Intelligence Failures of Imagination and The 9/11 Attacks
Failure of imagination is invoked as a reason that intelligence agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency and the NSA, failed to prevent the September 11 attacks. More generally, the concept may also apply to the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, neither of whom prevented the attacks.
During the summer of 2003, after the now-declassified report about the September 11 attack, many government officials, such as Senator Bob Graham began to make criticisms that the September 11 attack might have easily been predicted and even prevented. Following these criticisms, President Bush declassified the August 6, 2001 President's Daily Brief, Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US, which indicated that hijackings might be one possible mode of attack.
After the attacks, representatives of the Bush administration claimed in early 2004 that "nobody could have imagined that ... hijackers would intentionally crash ... hijackers usually want to live." To the contrary, the apparently intentional crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 by its co-pilot on December 31, 1999, and a similar intentional crash of PSA Flight 1771 by a disgruntled former airline employee on December 7, 1987, and especially the case of AFR 8969, offered precedents that indicated otherwise. Prior to the 9/11 attacks, a number of foreign nationals were taking pilot training in the U.S. and raised suspicion by being uninterested in learning how to land safely. The 9/11 Commission found that this failure to "connect the dots" and imagine what was being planned was an important contributing factor to the September 11 attacks, stating "the most important failure was one of imagination."
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Famous quotes containing the words intelligence, failures, imagination and/or attacks:
“Most women’s intelligence tends more to the improving of their folly than their reason.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“Fantasy is a product of thought, Imagination of sensibility. If the thinking, discursive mind turns to speculation, the result is Fantasy; if, however, the sensitive, intuitive mind turns to speculation, the result is Imagination. Fantasy may be visionary, but it is cold and logical. Imagination is sensuous and instinctive. Both have form, but the form of Fantasy is analogous to Exposition, that of Imagination to Narrative.”
—Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)
“We are supposed to be the children of Seth; but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilisation.”
—Anthony Burgess (b. 1917)