THE ROW IN the US as to whether the Bush administration could have prevented the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon has all too predictably turned into a slanging match between Republicans and Democrats. The disclosure that a month before the disaster President Bush was briefed that Osama Bin Laden planed to hijack several planes raises important questions about US security and a government’s responsibility to take intelligence seriously and use it to protect its citizens.
These need to be discussed calmly and thoughtfully. One can accuse the Bush administration of a lot of things — specifically on this issue, of incompetent intelligence gathering, of being more interested in revenge, and in refusing to understand why there is such deep anger against the US throughout the Muslim world. One can likewise accuse President Bush of several failings: Of being fixated with Saddam Hussein, with pandering to the Israelis, of bias against the Palestinians. But is it possible that he or anyone else in the White House would have done nothing had he known what was going to happen?
There is no point in Republicans saying that the Democrats want to believe the worst of President Bush or at the very least are out to make him look unfit for office. They did the same thing to Bill Clinton.
The issue here is how not what President Bush should or should not have done with the information provided. It is quite clear that the briefing he was given was very generalized and did not include the possibility of attacks on any buildings. The issue is American intelligence itself. It seems to have had a common sense bypass. Intelligence does not appear to have played any part in this. It is no justification to say that at the time Osama Bin Laden had cried wolf so often, saying that he was going to hit out at the USA and then not doing so, that it lulled the US into a false sense of security. That may have been his tactic. But given his pervious outrages against the US or the US charges against him — the bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and attack on the USS Cole in Aden — any threat coming from him should have been subjected to full intelligence analysis. It is incredible that so little was done. White House Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice says that no one could have predicted that Al-Qaeda would seize two airplanes and slam them into the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon. No one has suggested that on the basis of the report, but the US should have done what it later did — suspended all flights and closed its airspace.
Governments have intelligence services specifically to keep them forewarned about threats so that they can take appropriate countermeasures. Given that it was known that planes might be hijacked on the orders of a man already wanted by the FBI for the deaths of hundreds of Americans, and who was not going to want to fly them to Havana, a lot more than merely warning airlines about a possible hijacking could and should have been done. It would have been entirely appropriate to increase airport security on internal US flights to the level of that in much of Europe, or even on US international flights — and it would not have panicked the American flying public.
Had such measures been ordered it might have prevented the disaster. The Bush administration was wrong not to take the threat far more seriously. The revelation that US intelligence was aware of a Bin Laden-planned hijacking prompts several words to mind, the two most obvious being: Gross incompetence.
Rice’s claim that there was no intelligence lapse is patently untrue. It will convince no one in the US, not even her fellow Republicans.
Rice and her boss expect Yasser Arafat who does not have even a phantom intelligence apparatus to know the thoughts and actions of every individual Palestinian and prevent them from doing anything that would harm the Israeli interests or endanger Israeli lives. And here we have the leader of a superpower who, according to his opponents, did not do enough even when warned of a terrorist plot. Interestingly, among Bush’s litany of charges against Arafat (which he repeats ad nauseam) is that he is “not doing enough”.
