data not only from the FBI but also from the CIA, NSA, DOD and the State Department.
He was given little or no support from his superiors - which includes Freeh, Reno and Clinton. Indeed after the Cole bombing, the Ambassador Yemen, Barbara Bodine, had the State Department to deny O’Neill a return visa - because he was too rough on the Yemenies.
O’Neill could be an asshole at times as well as a maverick, and these traits got him in hot water with the suits at the FBI.
O’Neill hoped that the new Bush Administration would show more vigor in going after Bin-Laudin. In reality, they had less interest than did Clinton. In disgust, O’Neill retired in August 2001 - remaining at his post until he got his FBI team back into Yemen.
You can check out O’Neill’s story on PBS Frontline web site.
You can’t check out O’Neill himself however. After retiring from the FBI, he bacame the head of security at the World Trade Center in New York.
He had told friends that his analysis showed that Al Queda wanted to finish the job they failed at in the 1993 WTC attack. O’Neill’s body was found underneath the stairwell in the rubble of the North Tower.
Witnesses said that he had gotten out of the building, but returned to help others.
dos centavos
Nixon – thanks for the info. A most interesting post.
Sua – I have looked around for other news articles. All the ones I saw were taken from the ABC article cited in the OP. ABC had an exclusive.
Kimstu – prior to the war in Afghanistan, OBL regularly made video tapes of himself, promoting himself and his organization. In the last year or so, there have been no video tapes, even though their absence tends to weaken al Qaeda. The lack of video tapes supports the possibility that OBL may be dead. Of course, nobody knows for sure.
The whack at Abdel-Hafiz is cheap. What he chose not to do was to wear a wire in a mosque. According to the US Attorney General guidelines in effect at the time, recording in churches, mosques and synagogues was not permitted by law. In refusing to wear a wire in the mosque, Abdel-Hafiz was upholding the law.
Singularly lacking in the ABC program was any comment about Abdel-Hafiz role in busting the “blind sheikh” Omar Abdul-Rahman. When a serious assasination threat againt him surfaced, Abdel-Hafiz refused to withdraw from the case, in which he testified more than 19 times. (This is also according to the FBI’s release.)
The PBS link about John O’neil…
(strange thing was, I had this open in another window before I even opened this thread!!! :eek: )
BB
So you took one side of the story, which was pure anecdote, decided it was the whole story, and skipped the step of ‘were the actions of the FBI erroneous?’ and instead skipped right ahead to ‘how should be blamed?’ Brilliant - particularly when the FBI agent in question doesn’t agree with you.
And that is precisely the point. You are applying the perception of today, when we know that a 9/11-type attack is possible, to events that occured before 9/11. That’s just silly.
You must first ask the question ‘should 9/11 have been foreseen?’ Only after you answer that question can we judge whether particular pre-9/11 actions were appropriate or inappropriate.
This is not to exonerate the FBI or CIA. Things that should have been done, even in the pre-9/11 world, were not done (particularly routine information-sharing). But the story of these FBI agents without any contextual information is useless.
I mean, let’s look at the simplest and most important bit of information that is missing from the article - to which case were the agents reassigned? Sure they were taken off the case, but was the case that they then took on, from a pre-9/11 perspective, rationally the more important one? We don’t know, 'cause they haven’t said.
Sua
Alternatively, we could look on this as the wholly unsubstantiated claims of two retired guys looking to drum up support for some potentially forthcoming book. The “unidentified FBI spokesperson” was so far unidentified that it was not possible during the interview to tell whether ABC actually interviewed a someone from the FBI or simply repeated their stars’ claims about what someone else might have said.
The FBI has been criticized as an image-conscious, ineffective, decision-phobic, bureaucracy for well over 20 years. Assuming that any specific appointee is going to change that (or believing that the appointees are responsible for any specific bad decision) may be fun, but it is not likely to be accurate.
The FBI might have actually hindered the investigation and prosecution of some al Qaida members–or two agents may be overstating their beliefs to make themselves look good.
Of course, the claim that he was asked to record the conversation in a mosque was only his long-after-the-fact claim that was denied by the guys ABC interviewed.
(I generally don’t belive anyone in these “reports.”)