Two Lessons of 9/11

1. We are not made safer by Government officials who have great confidence but little competence.

According to the 9/11 Commission Report, two senior officials at the CIA's Counterterrorist Center (CTC) considered resigning and going public in order to raise attention to the seriousness of the threat situation in the summer of 2001. Apparently, they were not alone in feeling frustrated. Interviewed on "Meet the Press," former White House Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke said that prior to 9/11 he and his chief of staff became "so frustrated with the administration's lackadaisical attitude toward terrorism" that they requested transfers.

The 9/11 Commission Report paints a picture of inattention and ineptitude at the highest levels of the Bush II administration. During the summer, as intelligence warnings were reaching unprecedented levels about impending "spectacular" and "catastrophic" attacks, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz believed that it was much ado about nothing - that al-Qaeda was merely testing the U.S. by sending out false signals. In August, CIA Director George Tenet was presented with a brief on Zacarias Moussaoui - a flight student arrested in Minneapolis whom the FBI field supervisor presciently described to his superiors at FBI headquarters as someone who might be planning on "taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center." The brief was titled "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly," but Tenet drew no connection between this and the warnings of an impending "spectacular" al-Qaeda attack. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley told the Commission that prior to 9/11 they had not believed it was their responsibility to "coordinate domestic agencies" with regard to the terrorism threat. Acting FBI Director Thomas Pickard testified that he was told by his boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, that Ashcroft "did not want to hear about the threats anymore." Ashcroft denies this, but admits that it was a mistake for him not to have taken a more proactive role; he issued no directives that summer concerning the terrorist threats to either the FBI or the INS.

As for George W. Bush's role, he also appears to have been detached. The 9/11 Report includes a short paragraph, damning in its terseness, about Bush's recollection of events after he received the August 6 briefing titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US," which referred to "suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.":

He did not recall discussing the August 6 Report with the Attorney General or whether Rice had done so. He said that if his advisors had told him there was a cell in the United States, they would have moved to take care of it. That never happened.

When things go terribly badly, the first thing a poor manager will say is "no one could have predicted it." There were not only predictions - but documented terrorist plots to use hijacked jets or explosives-laden planes as missiles in the 1990's, and as late as July, 2001, the Italian government had set up anti-aircraft batteries to protect the airspace over Genoa when it received intelligence of a terrorist plot to use a plane to kill visiting president George W. Bush (link). Yet after 9/11, Condoleezza Rice said "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people...would try to use an airplane as a missile." While this level of ineptitude is head-spinning, it would be exceeded four years later when the administration was caught unprepared for what was arguably the most well-predicted disaster in American history, the devastation of New Orleans by hurricane floods, after which President Bush remarked - eerily reminiscent of Rice - "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees" (link).

And of course, none of the super-confident architects of war in the Bush II administration could have predicted that dubious Iraqi exiles telling stories of WMD were lying. None could have predicted that a U.S/British/Polish invasion and occupation of an Islamic nation would lead to a bloody insurgency, a backlash of terrorism, and the deaths of tens of thousands. None could have predicted - in a place that had suffered the cruelty of Baathist rule - that the humane treatment of prisoners should have been a top concern of the liberators.

 

2. Responsible leaders do not hype the threat of terrorism.

Although it failed to prevent the 9/11 attack, the Bush administration missed no opportunity to stoke the public's fear of future attacks. And this dire message has been echoed by conservatives in the media, such as columnist and Fox News host Cal Thomas, who in a 2004 column declared bleakly:

Now, we must face the daily trauma that goes with wondering when and where killers will strike next.

That is the Republican message to America: We must face a daily trauma. The terrible thing about this message isn't so much that it will puff up the already outsized egos of the terrorists - or that it will actually be taken at face value - most Americans clearly are not living in constant, traumatic fear. The really insidious effect of this continual drumbeat of fear - in political speeches, in punditry, in the color-coded alert level crawling in the cable news ticker - is that it has become so familiar. Fear has become an old, trusty friend - a pillor of the community - like Reasonable Caution and Common Sense and Healthy Skepticism used to be. Fear - once thought of as a weakness, as a hindrance to good decisionmaking, as the only thing we have to fear - is now the thing which Republican leaders and pundits suggest we should keep foremost in mind when making our most critical decisions - about going to war, about the treatment of prisoners, about the rights of American citizens, about whom we should vote for.

Unless a vaccine against hatred is invented, the world will forever contain homocidal fanatics - Tim McVeighs, Osama bin Ladins. Given this reality, responsible leaders would encourage their party, the media, and the public not to be consumed by fear and not to overreact to fear - which can lead to gross mistakes and misdeeds - but instead to take level-headed, reasonable steps to reduce the risk.

In a 1961 speech, President Kennedy said:

Terror is not a new weapon. Throughout history it has been used by those who could not prevail, either by persuasion or example. But inevitably they fail, either because men are not afraid to die for a life worth living, or because the terrorists themselves came to realize that free men cannot be frightened by threats, and that aggression would meet its own response.

And speaking off-the-cuff in an interview in 2004, Sen. John Kerry said:

We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance. As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life.

These men sound like they are guided by their wits, not by their fears.

Not surprisingly, the Bush campaign tried to make political hay of Kerry's use of the word "nuisance," pretending that Kerry was not serious enough about terrorism. They ignored the fact that a year after 9/11, in a prepared speech, another serious person, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, National Security Advisor in the Bush I administration, had used the same word in the same context. Scowcroft said:

Can we win the war on terrorism? Yes, I think we can, in the sense that we can win the war on organized crime. There is going to be no peace treaty on the battleship Missouri in the war on terrorism, but we can break its back so that it is only a horrible nuisance and not a paralyzing influence on our societies.

This is how real leaders talk about terrorism. They don't ignore the threat, but they don't hype it either.