September 11 Intelligence Failures

The bureaucratic politics that go on within the government of the United States is often much more of a hassle than it is a help. A good example of this is the confused and incomplete job of intelligence gathering prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States. The problem in this case was not the lack of effort to gain intelligence, but rather the lack of ability to analyze and process the results of the limited intelligence that was gathered. The specific problems among the government's intelligence agencies are what need to be focused on in order to not let something like September 11 happen again.

Could the terrorist acts of September 11 been prevented? Evidence suggests yes. The information in the selected reading provided gives examples which suggest that enough information was gathered to stop the attacks, but the information was not properly handled. This, one can argue, is in large part due to the bureaucratic mess that is the United States intelligence community. To start off, the United States uses thirteen different intelligence agencies; all separate entities within cabinet departments, with the exception of the CIA, which is not part of any Cabinet department, but is instead under its own control. The Secretary of Defense is in charge of eight of these agencies, while other agencies are under the power of the Secretary of State, Treasury, Energy, and the Attorney General. Just from looking at the amount of intelligence agencies one realizes how difficult effective communication between agencies can be. Often times a power struggle is to blame, as is the case between the CIA and the FBI. These two agencies have different views and objectives, and are both often monitoring the same thing, yet fail to share information that would be mutually helpful. An example of this concerning the prior months to the attacks was the arrest and interrogation of Ahmed Ressam by the FBI. He had been convicted of trying to bomb Los Angeles International Airport, and after he was arrested he was informing the FBI about al- Qaeda's possible future attacks. He mentioned a high possibility of an attack involving an air plane as al- Qaeda's next move. But this information was never given to the CIA, who were at the same time gathering information to find out that two other members of al- Qaeda who had participated in past anti- US terrorist actions, were in Southern California. Had both of these pieces of information been placed together, more attention would have been given to this threat.

Along with this example of sloppy coordination between agencies, problems also arouse within the hierarchy of individual agencies, such as the FBI. One team of FBI investigators in Phoenix, Arizona discovered that many suspected Islamic terrorists were enrolling in flight schools in the United States. This alarming fact was reported on in a memo sent to FBI headquarters. At its destination, the memo was paid basically no attention, even though President Bush and his White House intelligence agency and the CIA were both discovering their own worries about possible terrorist attempts by al- Qaeda in the near future. Had higher division members of the FBI paid more attention to this document, and then collaborated with the CIA in a more effective way, the plan that eventually unraveled itself on September 11 might have never had the opportunity to be.
One could argue that looking back it is easy to say, "We should have done this, should have done that," but there in fact was not enough information provided to make a difference. A person giving this argument would agree that yes, a few memos were sent with information concerning what turned out to be active terrorists related to the attacks of September 11, but not enough relative information was given. In the thirteen agencies all in charge of gathering intelligence to keep the country safe, think of all the information that is gathered, and how much of it is more speculative than factual, incriminating intelligence. The amount of information provided, a person giving this argument could say, was not specific nor threatening enough, but was instead based on theories and speculation. The prior intelligence looks clear now, but at the time it was not quite enough to cause a further inquiry. This person might be right, but the evidence presented in the class case book seems to suggest otherwise.

More than just one or two random memos or pieces of information were gathered, but instead a whole collection of clear information that simply needed to be shared among the agencies and shown to more of the right people. The problem was more with the lack of communication between top intelligence officials between agencies than with the information or lack there of. There is another situation that shows the mistakes caused by a badly designed organizational structure within the intelligence community. In August FBI agents arrested a man named Zacarias Moussaoui after a flight school instructor of his informed the FBI that he wanted to learn how to fly a Boeing 747, but didn't want or need to learn how to land it. The FBI contacted the French police to further investigate his past, as he was from France. The FBI agents were informed that Moussaoui was in fact a member of radical Islamic groups and with this information the FBI agents wanted to get a search warrant to search for files on his laptop. Their attempt to do this was denied because they supposedly didn't have enough evidence. Higher up members in the FBI seemed uninterested, as did the CIA. One of the agents actually mentioned the idea of Moussaoui being part of a plan to crash a plane into the World Trade Center. This information makes it clear that had all leads been followed, the terrorist attack could possibly and probably have been prevented. The bureaucracy of the intelligence community made the flow of important information sluggish and therefore prevented any precautionary tactics from taking place.

Given the evidence provided, one can see that information about the future attacks was in the hands of various intelligence agencies at the time of the attack. The problem is that the information was not linked together to form a clear and specific danger sign until after the attacks occurred. Hopefully the intelligence community of the United States can take this very unfortunate event and learn from their mistakes about handling important intelligence. It would be helpful if the entire intelligence gathering community acted together as a collective whole in sharing information and were more interested in examining possible leads than having higher ranking officials ignore possibly important memos. It is not right to place all the blame for the attacks on the way the limited information was processed, but it does seem logical that if the information that was known was put to the right use, something could have been different about what happened on the morning of September 11, 2001.