9/11 should mean nothing

Posted by Joshua Holland at 11:33 AM on September 8, 2006.

The War on Terror is a miserable failure. The problem it was supposed to address, according to the White House, was Islamofascist terrorism. The proximate cause of that terrorism was that "they hate us," and the root cause of that hatred was supposedly "our freedoms."

OK. Here we are, five years in, and last year there were three and a half times the number of terror attacks worldwide than in 2001. "They" -- the Islamic world at large -- didn't hate us before we launched the war (at least a majority didn't), but they sure do now. And, to top it off, we've had to accept fewer freedoms because of that "war." Most of all, we're losing because, with an assist from our Commander-in-Chief, we're still terrified -- Al Qaeda's mission is accomplished.

Intelligence, on the other hand, seems to work pretty well. I did a review of media reports for an article I'm writing and found that governments have claimed to have foiled at least 37 major attacks against Western targets since 1999.

But the best evidence that competent intelligence and law enforcement, handled by responsible adults, is the best defense against terrorism may have been the devastating attacks of 9/11 themselves. After all, they never should have happened.

Consider:

• The President's now infamous August 6, 2001, intelligence briefing warned that Osama bin Laden was seeking to hijack aircraft. The White House at first claimed that there was no indication that the attacks would be on American soil. Later, it was revealed that the briefing was titled "Bin Laden determined to strike in the U.S.
• According to the Sunday Herald, "Britain gave President Bush a categorical warning to expect multiple airline hijackings by the al-Qaeda network a month before the September 11 attacks…" British intelligence had previously warned of attacks using aircraft in Washington DC and New York.
• According to Newsweek, a classified report by a joint Congressional inquiry found that the CIA had warned the white House just over a month before the attacks that Osama bin Laden was about to launch a terrorist strike "in the coming weeks." Agency officials warned: "The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning."
• According to the British Independent, "Weeks before the terrorist attacks on 11 September, the United States and the United Nations ignored warnings from a secret Taliban emissary that Osama bin Laden was planning a huge attack on American soil. The warnings were delivered by an aide of Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, the Taliban Foreign Minister at the time, who was known to be deeply unhappy with the foreign militants in Afghanistan, including Arabs."
• The New York Times reported ($$) that Egyptian intelligence had warned U.S. intelligence a week before the attack that Al Qaeda "was in advance stages of executing significant operation against American targets" based on intelligence from a secret agent in close contact with Bin Laden.
• The Telegraph of London reported that "two senior experts with Mossad, the Israeli military intelligence service, were sent to Washington in August [of 2001] to alert the CIA and FBI to the existence" of a terror cell inside the U.S. and warned "that large-scale terrorist attacks on highly visible targets on the American mainland were imminent."
• James Ridgeway reported in the Village Voice that both Russian and Jordanian intelligence had warned of pending attacks in the U.S. during the summer of 2001; both warnings were specifically of "suicide pilots" training for attacks on U.S. soil.
• Journalist William Rivers Pitt reported that during the summer of 2001: "The German intelligence service, BND, warned American and Israeli agencies that terrorists were planning to hijack commercial aircraft and use them as weapons to attack important American targets."
• Military intelligence officials claim they had identified 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta and three other 9/11 hi-jackers well before the attack (others have disputed the claim).
• James Ridgeway reported that U.S. intelligence officials had ignored French intelligence's warnings about Zacarias Moussaoui, an Algerian believed to have been planning to accompany the hi-jackings.
• FBI agents in Minnesota had launched an investigation into Moussaoui, but their information was ignored by Washington.

Just think about that on Monday. Katrina is always held up as the best evidence of this administration's great, avoidable disaster, but the truth is that 9/11 should never have happened.

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.