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Sorry for not coming back to my own topic sooner - I was away at the weekend, and then I lost a massive post along these lines to this thread last night and just gave up. So here we go again, hopefully...
OPB Buk:
We should be very careful about expecting infallibility. The reason 9/11 happened was because terrorists decided to engage in terrorist activity, not because of the intelligence service. If we are going to try to lay the blame on them then we have to accept the kind of situations highlighted in the "FBI stretches a wide net" [thread], where someone was visited by the FBI for remarks made in a locker room.
Well... no.
I don't expect infallibility, for sure. I am certainly not under the impression that the Intelligence services in the US are James Bond-style motherfuckers, ready to save the day at every turn. No, I'm quite aware that they cannot and will not stop every terrorist incident.
And I suppose it's not so much the lower ranks of the intelligence services I'd say should be a bit less fallible, indeed, they seem to have done their job and collected the information before September 11, and without so many of the civil liberties intrusions described in the wide-net thread, It's more those who act on the information received (or not, as it happened) who I'm worried about.
I mean:
"The vice president, Dick Cheney, sat on a counter-terrorism bill passed to him in July. The attorney general, John Ashcroft, refused a demand for more FBI anti-terrorism agents. The defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, did not deploy a Predator drone aircraft which the Clinton administration had used to track Bin Laden. The national security adviser, Condi Rice, was warned in January 2001 by her Clintonite predecessor that she would spend more time on al-Qaida than any other issue. She launched a review, but let it languish in bureaucratic limbo. " (Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian)
Of course there is a massive amount of information moving through the Intelligence services' hands all the time; that is, after all, their job.
They are there to gather and analyse intelligence, and to put it together, look at what patterns emerge, and then to act on them.
"Lawmakers say U.S. authorities failed to connect the dots between the so-called Phoenix memo, an August CIA briefing paper given to President George W. Bush in Texas which mentioned bin Laden's al Qaeda group might use hijacking and the August arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui, who sought flight lessons in Minnesota and is now charged with conspiring in the Sept. 11 attacks."(Tabassum Zakaria, Reuters Alternet)
And of course, if the information was too vague to predict September 11, what does that mean for Moussaoui? If the information was too vague then to predict, then the Intelligence services must be doing a shitload of work now to convict - or does this 'vague information' suddenly mean a lot more now - enough for him to be tried and found guilty on it in a court of law?
Y'know, the Phoenix memo sounds interesting. Wonder how vague it was?
Well, the Washington Post said that the FBI publicly released only one paragraph, which contained a suggestion that a list of flight schools should be made and that the concerns raised in the memo should be discussed with other sections of the intelligence community.
They certainly didn't add the memo contained a terrorist group by name, but:
"A Phoenix FBI agent's request for a canvass of U.S. flight schools for al Qaeda terrorists was formally rejected within several weeks of his July 10 memo, after mid-level officials at FBI headquarters determined they did not have the manpower to carry out the task, sources familiar with the memo said."
(Dan Eggen, Washington Post)
Of course, no-one could have forseen such an attack as September 11, could they?
"Despite White House avowals that it would have been impossible to conceive before September 11 of a hijacked plane being used to attack U.S. targets, a 1999 report for the CIA envisioned a very similar threat.
It predicted Islamic militant Osama bin Laden would retaliate "in a spectacular way" against Washington for U.S. cruise missile strikes in 1998 against training facilities of his al Qaeda network in Afghanistan.
"Suicide bombers belonging to al Qaeda's martyrdom battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives ... into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, or the White House," the report said."
(Randall Mikkelsen, Reuters)
So yeah, you could count me among those who "question how the world's largest intelligence gathering organisation, with a budget of billions of dollars, could not have known anything about what was about to happen." (Lars Bevanger and Jonathan Marcus, BBC News Online, Sept 12, 2001)
But I'm sure someone will disagree... |
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