Several comments about my 9/11 book SPYING BLIND raise a crucial question: can I really talk about the causes of 9/11 without commmitting hindsight bias? The answer is you bet. 340 reasons explain why.
I was deeply worried about this question, so spent two years tracking what happened to every unclassified intelligence reform recommendation from 1991 to 2001. I found that a dozen unclassified studies examined the CIA, FBI, intelligence overall, and US counterterrorism capabilities during the decade. These weren't obscure little groups, but high profile blue ribbon commissions, government studies (Clinton's reinventing government initiative, the FBI's own strategic plan, to name just 2), and nonpartisan think tank task forces sponsored by places such as the Council on Foreign Relations. Together, these studies issued 340 recommendations for reforming intelligence agencies. But almost none of the suggested fixes were implemented before 9/11. Most -- 268 to be exact, or 79% of the total-- produced no action at all. Zip. Nada. Nothing. Only 35 were fully implemented, and these were mostly "study the problem more" suggestions. Here's the kicker: in retrospect, these pre-9/11 reform recommendations were right on target: 84% focused on just 4 key problems:
1. Information sharing 2. The inability of the CIA, FBI, and other intel agencies to work as a unified team 3. Weaknesses in setting priorities 4. Poor human intelligence.
Sound familiar? These are the same deficiencies the 9/11 Commission and Congressional intellgence committees' Joint Inquiry into 9/11 identified as crucial weaknesses that left us vulnerable.
There's more. Much more. Hindsight bias is all about the historical record. And in this case, the historical record is clear: the CIA Director told Congress publicly that terrorism ranked among the top threats to U.S. national security every year from 1994 (when the threat assessment was first made public) to 2001; President Clinton mentioned terrorism in every State of the Union address from 1994 on; in 1999, Secretary of Defense Cohen even wrote an op-ed to an obscure little paper called the Washington Post in which he explicitly predicted a terrorist attack on American soil. That's just a preview of the highlight reel.
It's a smart and fair question to ask whether we really could have seen it coming before disaster struck. But evidence suggests that years before 9/11, intelligence officials and elected lawmakers were aware of the al Qaeda threat, and understood the imperative for intelligence reform. But they were unable to get the fixes they believed were vitally necessary. Sometimes hindsight isn't as biased as it appears.
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I'm also going to take issue with the accuracy of the implication about Clinon's mentioning terrorism in every State of the Union address. The implication is clearly that the government identified and understood the problem. The texts, read with the benefit of hindsight, do not provide evidence for this implication:
1997 -- Clinton devotes one sentence to terrorism, in the context of the Chemical Weapons treaty.
Most of the other mentions concern terrorism as one of a trifecta of law enforcement problems, the other two being organized crime and drug trafficking. Now, granted, as a tactical matter Al Qaeda has been known to benefit from all three of these, but we have the benefit of knowing now that addressing terrorism primarily as a criminal matter costs lives because it forces us to be perpetually reactive rather than proactive in addressing it. Example:
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I predict to you, when most of us are long gone, but some time in the next 10 to 20 years, the major security threat this country will face will come from the enemies of the nation state: the narco-traffickers and the terrorists and the organized criminals, who will be organized together, working together, with increasing access to ever-more sophisticated chemical and biological weapons.
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Give Clinton credit, he wasn't totally wrong, but he's not nearly as right as your post would have it. The 9/11 attacks didn't rely in the slightest on either organized crime or narco-trafficking. They weren't smuggled in by the Columbia drug cartels, they came in through the front door on student visas, and they weren't financed through organized crime except insofar as that definition includes a titularly soverign government we had to declare outlaw later. They weren't perpetuated by an enemy of the nation-state, they were perpetuated by a group which was the de-facto protectorate of a nation state. The contemporaneous biological attack has been almost totally forgotten in favor of the destructive power of common household cutting implements.
And the recommendations issued? They were recommendations to improve security, but they were aimed at threats that never materialized*: conceptualization of a stateless criminal gang armed with computers and anthrax rather than a transnational (but intimately familiar with governments) ideological movement armed with explosives and boxcutters. This is despite the same movement having gone with Plan A, Blow Up A Building And See What Happens, several times over the interval. That would get mentioned in the SotU address for the year, and then the topic would immediately seque back to crime, WMD, and cyberterrorism.
* Technically, I suppose, they have yet to materialize. They still could. Of course, that is exactly what informs the logic of CYA government reports: if you exhaustively document every possible threat and contingency you will have a piece of paper saying that you did, truly, identify the catastrophe that did happen. The fact that it was buried in a mountain of other equally pressing worries because you were not able to excercise your discretion in identifying which avenues were most likely, or failed in your analysis, won't cost you your career. This is the bureacratic game theory rationale for why the US consistently fails to "connect the dots" -- there are too many dots produced and, seperately, the dots which are thought to be important (and which thus catch further allocation of intelligence and countermeasures resources) are not actually important compared with the dots which are identified and (relatively speaking) ignored.
The problem with this is that the connotations of "terrorism" is just too broad a category. In particular, many of the connotation and unspoken assumptions that go along with a concern about terrorism are quite different now then they were pre-9/11. When these assessments where made, what sort of terrorism were they concerned about? The kind of measures and precautions that would protect against the next Timothy McVeigh don't necessarily have a lot of overlap with the measures that would protect against Mohamed Atta.
Saying that people were concerned about terrorism from 1994 to 2001 is hindsight bias if you ascribe the
Saying that people were concerned about terrorism from 1994 to 2001 is hindsight bias if you assume that the kind of terrorism that they were concerned about then is the same kind that we are concerned about today.
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in 1999, Secretary of Defense Cohen even wrote an op-ed to an obscure little paper called the Washington Post in which he explicitly predicted a terrorist attack on American soil.
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That makse it sound like Cohen was right in his prediction. Care to follow that with the actual text of the prediction?
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In the past year, dozens of threats to use chemical
or biological weapons in the United States have turned out to be
hoaxes. Someday, one will be real. ...
We are preparing for the possibility of a chemical or biological
attack on American soil because we must. There is not a moment to
lose.
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The prediction which Cohen actually wrote, as opposed to your gloss of it, does not appear to have been very prophetic in predicting the September 11th attacks. US security policy was far more concerned with preventing that scenario than with the scenario which actually unfolded. Cohen does identify the first WTC bombing in the editorial, and mentions that they're candidates for... planning a biochem attack. Not blowing up the WTC again, that was emphatically not on the radar.
To speak from direct personal experince, the team of which I was lead analyst — and which specialized in threat assessment and project — proposed time and again to include the terrorist threat in our projects. Our proposals were always initially accepted, but by the kick-off meeting they would be watered down. By the first program review (if not sooner) terrorism was invariably stripped from the scope of the analysis. In the face of our repeated complaints that doing so left our analysis dangerously incomplete, we were invariably told we were right but that the “higher ups”, acting on direction from the Administration, did not want those topics looked at. The usual reason advanced was that they wanted to avoid turf battles and that someone else was looking at the problem. As we now know, that was not the case. Lack of interest in, not to say hostility towards — though I suspect there was some of that too, in Berger’s case — the terrorist threat prevented it being seriously addressed, over the protests of many at the working level in the Intel Community. (I will briefly note that the schism between the analysts at CIA and their upper management in the late 90s was worse than anything I’ve ever seen or heard of in my professional career. The atmosphere was one of rank despair and at times out-right mutiny.)
In short, Clinton’s domestic response to terrorism was in line with his international response: lob a few cruise missiles at valueless targets to be seen as “doing something” and hope the problem went away. That combined with the deleterious actions he did take — heightening the now infamous “Wall” and a directive that further crippled our already non-too-stellar HUMINT capabilities, among others — effectively guaranteed that the Intel Community would be unable detect the 9/11 attacks or even if they did, that the warning would be dismissed and no action would taken.
So yes, we were “Spying Blind” but only because Bill Clinton tied our hands and put blindfold over our eyes.
In the past year, dozens of threats to use chemical
or biological weapons in the United States have turned out to be
hoaxes. Someday, one will be real
Has everyone forgotten the anthrax attacks that immediately followed? Sometimes it seems that way... I still have yet to see a reasonable explanation of where they came from, why interest was seemingly lost so quickly, or even what was going on.
1. Information sharing 2. The inability of the CIA, FBI, and other intel agencies to work as a unified team
How does this explain Jamie Gorelicks wall? It seems the Clinton team did all they could to frustrate cooperation between agencies.
Truth is stranger tahn fiction.
And another problem is that "blue ribbon commissions" that focus on a particular problem can propose solutions to only that problem; actual policymakers have to make tradeoffs. More HUMINT -- well, who could disagree with that? Nobody, ceteris paribus. But in the real world, where tradeoffs must be made, more HUMINT means less SIGINT. A lot of the recommendations amount to "do a better job," which isn't really a recommendation at all.
I think she's suggesting that policy makers, if nothing else, were long aware of the shortcomings she cites as the main culprits in failing to stop the 9/11 attacks. Yes, there's plenty of blame to go around (Bush and Clinton administrations, as well as the intelligence communities). But she's making a very persuasive point here:
We knew we weren't ready. Whether we knew what was coming or not, we damn sure knew we weren't ready for it.
1993
Feb. 26, New York City: bomb exploded in basement garage of World Trade Center, killing 6 and injuring at least 1,040 others. In 1995, militant Islamist Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 9 others were convicted of conspiracy charges, and in 1998, Ramzi Yousef, believed to have been the mastermind, was convicted of the bombing. Al-Qaeda involvement is suspected.
1995
Nov. 13, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: car bomb exploded at U.S. military headquarters, killing 5 U.S. military servicemen.
1996
June 25, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia: truck bomb exploded outside Khobar Towers military complex, killing 19 American servicemen and injuring hundreds of others. 13 Saudis and a Lebanese, all alleged members of Islamic militant group Hezbollah, were indicted on charges relating to the attack in June 2001.
1998
Aug. 7, Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: truck bombs exploded almost simultaneously near 2 U.S. embassies, killing 224 (213 in Kenya and 11 in Tanzania) and injuring about 4,500. 4 men connected with al-Qaeda 2 of whom had received training at al-Qaeda camps inside Afghanistan, were convicted of the killings in May 2001 and later sentenced to life in prison. A federal grand jury had indicted 22 men in connection with the attacks, including Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, who remained at large.
2000
Oct. 12, Aden, Yemen: U.S. Navy destroyer USS Cole heavily damaged when a small boat loaded with explosives blew up alongside it. 17 sailors killed. Linked to Osama bin Laden, or members of al-Qaeda terrorist network.
Yes, that's the point.
I think she's suggesting that policy makers, if nothing else, were long aware of the shortcomings she cites as the main culprits in failing to stop the 9/11 attacks.
She's "proving" this by cherry-picking statements from a government which has, somewhere, described everything in existence as a shortcoming.
Am I missing something? That doesn't sound like hindsight to me. It sounds like she looked at the review commissions which were conducted at the time, which said to the political leadership "Hey, guys, you said terrorism is our biggest threat, and we agree, but our agencies are not organized to do what it takes to gather information about terrorist threats, analyze them, and take action." Which studies were all ignored until after 9/11.
But there are plenty of reforms in the intelligence-gathering process which could have been taken without that kind of provocation, reforms that can be implemented if the President and his top staff decide it is sufficiently important to do so. It shouldn't take an attack on American soil to lower some of the bureaucratic barriers and ease some of the turf wars which have arisen over time.
Using the examples you provide, what we should have expected was an al qaeda truck bomb attack.
evidence suggests that years before 9/11, intelligence officials and elected lawmakers were aware of the al Qaeda threat, and understood the imperative for intelligence reform. But they were unable to get the fixes they believed were vitally necessary.
There is no "fix" that will ensure that you have what you need to stop something like 9/11, which is access to a person inside al Qaeda. You can even throw a ton of money at the problem, and still there is no guarantee you'll have that humint penetration.
A leader is supposed to lead, not follow public opinion. The President is not a totally passive victim of public opinion, he has plenty of power to shape it. We had been attacked plenty of times by al Qaeda before Clinton left office, and if he had said "we're going to go into Afghanistan and kill those guys" - and explained why - then the public would have gotten behind it.
Bingo. I would've liked to see Clinton be more aggressive; OTOH, the one time they *were* aggressive, we got the Sudan missile attacks. And the curs baying for Clinton's impeachment/resignation (Repubs &Dems alike), who had no clue what was going on behind the scenes in counterterrorism, had a barking fit.
Some of those warnings had to do with terrorism. Others had to do with crime and drug trafficking, industrial espionage, even environmental issues. But as long as the overall political climate was one of unconcern about national security threats, they were doomed to fall on deaf ears--and quite rightly, too, for the truth is that terrorism hadn't yet been identified as a more pressing concern than any of the other alternative top intelligence priorities that were being floated around pre-9/11.
Nick
This is well and good, but it doesn't follow that attacking countries with, say, 33% public support (and, more importantly, little institutional support from key allies) is a wise move. The whole Iraq mess should have taught us that.
A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day...so check back often.
The President's job is to make the country safe and do the right thing to ensure national security, even if he is unpopular at the time. This argument is particularly unconvincing in the case of Bill Clinton, whose popularity was always over 50% during his last four years in office. "Public support" wasn't holding him back from going after the tangos in Afghanistan, that's for sure.
I have confidence that if you do the right thing in the right way - and explain it to the American people - they will support you. If Dubya did the wrong thing in the wrong way in Iraq, and failed to explain himself properly, it does not follow that Clinton could not have done the right thing with respect to al Qaeda in 1998-2000 and explained it convincingly to the people.
Yeah. I think the point is the law needs to be tweaked. It's not written in stone.
BTW, nice game last night, but you really need to work on your RLISP stats.
Were you even concious during the 90s? Clinton got impeached over a blowjob. He used cruise missiles against AQ and was accused by the very people impeaching him (Republicans) of "Wagging the Dog".
He couldn't have done jack, because the GOP Congress wouldn't have hesistated to defund any foreign adventure he cared to make.
He was stuck "uselessly lobbing cruise missiles", because he lacked Congressional support for anything else.
Congress treated Bush with kid gloves post 9/11, gave him everything he wanted -- if you think the GOP Congress form 94 onward would have allowed an invasion of Afghanistan, you should cut back on your crack usuage.