TWENTY months after it began its work, the congressional committee yesterday delivered its report into the events leading up to the Sept. 11 tragedy. Much of its findings had either been leaked or published in its interim report. It was inevitable after an event of such enormity that an investigation would have been mounted in the hue and cry that has been looking for someone to blame.
The failures of intelligence and the US law and order authorities are set out starkly. Washington has already taken steps to tighten substantially its airport security measures and with the establishment of the Department for Homeland Security has introduced a whole raft of precautionary measures. Before the September attack they would have seemed absurd and indeed inimical to the liberal spirit that has always underpinned the US constitution.
Nevertheless, the errors that were made, however serious their consequences, should not be now be taken out of context. Despite the murder of 168 people in the Oklahoma City bomb outrage of 1995 by Timothy McVeigh, Americans simply did not believe that the terrorist attacks which they saw disfiguring other parts of the world could ever happen to them. When all was said and done, McVeigh was an American, not some foreign butcher.
With the single and dreadful exception of its Civil War between 1860 and 1865 most of the violence in which Americans have been involved since their independence has been on their borders or in distant countries. The vast space of the United States itself has seemed inviolate. Gangsters, drugs smugglers and foreign spies were the most serious challenges that the FBI had to confront in its role as federal protector.
The idea of a major terrorist attack upon the US was, to most people, simply unthinkable.
That there were a few well-placed intelligence analysts who warned that Al-Qaeda was a rising threat but were ignored should not of itself be seen as culpability. It must not be forgotten that within any political administration there will be people hired to think the unthinkable and this cadre of individuals will have produced a wide range of different threat scenarios. One of these was always in danger of being right and the man who dreamt it up would then feel entitled to say that he had issued a warning but been ignored.
It should not be forgotten that there were also a lot of other blue-sky thinkers who probably came up with equally unlikely scenarios which never materialized. Because it could not conceive that a crime of the depravity of Sept. 11 could occur on its own soil, the United States was an easy target.
Unfortunately the fact that they have now shared in the terror that has long afflicted the rest of the world has not yet helped them understand the basic injustices on which terrorism feeds and thrives such as the atrocity of Palestine. No committee is needed to tell us who is behind the terrorism Palestinians are suffering every day.
