Asleep at the Wheel

By Bill Moyers, NOW with Bill Moyers. Posted September 10, 2004.

It has taken three years for the details of the terrorist plot of 9/11 to emerge. The fateful turns that led to the attacks have finally entered the public discourse. Their lessons, however, have yet to be learned.

The first lesson is that the highest officials in government did not want us to know the truth.

They already had the story they wanted Americans to believe: Nearly 3,000 people had died, we were assured, because the terrorists turned our liberties against us, had brazenly exploited our open society. According to this official view, the atrocities were inevitable, the plot so diabolical and its execution so precise that only a superhero could have prevented it.

It sounded right. For the American people, the terror seemed to have fallen out of that near-perfect September sky, out of the clear blue.

We now know otherwise. The report of the 9/11 Commission lays the story bare in exhaustive, forensic detail:

• That Condoleezza Rice in the White House press room told reporters May 16, 2002: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, taken another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."
• That George Tenet, in testimony before Congress, countered Rice's claim: "The documents we've provided show some 12 reports spread over seven years which pertain to possible use of aircraft as terrorist weapons. We disseminated those reports to the appropriate agencies, such as the FAA, the Department of Transportation, and the FBI as they came in."
• That the CIA in late 1999 had identified one of the future hijackers, Khalid al Mihdhar, tracked him and a companion to Malaysia, obtained a photocopy of his Saudi passport, learned he had a U.S. visa valid until April 2000, obtained photographs of him and his associates, recognized that "something more nefarious [was] afoot," and then promptly lost Mihdhar, and his traveling partner and fellow future hijacker, Nawaf al Hazmi, in Thailand.
• That Mihdhar and Hazmi arrived in Los Angeles aboard a United Airlines flight on Jan 15, 2000.
• That Mihdhar was, according to a 9/11 Commission staff report, "a known al Qaeda operative at the time."
• That Mihdhar and Hazmi lived openly in San Diego, obtained California drivers' licenses in their own names, even rooming for a time with an FBI informant.
• Even when the CIA learned of Mihdhar and Hazmi's arrival, their names were not added to a terror watchlist until August 24, 2001.
• That even today, after three years of intensive FBI investigation, the 9/11 Staff conceded an "inability to ascertain the activities of Hazmi and Mihdhar during their first two weeks in the United States...."
• That FBI director Robert Mueller said, "They gave no hint to those around what they were about. They came lawfully. They lived lawfully. They trained lawfully."
• That the staff of the 9/11 Commission endeavored "to dispel the myth that [the hijackers'] entry into the United States was 'clean and legal.'"
• "That all 19 of the still-existing hijacker [visa] applications were incomplete in some way..."
• That the hijackers cleared U.S Customs a total of 33 times over 21 months through 9 airports.
• Ziad Jarrah, one of the 4 pilots, entered the U.S. a total of seven times between May 2000 and August 2001.
• That "in all, [the hijackers] had 25 contacts with consular officers and 43 contacts with immigration and customs authorities."
• That Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, "KSM," the mastermind of the terror plot, used "a travel facilitator" to acquire a U.S. visa on July 23, 2001 in Saudi Arabia – even though he had been indicted in the Southern District of NY in 1996.
• That Mohammed Atta was readmitted to the US on January 10, 2001 – even though he had overstayed his previous visa by a month.
• That even when Atta was referred for further, "secondary inspection" at Customs, "Atta's secondary inspector misjudged him as a tourist, even though Atta presented him with a student/school form as a basis for entry."

This commentary is associated with "9/11: For the Record" a one-hour documentary by Bill Moyers, Andrew Meier, and Sherry Jones which airs on PBS' NOW with Bill Moyers, on Friday, September 10 at 9 PM (check local listings).

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