Oh, and shouldn’t the knowledge of the FBI be imputed to Bush under agency theory?
From Squink’s excerpt of the report:
Sounds pretty close to what happened, right? But even this kind of warning wouldn’t have helped. Later in the report, it specifically says “crash a light aircraft”. So it’s talking about private planes, not commercial jetliners. Even if they had acted fully on this warning, it would have just made a mess at a bunch of small airports, and not done anything at the major airports where it would have mattered.
It just shows how exact a threat has to be to be actionable.
I think the fact that the report says “crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon” implies that they don’t mean a commercial airliner. I mean, say what you will about airport security, but I don’t think they would take “Yeah, we’d uh… like to replace all the baggage with our own boxes filled with… uh… silly putty. Yeah… that’d be great.”
Tenebras
Judging the quality of pre- (and even post-) Sept. 11 airport security, it might just have worked.
Like the psychic who predicts the earthquake the day after it happens. It is awfully easy to connect the dots, when all the other dots have been removed from the game.
Since this 1999 report is so important (and it, apparently, is good enough that a warning of mis-use of private craft should have lead CLINTON to mandate stronger cockpit doors on commercial craft) I have to wonder about those other warnings in the quoted section. Have we begun monitoring of all Japanese nationals to prevent the use of WMD in downtown Manhattan?
Also, those two quoted paragraphs read like any good psychic reading. Those paragraphs don’t say one thing that IS going to happen or is even being planned, they just list things that COULD happen. Do that often enough, ignore the failures, and trumpet the hits. You’ve got Sylvia Browne, not a warning.
Was there enough information in the hands of the right people to predict and prevent 9/11? Perhaps. Does this indict the people in charge if true? Not necessarily.
Some CIA operative may have had a memo that said “Osama bin Laden will hijack four planes on 9/11 and crash them into World Trade Center, Pentagon, and rural Penssylvania.” And another one probably had one that said “Osama bin Laden will hijack for golf carts, load them with cyanide and drive them through the tunnels under Ohio State University, poisoning the entire student body.”
It is easy to know NOW which of those should have received more attention. It wasn’t so easy on September 10.
Yes, both sides are trying to make political hay; they’re politicians. Yes, both sides can make a claim that they are being wronged or have been wronged in the past, warranting retaliation; both are likely true
Shit happens, bad people do bad things, good people don’t always stop them. That doesn’t make the good people bad or the bad people better.
Yes, creating better barriers to the cockpit could have prevented 9/11. But it would have been counter to everything we really expected from hijackings prior to that date. All a thoroughly locked cockpit door would do, is provoke a hijacker into hurting passengers to convince the pilots to open the door. Prior to 9/11 the best policy in a hijacking was to do what was asked, negotiate it and usually everybody came out alive.
I’m taking too long, but really my point is simply that post hoc analysis always makes things look obvious. And others have made the same point so I’ll shut up.
Oh, and since it seems to be necessary to qualify statements with general political position: I am a libertarian and generally disagree with about 80% of what Bush has done in response to 9/11.
I missed it-what did Vice President Pace-Maker say?
I think he’s referring to Cheney’s remarks that the Democrats would be wise not to make this a political issue.
I think…I honestly don’t know
gobear, if you were straight, I’d kiss you for that!
Oh, what the hell-kisses gobear on the cheek
Teehee!
As for whether or not Bush is to blame, my guess is this-would anyone have taken them seriously, if they tried to install security measures and the like?
Think about it.
On Sept. 10, 2001, everyone in America lived with a sense of imperviousness. Nothing like what would happen the next day had ever happened here. That lulled people into a false sense of security about just how difficult it would be to do such a thing.
Even the hand-wringing reports on terrorists and what they were capable of - going back even farther than the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland - probably were met with some degree of skepticism even at the top federal government and law enforcement levels. It had never happened here; therefore it must not be possible.
Anyone who now wants to play politics with that is an asshole. And, as has been abundantly pointed out here, culpability (if there is any) easily crosses party lines.
The tenor of what I’ve seen Democrats saying in the news the last few days doesn’t seem to be about wanting to find out how we can do better in the future.
And won’t it be a shame if the upcoming hearings this summer on 9/11 devolve into election-year bullshit, instead of the aforementioned aim?
Count me in as a liberal who’s waiting-and-seeing. I certainly think that there are some Democrats using this as a spin, but that doesn’t mean that the issue shouldn’t be investigated (think Enron). I don’t want to jump over GW without cause, and it certainly seems more likely to me that hijacking planes to crash them into WTC sounded too farfetched to be real than actual negligence of some kind occurred. I seriously doubt that a Gore administration would have successfully prevented 9/11, and I’m certainly not going to abuse the subject for my own political purposes – something that has certainly been done by both sides.
Lissener, it’s really easy to build a jigsaw puzzle when you have all the pieces, but if you gave one piece to 1000 people within the government, that puzzle would be unlikely to be built any time soon.
Erek
Oh yeah!!! Bush-bashing is back with a vengeance.
Ari Fleischer should be let go immediately. He embarrased the White House way too many times.
The only real mistake, if any, by the others, was keeping silent and not doing some kind of public alert. That way, on Sept 11, more passengers may have been more be willing to roll, making hijacking a non-starter. The administration already fixed some parts of the communication problem between the agencies.
I’m as anti-Bush as anyone on this board, but I don’t think anything he knew would have stopped the attacks. Hindsight is 20/20, yadda yadda. It’s a horrible tragedy, but it probably couldn’t have been easily prevented.
What does piss me off is the fact that this information is coming out 9 months after the fact, when for the past year (nearly) we’ve been hearing nothing but “we had no indications”, “no warning”, etc. Why is this coming out now? Why not last october, or, god forbid, september? It seems to me that there is much more to come, or that they’re hiding something more. Why would we just be finding out now?
On present evidence I should say that Bush ibn Bush deserves no blame whatsoever.
(a) releasing info earlier would have simply fed hysteria. A review of post 11 September threads, and I do not exclude myself from this having some personal connexions, clearly illustrates this.
(b) Earlier warning is crap.
(i) flowbark righly notes (obliquely) the Wag the Dog bullshit effect. This, while sadly even disgustingly used by some rather too ideological Clinton haters (again review the evidence) is a crap argument. Any action by a president will be subject to 2nd guessing and even 3rd level. It is sad that some feel so ready to challenge the big P’s commitment (even if wrong-headed and distorted) to security. Security losses are a lose-lose situation.
(ii) I actually have to deal with similar types of information (in a very gross sense) to what I presume, post facto, intelligence is like. Lots of noise, lots of contradictory infos. Even when there is clear signs, one doesn’t know when X will happen. To early reaction may impose unnecessary costs, which the market will not properly price for its lack of public infos. Now, for me I am thinking of something as simple as future exchange rates, GDP growth and realted items. I don’t (in a general sense) have to worry about lives. And frankly it is a fucking pain in the ass to figure out proper procedure.
Now, it may be that there were intelligence failures. It is doubtful that any one administration should shoulder the blame there. Our humint has atrophied by decades. And our holding to a obsolete miltary and civvy intel position in re cold war enemies is the fault of both sides of the political fence, if for different reasons.
If there is criticism to be made it is for piss poor policy in re rather less obscure and rather more observable policy issues, such as int’l commitments and int’l image
We still don’t have these, do we?
As has been pointed out, this really wouldn’t have helped. But even if GW HAD mandated secure cockpit doors, there is no way they would have been in place by 9/11/01.
I’m on the US embassy email list for China. I get warnings about how American’s abroad are under risk on a weekly if not monthly basis. After the first few dozen, I don’t even bother to read them any more but just hit delete.
Just way too many threats to be credible. It’s a bit like parenting. There are thousands of things that can hurt your child, and when she does get hurt, some one will always say “I warned you about that.”
I don’t like Bush, but unless the warning turns out to be something very specific, very obvious and brought to the attention of the White House, then this is just bashing.
I didn’t think you were allowed to say anything this true, this funny and this cool in the bbq!!!
They’re not mandated, but all major US airlines have put them in on their own initiative.
Boy, you got that right. Not only would they probably not have been taken seriously, we’d have heard much wailing and gnashing of teeth from many Democrats and leftists about how the fascist Pretender-in-Chief and the Nazi Attorney General were using some flimsy terrorism pretext to deprive us all of our civil rights and blah blah blah.
Flymaster:
**
Vice President Dick Cheney, in an interview with Tim Russert on “Meet the Press,” Sept. 16, 2001 - five days after the attacks (bolding mine):
Sounds to me like, right from the get-go, the administration was acknowledging that they had information coming in about an attack. The problem was with tying it all together in time to figure it out and thwart it.
I’ve gone on record here as stating the FBI, and probably the CIA, no doubt made some serious gaffes pre-9/11. To the point that some in each agency should maybe be held responsible - not for “allowing the attacks to happen,” but simply for not doing their jobs capably.
But to say that the executive branch should have figured all this out and taken steps to prevent Sept. 11? Come on …