This editorial could use a good fisking, but the NYT is such a joke these days that it doesn’t seem worth the effort.
From Norman Podhoretz's World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism
... the attack on 9/11 did indeed come out of the blue in the sense that no one ever took such a possibility seriously enough to figure out what to do about it. Even (Richard A.) Clarke himself, who at a meeting on July 5, 2001, warned that “something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it’s going to happen soon,” had to admit under questioning by one of the 9/11 commissioners that if all his recommendations had been acted upon, the attack still could not have been prevented. And in its final report, the commission, while digging up no fewer than ten episodes that with hindsight could be seen as missed “operational opportunities,” thought that these opportunities could not have been acted on effectively enough to frustrate the attack. Indeed not: not, that is, in the real America as it existed at the time.
It was, to begin with, an America in which the FBI had been so hobbled by congressional restraints that it could scarcely make a move, and so intimidated by legal restrictions that it shied away from taking action even when it had very good reasons to pounce. The most egregious case in point was what happened when, only a month before 9/11, an agent in the FBI’s Minneapolis field office discovered that one Zacarias Moussaui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, had enrolled in a flight school in order to learn how to take off and land a Boeing 747. The agent initiated an investigation, which, the 9/11 Commission report would tell us, led him to conclude that Moussaui was “an Islamic extremist preparing for some future act in furtherance of radical fundamentalist goals.” The agent also suspected that Moussaui was planning to hijack a plane, and to check out this suspicion he wanted to seize and search Moussaui’s laptop computer. For this he needed a warrant, but his superiors at FBI headquarters in Washington did not believe that there was sufficient probable cause of a crime to obtain one. In the hope of getting around this problem, the agent and his colleagues now tried to show that Moussaui was an agent of a foreign power. This set them off on a wild–goose chase involving intelligence agencies in England and France, not to mention the CIA, the FAA, the Customs Service, the State Department, the INS, and the Secret Service. But still no warrant. Why? Because, the 9/11 Commission report explains:
There was substantial disagreement between Minneapolis agents and FBI headquarters [in Washington] as to what Moussaui was planning to do. In one conversation between a Minneapolis supervisor and a headquarters agent, the latter complained that Minneapolis’s…request was couched in a manner intended to get people “spun up.” The supervisor replied that was precisely his intent. He said he was “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center.” The headquarters agent replied that this was not going to happen and that they did not know if Moussaui was a terrorist.
Well, the headquarters agent would eventually find out not only that Moussaui was a terrorist but that he was a member of Al Qaeda and slated to participate in a West Coast follow–up to 9/11.
As if such obstacles were not enough to block an effective counter to the threat of terrorism in pre-9/11 America, there was also the “wall of separation.” This wall was erected during the Clinton administration to obstruct communication or cooperation between the FBI and the CIA. The main purpose was supposedly to prevent secret information and intelligence sources from being compromised by law enforcement agencies and prosecutors. But the idea must also have owed more than a little something to the hope among leftists and liberals that keeping the FBI and the CIA apart would reduce the menace they both allegedly posed to “dissent” and civil liberties.
Be that as it may, let me cite only three mind-boggling examples of what the “wall of separation” wrought. They come from Lawrence Wright of The New Yorker by way of the conveniently succinct summaries by Dexter Filkins of The New York Times (two publications that one would expect to be justifying the “wall of separation” and not exposing the horrendous damage it did). Here is the first:
The CIA…knew that high–level Qaeda operatives had held a meeting in Malaysia in January 2000, and, later, that two of them had entered the United States. Both men turned out to be part of the team that hijacked the planes on Sept. 11. The CIA failed to inform…the FBI—which might have been able to locate the men and break up the plot—until late in the summer of 2001.
The second such example of the damage done by the “wall of separation” is even worse:
At meetings, CIA analysts dangled photos of two of the eventual hijackers in front of FBI agents, but wouldn’t tell them who they were. The FBI agents could sense that the CIA possessed crucial pieces of evidence about Islamic radicals they were investigating, but couldn’t tell what they were. The tension came to a head at a meeting in New York on June 11, exactly three months before the catastrophe, which ended with FBI and CIA agents shouting at each other across the room.
And the third of the three examples may be the worst of them all:
Ali Soufan, an FBI agent assigned to Al Qaeda, was taken aside on September 12 and finally shown the names and photos of the men the CIA had known for more than a year and a half were in America. The planes had already struck. Soufan ran to the bathroom and retched.
Finally, the America of those far–off days before 9/11 was a country in which politicians and the general public alike were still unable and/or unwilling to believe that terrorism might actually represent a genuine threat. Attention was of course paid by the professionals within the federal government and in various law enforcement agencies whose job it was to keep their eyes open for possible terrorist attacks on American soil. Yet not even they could imagine that anything as big as 9/11 might be in the offing, and when the few lonely exceptions were not being stymied by the “wall of separation,” the initiatives they tried to take were invariably killed off by bureaucratic bungling.