From Richard Clarke’s “Against All Enemies” and other books and articles written in the first several years after 9/11, we’ve long known that the Bush administration neglected to react to intelligence reports warning of a possible terrorist attack. President George W. Bush and his security team came into office focused on Saddam Hussein and Iraq, and that focus led Bush officials to downplay concerns about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. After 9/11 it led the administration to divert attention and resources away from Afghanistan.
The latest reminder of this neglect appears in today’s New York Times, on this, the 11th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In an op-ed headlined “The Deafness Before the Storm,” Kurt Eichenwald writes about briefings Bush received before the infamous Aug. 6, 2001, briefing “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” which was declassified in 2004 as a result of the 9/11 Commission’s investigation of the events leading up to 9/11.
Eichenwald informs readers that there were several other briefings before the Aug. 6 briefing, and that these other briefings more urgently warned of a planned terrorist operation. Eichenwald mentions briefings dated May 1, June 22, June 29, July 1 and July 24 and writes that those briefings, combined with other records, lead to “an inescapable conclusion: the administration’s reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence than has been disclosed. In other words, the Aug. 6 document, for all of the controversy it provoked, is not nearly as shocking as the briefs that came before it.”
Partially explaining the administration’s inaction before 9/11, Eichenwald writes, were arguments by some administration officials dismissing the warning about bin Laden as “just bluster,” disinformation designed to take attention away from the real threat, Saddam’s Iraq:
An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives’ suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day.
Those same neoconservatives would, 18 months later, carry the nation into an unnecessary and unwarranted war with Iraq.
No one will ever know whether 9/11 could have been prevented. We do know that in the late spring and summer of 2001 “the system was blinking red,” as former CIA director George Tenet described it. (Chapter 8 of “The 9/11 Commission Report” summarizes missed clues about a pending attack and missed opportunities to possibly stop it.) Still, dots went unconnected, to revive a descriptive phrase from the investigations into 9/11.
Granted, the intelligence briefings Bush received lacked specificity about when and where an attack might take place. But given their urgency, they should have prompted action, even if action was limited to ordering the FAA and other government agencies to heighten security.
That the United States would react to the Sept. 11 attacks was a given. What the reaction would be was not. It’s the reaction, and the course it set, that most interests me, that continues to challenge who we are as a nation.
When presidents react to major events, they put in place policies and bureaucracies that subsequent presidents find difficult, even impossible, to change, much less reverse or dismantle (see President Barack Obama, closing of prison at Guantanamo Bay). Not only do subsequent presidents maintain their predecessor’s policies (see Obama, warrantless surveillance), they also sometimes double down on those policies (see Obama, drone strikes). Today, we remember the events and victims of Sept. 11, 2001. Today, tomorrow and for years to come, we live 9/11’s consequences.