July 25, 2003

The 9/11 Report

With much fanfare but little new information, the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 has finally seen the light of day. To their credit, the members of the commission seem to have kept partisanship to a minimum and focused instead on the issue at hand: what failures, if any, did our intelligence services make prior to September 11?

Let me start by saying that the failure of our intelligence services to prevent September 11 does not necessarily demonstrate a failure of our intelligence. Even the best intelligence is based on hearsay and an accumulation of seemingly unrelated facts. A good analyst can tie these pieces into a thesis, but in the end it's only a theory. Therefore, the 9/11 attacks are not sufficient reason to declare our intelligence services broken.

But the evidence in the report seems to lead us to that conclusion after all. As has been reported many times over, there is no 'smoking gun' that would have prevented the attacks. Only an analyst able to tie together the intelligence that had been gathered prior to September 11th could have possibly predicted the attacks. This was almost certain not to happen, thanks to the dispersion of effort in our intelligence services I discussed last week. There was a wealth of data available about the terrorists, their locations, their general plan to attack the United States, and far more. This information was spread so thinly that no one person was able to see the data and attempt to put it together. This was a significant factor in the intelligence failure, although it was by no means alone.

It appears that a key factor in the breakdown occurred because the FBI was more afraid of wrongly accusing someone than in acting on a perceived threat to the United States. The FBI's Phoenix office, for example, noted the prevalence of young Arab men attending flight school, and recommended an investigation. That recommendation went unheeded, although such a check might have uncovered several of the 9/11 conspirators. At the same time, FBI headquarters was refusing to allow their Minneapolis office to examine the computer of Zacarias Moussaoui for further evidence, despite the knowledge Moussaoui was connected to Islamic terrorism. Although there was no smoking gun on Moussaoui's computer, there was evidence that could have connected him to several of the other hijackers. It's possible that these mistakes were simply was a result of bureaucratic screwups. It's also possible that this failure was a natural consequence of the FBI's transition from a national security agency to a federal police force. Or, it may have been the fear of being accused of racial profiling. Or, again, it could simply have been stupid mistakes. The bottom line remains the same: two key pieces of evidence remained unconnected until they were too late to matter.

Nor was the FBI alone in this. The CIA and NSA held key pieces of information as well, from the knowledge that al Qaeda was planning to strike at the United States to the knowledge of prior terrorist plans to strike targets with aircraft. The clues necessary to unveil the 9/11 plans were all out there well in advance of the attacks. They were buried in a morass of other data, but they were out there. It's quite possible that, even if all the data were gathered in one place, nobody would ever have seen the connections. But nobody ever had the chance, because the data was scattered throughout multiple agencies, all of whom jealously guarded their own information as if it were their turf. And so the information remained compartmentalized, where it would do no one any good until it was too late.

The report is valuable. But the real question remains what the government will do with it. The failure to share intelligence precluded uncovering the September 11th plot. Nothing has changed in the U.S. intelligence structure that would suggest the agencies would be any better to detect such a plot today. It seems logical to assume that, if nothing has changed, than the end result of future plots will not change either. Given that the next attack may involve weapons of mass destruction, that seems an unsatisfactory answer. It's time to make some serious changes to our intelligence collection and assessment structure. There's no guarantee such changes will prevent another 9/11. But it's quite obvious that the current structure is incapable of doing so.

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