Posted on 09/11/2001 7:14:09 PM PDT by kattracks
WASHINGTON (AP) - For all its technological prowess and military might, the United States didn't see this coming.
None of the vaunted intelligence tools at the nation's disposal gave any warning of the coming nightmare - a massively coordinated effort to hijack and crash at least four airliners at the same time.
U.S. officials confirmed they had no reports that such attacks were imminent.
Not from the CIA's networks of spies and informants. Not from the FBI's many counterintelligence agents. Not from the National Security Agency's telephone and computer taps. Not from the military's satellites or spy planes.
"If there had been successful intelligence gathering, we would have thwarted" the attacks, said Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which oversees the nation's $30 billion-plus intelligence budget. "There's never going to be perfect intelligence, but we cannot afford these kinds of failures."
There were general warnings of possible terrorist activity, ones that come and go with some frequency. But nothing like this was foreseen.
"This is a stunning security and intelligence failure," said Mike Yardley, a terrorism expert and former Army officer. "In both those spheres, major errors have evidently occurred. Heads should roll."
The complexity of this kind of operation should have been its downfall, Yardley said.
"To coordinate the hijack of four or more is absolutely extraordinary," he said.
The U.S. investigation quickly focused on millionaire Saudi Arabian exile Osama bin Laden, who is believed to be in Afghanistan, U.S. officials said.
Intelligence agents listened to a conversation between two affiliates of bin Laden saying they had hit two targets in the United States, said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah.
"I'm really ticked off," Hatch said. "We should have bin Laden on the defensive so he would be thinking about how we are going to take them rather than him plotting massive terrorist plots."
"We should have kept bin Laden on the defensive," Hatch said. "That is more than intelligence, that is a military operation."
John Martin, a former Justice Department official who prosecuted espionage cases, said, "It is a failure of security and intelligence collection."
"The clues and the investigation are going to be as difficult as the intelligence that was never there leading up to this," said Martin.
Asked about the critical statements of the intelligence community, CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said, "The CIA has worked diligently and relentlessly to try to counter terrorism. Our resources are being devoted to determining who was responsible for these horrendous attacks, and it doesn't serve any useful purpose in light of that to respond to such criticism."
Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that if the United States finds that the attacks were state-assisted, "We should be prepared to take warlike activities."
Both he and Shelby mentioned several ways the intelligence system needs to be upgraded. The priority, Graham said, is to improve the human intelligence system, which he defined as the ability to infiltrate cells and small groups and learn what they are doing and what motivates them.
"I think the most important thing is to rebuild the intelligence community," Graham said.
He added said the United States' self-imposed ban on direct assassination "ought to be revisited."
After watching the President tonight - and the talking heads that are beginning the soft words and mushy actions of 'business as usual' - I fired off the following letter to my senators and my congressman. I am not eager for war, but it has been brought to my soil. The blood of our innocents has been spilled.
If you disagree that we must gird ourselves and engage in war to the bloody hilt with these unspeakable animals, then that is your right and read no more. But if you agree that we must wage war... you might consider sending a similar letter.
Letter starts.
Dear Senator Edwards,
Sir, I ask you, as a Senator, an American, and a fellow Tarheel to urge the President of the United States to ask the Congress, in joint session assembled, to declare war against those responsible for the infamous acts of war committed against the United States on September 11th, 2001 - a date which eclipes the infamy of December 7th, 1941.
This is the single bloodiest day in American history. We are at war. If we talk ourselves into 'business as usual' we let those innocents that were so fouly murdered and the brave men and women that lost their lives in the performance of their duty die in vain. This is not an issue to be settled by focus groups or by vote-mongering. This is WAR and America soil has been struck.
Millions of Americans watched their President this evening. We needed the courage of Teddy or Franklin Roosevelt, or the resolve of John Kennedy or Abraham Lincoln or Harry Truman... or the grim determination of that Anglo-American, Winston Churchill.
Sir, we are at war. Let us resolve to go forward together and WAGE THAT WAR.
Respectfully,
XXXXX X. XXXXXX
Major, Special Forces (Retired)
Most operations are compromised when a participant who though he was just playing games figures our the others are for read. The "games" type person goes to the law out of fear. But when the people are true beliveres as the Kool Aid drinkers were, they are willing to die for a cause.
I heard Tom Clancey say today that people who would submit to death for a cause were rare. He said you could not find such people. That is just crap. Who were those people that killed themselves in 2000 because they thought is was the end of the world. Do you remember those people that drank the poisoned grape Kool Aid in Guyana, they killed themselves becase a charismatic leader asked them to do so. There were the Japanese pilots in world War II who chose to die for their nation by flying bombs into our ships.
It is easy to find people who will die for a cause. Alos people who are prepared to die for a cause do not leak information. There is not way to intercept their communications. To think that some group willing to kill tens of thousands would not use an encription becuase it was illegal is just silly thinking.The fact is committed people can keep their mouths shut.
For every offense there is a defense that will prevail. And for every defense there is an offense that will succeed.
In the final analysis there is no security other than that we provide for ourselves. You can only provide for your own security.
Had a fairly large number of persons on these planes have been armed, no one in the world trade center would have lost their life. The evil people would have been forced to find a different way to attack us.
One fact of war is always true. You can not win a war with only a defense. You must have an offense to win.
People who only play defense in war, always lose.
And if not state assisted, what then? Just let it slide? This guy is the chairman!
Forget about intelligence, for now. What about the elapsed time between the first WTC hit, and the Pentagon hit? Why wasn't anything up in Wash. DC on the lookout, for potential terrorist strikes? Why didn't air traffic controllers issue a warning to the military pilots, about a flight path towards the Pentagon?
We got a whole lotta splainin to do.
Clinton doubtlessly helped degrade our capabilities, but there is much more. The military is weak, weak, weak, and dumb imho.
I think tolerance has taken a back seat. I think this may show a need for more covert ops.
What do you think?
Clancy wrote some great thrillers at the beginning - but it's time for him to go back to selling insurance to Navy officers, the closest he's ever been to a real military "post".
If we're going to be smart about this, let's punish the truly guilty, for once. And that would be Jimmy "nice nations don't read each other's mail" Carter - aka "dipshit".
My father and all the old WWII-generation CIA case officers retired under this absolute twit and his idiot lapdog Stansfield Turner. The Iranian embassy hostage crisis (that we knew nothing in advance about - sound familiar?) followed not too long after this decimation of the CIA.
ODA 111
I don't see this at all. The terrorists apparently used knives, perhaphs plastic knives to avoid problems with the X-Ray machines. Implication: No inside help needed to get on board the airplanes with the only weapons they needed to command control. The terrorists were at least maginally competent pilots so you didn't have to have pilots on the inside. The idea that the pilots were on the inside is absurd. What is the chance that you could get your four inside/mole pilots all an transcontinental flights taking off within such a short period of time? Much better to train the terrorists to fly just well enough to crash into some pretty big targets.
What does this all add up to? Answer: Training and dedication but not complexity. As few as 8 but probably 12 or 16 people without any outside help could and most likely did commit this act of war. It was well planned but you could do that anywhere is the world. All you need is access to airline schedules. Pick four trans-continental flights to make sure there is plenty of fuel to make the bomb, buy the tickets, threaten or kill the stewardesses, break down the door, kill the pilots and fly to the targets. It is clever, requires training and a willingness to die for a cause but it is not complex. It does not require any significant amount of communications except for the possibility of the one bit message "TRUE" = "Go For It As Planned."
So the critcism of the Intelligence agencies may or may not be well placed. This particular operation would not require the coordination and communications necessary to, for example, build a bomb and blow up a Federal Building in OKC or the World Trade Center buildings in NYC. Intelligence is built on the intercept of commumications, verbal or othewise. If you design a terrorist attack that doesn't require signicant coordination then the spy guys are going to have a hard time picking it up. I think the clue was the pilot training by bin Laden. We apparently knew that was going on and didn't manage to track these guys. That was the intelligence failure and it started back in the Clinton Administration.
Some recommendations for corrective action:
1. Put absolutely secure doors between the pilots and the passengers. Nothing less than a bomb should open those doors.
2. If our Intelligence services can pinpoint any pilot/trainee of bin Laden they should just go out and send them to the heaven they seek a little sooner than they planned. If we don't have the guts, then let the Israelies do it for us.
3. Post a $100,000,000 reward for providing the location of the people who did this (bin Laden or whoever.)
Tom brought up the subject of the CLINTON decimation of the US HUMAN INTELLIGENCE capabilities – that going all the way back to Sun Tsu, SPIES are a necessary part of the information gathering process. He mentioned that if we’d had a few spies and spooks out there in this increasingly dangerous world, we MIGHT have gotten one of them close to the perpetrator and been able to interdict the MURDER of perhaps 15,000 Americans in the incredible tragedy we witnessed this morning.
I think it’s safe to say that Clancy knows a bit about the subjects on which he writes.
Tom then tagged CNN by name as one of the news agencies that greeted Clinton’s decimation of the intelligence community with approval, continuing to say that they COULD have spoken out TO OPPOSE HIM but failed to do so. Tom’s rather clear implication was that CNN played a role in today’s catastrophe.
Judy VISIBLY RECOILED – and quickly concluded the interview. Her expression made it clear that she was NOT happy with Tom.
Clancy was RIGHT ON THE MARK and until we DO beef up those assets, it’s gonna happen again – and probably sooner than later.
And do you suppose there is some sinister significance to the fact that this happened on 9-11 (911!)? Are these people THAT sick? Don’t bother responding as that was a rhetorical question.
Let’s all pray – and shed a tear or two -- for the lost firefighters, police officers, innocent citizens and their families. Until this is behind us, we must put aside as many of our partisan differences as our principles will allow.
And we must also pray that our precious Constitution does not become one of the first victims of this SICKENING and senseless act.
THE HORROR! THE H O R R O R!!!!!!!!!!
Remember Coventry? There could be worse to come.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.