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by ABC News
2/18/02
Feb. 18 — The terrorist attacks of
Sept. 11, the worst in U.S. history, came as a complete surprise to U.S.
law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
There were no alerts, no increased
security, no warnings. An ABC NEWS investigation of the failure of
intelligence on Sept. 11 has found a trail of missed signals, missed
opportunities, and warnings ignored.
There were warnings about the
possibility of an airborne terrorist attack on U.S. targets as early as
1994, when terrorism expert Marvin Cetron underlined the threat in a
report to the Pentagon.
"We saw Osama bin Laden. We spelled
it out and we said the United States was very vulnerable," Cetron told
ABC NEWS. "You could make a left turn at the Washington Monument and
take out the White House. And you could make a right turn and take out
the Pentagon."
Cetron said he warned the Pentagon
that two events earlier that year — the crash-landing of a small
airplane at the White House by an apparently unstable man, and French
authorities' storming of a hijacked airliner that Algerian terrorists
had planned to fly into the Eiffel Tower — made an airborne terrorist
attack on the United States a very real possibility. "We knew that was
going happen and we were scared," he told ABC NEWS.
But Cetron said Pentagon
officials told him to delete the warning from the report. "I said, 'It's
unclassified, everything is available,' and they said, 'We don't want it
released because you can't handle a crisis before it becomes a crisis,
and no one is going to believe it anyhow,' " Cetron said. Even with the
warnings of an airborne attack deleted, the report was not released to
the public.
Aversion to Risk
Four years later, in 1998, U.S.
authorities faced a terrorist crisis with the bombings of the U.S.
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The United States accused bin Laden of
involvement, and Congress and the Clinton administration commissioned
two new reports on terrorism.
Both of the reports rang alarm
bells, but little was done.
The reports noted that the United
States had virtually no human intelligence sources inside groups like
bin Laden's al Qaeda.
"We found that over the years both
the overseas intelligence community, and at home the FBI had developed a
risk aversion," said Paul Bremer, chairman of the National Commission on
Terrorism, which released its report in 2000.
An aversion to risk meant that
the CIA failed to penetrate al Qaeda with a single agent, according to
U.S. intelligence sources.
The reports criticized Clinton
administration guidelines restricting U.S. intelligence agencies from
hiring informants with questionable human rights records.
"You don't get too many monks or
nuns to get information for the CIA," said former Sen. Warren Rudman,
who co-chaired the U.S. Commission on National Security, which submitted
its report to Congress in three parts, beginning in June 2000. "There
are some pretty rotten people, some of them with pretty bad records. But
if they had the information that would protect our national security, we
damn well should have used them."
Critics say the United States was
too dependent on satellites and other high-tech means to gather
intelligence on bin Laden's network, and that there was a shortage of
people to translate and analyze the vast amounts of data.
For example, ABCNEWS has learned
that shortly before Sept. 11, NSA intercepts detected multiple phone
calls from Abu Zubaida, bin Laden's chief of operations, to the United
States. The intercepts were never passed on.
"We do have a joint antiterrorism
center, and that is a failure of information consolidation and
analysis," said Rudman. "It obviously (a) wasn't consolidated and (b)
wasn't analyzed. I mean, those are serious shortcomings."
After the Fact
All three reports recognized the
shortcomings and made recommendations including closer monitoring of
student visas, the creation of a homeland security office, the freezing
of financial assets that supported terrorism, and more coordination
between the CIA and the FBI on intelligence.
But, the reports' authors say,
their recommendations went largely unheeded.
Bremer said that no action was taken
on any of his commission's recommendations — until the attacks on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon: "Interestingly, since Sept. 11
almost every one of our recommendations has either been enacted by the
executive branch or been put into law by Congress, which suggests that
we probably had a pretty good menu of things to do before Sept. 11."
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