Panel faults 'failure of imagination"...
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| Thu, 07-22-2004 - 10:05am |
This report is pretty much as expected, IMO.
9/11 panel faults 'failure of imagination'
http://www.suntimes.com/output/terror/cst-nws-probe22.html
The Sept. 11 commission concludes that a "failure of imagination," not governmental neglect, allowed 19 hijackers to carry out the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history. The panel calls for an intelligence overhaul to confront an al-Qaida organization intent on striking again.
While faulting institutional shortcomings, the bipartisan report being released Thursday does not blame President Bush or former President Clinton for mistakes contributing to the 2001 terrorist attack, Bush administration officials familiar with the findings said.
The report, which is the culmination of a 20-month investigation into the plot that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, describes the meticulous planning and determination of hijackers who sought to exploit weaknesses in airline and border procedures by taking test flights.
A surveillance video that surfaced Wednesday shows four of the hijackers passing through security gates at Washington Dulles International Airport shortly before boarding the plane they would crash into the Pentagon. In the video, the hijackers can be seen undergoing additional scrutiny after setting off metal detectors, then being permitted to continue to their gate.
White House officials and congressional leaders were briefed on the panel's findings, and Bush was to receive a copy just before the 11:30 a.m. EDT release Thursday on the commission's Web site and in bookstores.
The president, bracing for a report that will be sharply critical of the government's intelligence-gathering, said Wednesday he looked forward to reading it. He also said his administration was doing everything possible to combat terrorism, a major theme of his re-election campaign.
"Had we had any inkling whatsoever that terrorists were about to attack our country, we would have moved heaven and earth to protect America," Bush said. "I'm confident President Clinton would have done the same thing. Any president would."
Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism czar in the Clinton and Bush administrations and now an ABC consultant, said on the network's "Good Morning America" the commission avoided controversy. "To get unanimity they didn't talk about a number of things, like what effect is the war in Iraq having on our battle against terrorism. Did the president pay any attention to terrorism during the first nine months of his administration? The controversial things, the controversial criticisms of the Clinton administration as well as the Bush administration just aren't there."
"What they didn't do is say that the country is actually not safer now than it was then because of the rise in terrorism after our invasion in Iraq."
One administration official said the 575-page report concludes that Bush and Clinton took the threat of al-Qaida seriously and were "genuinely concerned about the danger posed by al-Qaida," but didn't do enough to stop the terrorist organization headed by Osama bin Laden.
There was a "failure of imagination" to provide either Bush or Clinton with new options-- particularly military approaches-- to deal with al-Qaida, the official said. There also was a failure to adapt to the post-Cold War era, and people just kept trying the same kinds of things that didn't work, the official said.
While administration officials offered a preview of the report, their summary was far from a complete accounting of the commission's findings.
Less than four months before the presidential election, the commission's work already has ignited partisan debate over whether Bush took sufficient steps to deal with terrorism in the first year of his administration.
As expected, the report will propose a national counterterrorism center headed by a new Cabinet-level national director of intelligence. The director would have authority over the CIA, FBI and other agencies, while congressional oversight also would be strengthened.
The commission described a rapidly changing al-Qaida threat that has become more dispersed and harder to detect. A national intelligence chief would coordinate information-sharing and intelligence analysis to thwart al-Qaida terrorists who are keenly interested in launching a chemical, biological or nuclear attack, commissioners say.
The Bush administration is reserving judgment on that recommendation, and officials doubt it could be approved by Congress this year.
Four administration officials briefed reporters on the content of the report Wednesday on condition of anonymity because it has not been publicly released.
"There were deep institutional failings within our government," an official said. "And that's what they really examine at some length over a long period of time-- that there were a variety of factors spanning many years and many administrations that contributed to a failure to share information amongst agencies for both legal and policy reasons."
In particular, the official said, the commission found the FBI was not set up to collect intelligence domestically, in part because of civil liberties concerns.
The report lists a series of missed operational opportunities to stop the hijackers, such as the bungled attempts to kill or capture bin Laden and the FBI's handling of terror suspect Zacarias Moussaoui, who was arrested in August 2001 before the hijackings, the official said.
It also "debunks" some theories that once circulated widely, such as that the Saudi government had funded the hijackers and that the White House allowed a group of Saudis to slip out of the country just after Sept. 11 when all planes were grounded, the official said.
Commissioners have said the report also will fault Congress for poor oversight of intelligence gathering and criticize government agencies for their emergency responses to the attacks. The harshest criticism will be leveled at the FBI and CIA.
But the 10-member panel declined to recommend a separate domestic spy agency modeled after Britain's MI5, as some outside experts have suggested, deciding that reform efforts by FBI Director Robert Mueller were on the right track despite the FBI's historical focus on law enforcement, said Rep. Jim Turner, D-Texas.


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The important thing is to effectively prevent another 9/11 from occurring here and the Commission’s decision to use the evidence it gathered as a way to assess past and ongoing problems and offer real solutions to remedy them, instead of just blaming individuals was IMO wise.
C
"Commission’s decision to use the evidence it gathered as a way to assess past and ongoing problems and offer real solutions to remedy them, instead of just blaming individuals"
I agree, although coming up with any other result, A or B
C
Is it important? Yes. Does it contain any real surprises, either in information or recommendations? No.
~mark~
9/11 report says U.S. failed to grasp `gravity of threat'
Plot exploited overwhelming weaknesses
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0407230198jul23,1,2964953.story?coll=chi-news-hed
Government leaders, their policies and their capabilities all failed to protect the American people from the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history--a failure that could be repeated without a bold and urgent restructuring of U.S. defenses, members of the bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks said Thursday.
Above all, the 10 commissioners unanimously concluded in their final and historic report that Al Qaeda exploited an overwhelming "failure of imagination" spanning U.S. government agencies and two presidential administrations. At the same time, commissioners said, officials missed at least nine opportunities to exploit vulnerabilities in Al Qaeda's plot, each of which held the potential to disrupt it.
But commissioners fell short of concluding that the deaths of almost 3,000 people on that clear, fall day could have been averted.
"There's no single individual who is responsible for our failures, yet individuals and institutions cannot be absolved of responsibility," said Thomas Kean, the commission chairman and former Republican governor of New Jersey. "Any person in a senior position within our government during this time bears some element of responsibility for our government's actions."
At nearly every turn, the report concluded that U.S. leaders failed to clearly grasp "the gravity of the threat."
The commission called for the naming of a Cabinet-level national intelligence director, a sweeping reorganization of the nation's entrenched intelligence agencies, an overhaul of what it portrayed as a failed system of congressional oversight and an urgent U.S.-led diplomatic war of ideas against Islamic-extremist ideology.
While the report said Americans are better protected than they were on Sept. 10, 2001, it also warned that "we are not safe."
President Bush, who originally fought the panel's creation but ultimately yielded to political pressure and supported its formation, praised commissioners Thursday for their efforts and called their recommendations "very solid." But he fell short of offering unqualified support for the sweeping proposals outlined in the 567-page report, which capped a nearly 20-month probe.
In a Rose Garden appearance two hours before the report was released, Bush said he assured Kean and Lee Hamilton, the panel's vice chairman and a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, that "where government needs to act, we will," adding that he looked forward to studying the recommendations.
But speaking about eight hours later from a podium in front of a wall of uniformed police and firefighters at a speech in Glenview, Bush sought to downplay any sense of insecurity by offering a litany of what the administration has called its successes in the war on terrorism.
"In the past three years, we have taken unprecedented steps to defend the homeland, to increase security, and to give our brave first responders the tools they need to deal with a terrorist attack," Bush said.
His Democratic opponent, Sen. John Kerry, said he would convene an emergency summit to push through reforms if he wins the election and Bush has failed to act, adding that the panel's work held "urgent implications for the security of our country."
Kerry, following a speech to the National Urban League in Detroit, told reporters that the panel's work "carries a very simple message for all of America about the security of all Americans: We can do better, we must do better and there's an urgency to our doing better. We have to act now."
The Democratic candidate said he received a 10-minute telephone briefing from Kean and Hamilton on Thursday and that his aides were still poring through the report. But he said the briefing convinced him of the clear need for reform, which he described as "long overdue."
Failures were known
Myriad intelligence lapses detailed in the report were known before the panel was formed in November 2002, including the CIA's key failure in January 2000 to add two men who would become hijackers to terrorist watch lists after tracking them to a meeting in Malaysia. The agency also failed to tell domestic authorities in the U.S. that it knew one terrorist suspect had a visa allowing him to move in and out of the country and the other had flown to Los Angeles.
But in public hearings this year--sometimes widely overlooked, sometimes riveting the nation via live television coverage--the commissioners assembled the most comprehensive picture of the tragedy to date, a rare glimpse often not available to the public until years after such a historic event.
Commissioners used their access to more than 2.5 million documents, many among the most highly classified in the U.S. government, to peer into years of neglect or stumbling in Washington, and years of plotting in Afghanistan, Pakistan and beyond.
Blame was spread much further than the CIA and FBI, both battered since the suicide hijackings. Commissioners found fault with aviation authorities, the Pentagon, the National Security Councils under Bush and former President Bill Clinton, the State Department, the Justice Department, immigration authorities, border guards, Congress and emergency responders.
They found air defense systems woefully lacking on Sept. 11, from unsecured cockpit doors to military plans designed to repel Soviet air strikes.
Nineteen men boarding four commercial airliners with box cutters, mace, pepper spray and a carefully crafted plan caught the U.S. off guard.
"We learned that the institutions charged with protecting our borders, civil aviation and national security did not understand how grave this threat could be, and did not adjust their policies, plans and practices to deter or defeat it," the report said.
Sharing information
It also found "pervasive problems of managing and sharing information across a large and unwieldy government that had been built in a different era to confront different dangers."
Throughout their hearings, commissioners revealed dramatic new details about the plot and the terrorist leaders behind it, including Osama bin Laden's exacting involvement in the assault's minutiae and original plans for a more ambitious attack involving a total of 10 airliners on the East and West Coasts.
Relying on interrogations of captured terrorist leaders, the commissioners also revealed rifts among the suicide hijackers once they assembled on U.S. soil and fractious disputes among Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders back in Afghanistan.
Commissioners, perhaps unwittingly, also took center stage in the debate over the war to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. They concluded Thursday, as their staff had preliminarily done last month, that there was no evidence that Hussein's regime helped Al Qaeda plan or carry out attacks against the U.S.
Fears about such a relationship, dismissed by many in the intelligence community before the war, were a central thrust of the White House campaign to rally public support for an invasion in late 2002 and early 2003.
Iraq and Al Qaeda
Thursday's report said intelligence dispatches "describe friendly contacts and indicate some common themes in both sides' hatred of the United States." But it said, "to date we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with Al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States."
True to its bipartisan form, however, the report also offers vast detail about those friendly contacts, giving the Bush White House and its supporters an opportunity to cite the commission in support of their contention about a relationship between Hussein's regime and the terrorist network.
Thursday's report also offered new details on ties between Al Qaeda operatives and Iran, including evidence that the Iranian-sponsored militant group Hezbollah appeared to closely shadow hijackers before the attacks. It also said that at least eight suicide hijackers traveled freely through Iran en route to Afghanistan.
"We believe this topic requires further investigation by the U.S. government," the panel said.
Protecting civilians
Despite the inevitable focus on such new details, the crucial theme that emerged throughout the probe, Hamilton said Thursday, was that no one was really in charge of protecting civilians against an assault such as the one launched Sept. 11.
"Who oversees the massive integration and unity of effort necessary to keep America safe? Too often, the answer is no one," he said.
That central finding, along with the panel's conclusion that the Sept. 11 plot fell perfectly into the void of U.S. government responsibility between domestic and foreign threats, drove the panel's proposal to integrate counterterrorism elements of the nation's 15 intelligence agencies into a single entity.
It also was behind the plan to give a single official true power over the entire intelligence community.
But commissioners know the stakes will be enormous. At issue is control of more than $40 billion in secret, annual spending, access to the nation's most precious and important secrets, and the ability to fire some of the government's most influential officials--men and women who often wield their clout in Washington's shadows
Among the panel's most surprising recommendations was the call for an all-out American effort to exercise so-called soft, or diplomatic, power to confront Islamic extremism around the world. Commissioners said it was an essential complement to military, intelligence and law-enforcement actions. Critics have long cited the failure to move forward aggressively on that front as a shortcoming in the Bush administration's approach.
Unchecked, commissioners found, extremist ideology will fuel deaths long after bin Laden or other Al Qaeda leaders are killed or captured.
"America and its friends have the advantage--our vision can offer a better future," the report asserted.
But another key finding--that America lacked the imagination to confront the Sept. 11 threat--also seems as though it would be the most difficult to address.
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Key findings
PROBLEM AREAS
DIPLOMACY: From February 1997 through Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. tried to persuade the Taliban not to harbor Al Qaeda by issuing warnings and sanctions, but the efforts failed.
MILITARY: Policymakers were frustrated with the options presented to them. Some Pentagon officials were also frustrated with the lack of military action against Osama bin Laden.
INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY: Organizations struggled to collect and analyze intelligence on terrorism but were hampered by an overwhelming number of priorities, budget restraints and an outdated structure.
FBI: Efforts were made to improve methods to investigate terrorism, but reforms were not implemented. These areas of reform included better sharing of information, training and resources.
BORDER AND IMMIGRATION CONTROL: Travel plans of Al Qaeda operatives could have been disrupted because of the hijackers' actions, which included violating immigration laws, making false statements to border officials to enter the U.S. and presenting fraudulent passports.
AVIATION SECURITY: Though some hijackers were on the terrorist watchlist, they were not stopped from boarding planes in the U.S.
HOMELAND DEFENSE: Civilian and military defenders of U.S. airspace were unprepared for the attack. Communication was poor at senior levels, and the chain of command did not function well.
EMERGENCY RESPONSE: Effective decision-making in New York was hampered by problems in command and control and in internal communications.
CONGRESS: Senators and representatives were slow to respond to the rise of transnational terrorism as a threat to national security.
MISSED OPPORTUNITIES
The government missed several chances to perhaps foil the
terrorists' attack plan including:
- Failing to share information linking those involved in the USS Cole bombing to hijacker Khalid Almihdhar, who had contacts with an FBI informant.
- Failing to discover false statements on visa applications of the
operatives.
- Failing to expand the no-fly lists to include names from terrorist watch lists.
Source: The 9/11 Commission Report
Chicago Tribune
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WHAT PANEL SUGGESTS
- NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE DIRECTOR to oversee gathering of information by the CIA, FBI and other agencies.
- NATIONAL COUNTERTERRORISM CENTER to unify
intelligence and operational planning.
- PERMANENT COMMITTEES in the House and Senate to deal with homeland security.
- BETTER SHARING of intelligence, replacing a "need to know" system with "need to share."
- STEERING OF FUNDS to places considered most at risk, such as New York and Washington, instead of allowing pork-barrel politics to intrude.
- REACHING OUT to Muslim world with positive message of U.S. values.
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See the complete report at CHICAGOTRIBUNE.COM
Link to the report..........
http://images.chicagotribune.com/media/acrobat/2004-07/13520607.pdf
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~mark~
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