Responsibility For The September 11 Attacks - United States Advance Knowledge

United States Advance Knowledge

The 9/11 Commission Report concluded that both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had been "not well served" by the FBI and CIA prior to 9/11. It also explained that the military response protocols were unsuited for the nature of the attack, and identified operational failures in the emergency response.

Immediately following the attacks, the Bush Administration stated that "nobody in our government at least, and I don't the think the prior government, could envisage flying air planes into buildings" (George Bush) and that no-one "could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile" (Condoleezza Rice). An Air Force general called the attack "something we had never seen before, something we had never even thought of." FBI Director Robert Mueller announced "there were no warning signs that I'm aware of."

Some mainstream media reports have conflicted with these statements, claiming that the FBI and CIA knew of the threat of planes being used as missiles as early as 1995, following the foiling of the Bojinka Plot. The Chicago Sun-Times reported that:

The FBI had advance indications of plans to hijack US airliners and use them as weapons, but neither acted on them nor distributed the intelligence to local police agencies. From the moment of the September 11th attacks, high-ranking federal officials insisted that the terrorists’ method of operation surprised them. Many stick to that story. Actually, elements of the hijacking plan were known to the FBI as early as 1995 and, if coupled with current information, might have uncovered the plot.

The 9/11 Commission Report stated that "the 9/11 attacks were a shock, but they should not have come as a surprise. Islamic extremists had given plenty of warnings that they meant to kill Americans indiscriminately and in large numbers." During the spring and summer of 2001, US intelligence agencies received a stream of warnings about an imminent al-Qaeda attack; according to George Tenet, Director of Central Intelligence, "the system was blinking red." The warnings varied in their level of detail and specificity, and included warnings from both domestic intelligence operations and warnings from foreign governments and intelligence agencies.

In her testimony to the 9/11 Commission, Condoleezza Rice stated that "the threat reporting that we received in the spring and summer of 2001 was not specific as to time nor place nor manner of attack. Almost all the reports focused on al-Qaeda activities outside the United States." This statement has been criticised by family members of victims of the attacks and who described it as "an insult". On August 6, 2001, the President's Daily Brief was titled Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US. It warned that bin Laden was planning to exploit his operatives' access to the US to mount a terrorist strike: "FBI information... indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country, consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attack."

The 9/11 Commission Report outlined the following "opportunities that were not or could not be exploited by the organizations and systems of the time":

• not watchlisting future hijackers Hazmi and Mihdhar, not trailing them after they traveled to Bangkok, and not informing the FBI about one future hijacker's US visa or his companion's travel to the United States;
• not sharing information linking individuals in the Cole attack to Mihdhar;
• not taking adequate steps in time to find Mihdhar or Hazmi in the United States;
• not linking the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui, described as interested in flight training for the purpose of using an airplane in a terrorist attack, to the heightened indications of an attack;
• not discovering false statements on visa applications;
• not recognizing passports manipulated in a fraudulent manner;
• not expanding no-fly lists to include names from terrorist watchlists;
• not searching airline passengers identified by the computer-based CAPPS screening system; and
• not hardening aircraft cockpit doors or taking other measures to prepare for the possibility of suicide hijackings.

With regard to the failures of the US air defense system on the morning of the attacks, the Report explains that:

Existing protocols on 9/11 were unsuited in every respect for an attack in which hijacked planes were used as weapons. What ensued was a hurried attempt to improvise a defense by civilians who had never handled a hijacked aircraft that attempted to disappear, and by a military unprepared for the transformation of commercial aircraft into weapons of mass destruction.

The Report explains that the emergency response was also "necessarily improvised": there were "weaknesses in preparations for disaster, failure to achieve unified incident command, and inadequate communications among responding agencies... At the Pentagon, problems of command and control."