Unless you have a short or selective memory, you can’t help but remember talk of administration officials including now Secretary of State Condolezza Rice about how little warning there was about 911, or what a surprise the hijackings were — statements today undermined by held-until-after-the-elections parts of the 911 report.
This administration now risks a serious credibility problem that will cause all but its lock-step partisans to parse and doubt its future words and affirmations. Just read this New York Times report and as AN AMERICAN see what your gut tells you:
In the months before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal aviation officials reviewed dozens of intelligence reports that warned about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, some of which specifically discussed airline hijackings and suicide operations, according to a previously undisclosed report from the 9/11 commission.
But aviation officials were “lulled into a false sense of security,” and “intelligence that indicated a real and growing threat leading up to 9/11 did not stimulate significant increases in security procedures,” the commission report concluded.
The report discloses that the Federal Aviation Administration, despite being focused on risks of hijackings overseas, warned airports in the spring of 2001 that if “the intent of the hijacker is not to exchange hostages for prisoners, but to commit suicide in a spectacular explosion, a domestic hijacking would probably be preferable.”
The report takes the F.A.A. to task for failing to pursue domestic security measures that could conceivably have altered the events of Sept. 11, 2001, like toughening airport screening procedures for weapons or expanding the use of on-flight air marshals. The report, completed last August, said officials appeared more concerned with reducing airline congestion, lessening delays, and easing airlines’ financial woes than deterring a terrorist attack.
The Bush administration has blocked the public release of the full, classified version of the report for more than five months, officials said, much to the frustration of former commission members who say it provides a critical understanding of the failures of the civil aviation system. The administration provided both the classified report and a declassified, 120-page version to the National Archives two weeks ago and, even with heavy redactions in some areas, the declassified version provides the firmest evidence to date about the warnings that aviation officials received concerning the threat of an attack on airliners and the failure to take steps to deter it.
Among other things, the report says that leaders of the F.A.A. received 52 intelligence reports from their security branch that mentioned Mr. bin Laden or Al Qaeda from April to Sept. 10, 2001. That represented half of all the intelligence summaries in that time.
Five of the intelligence reports specifically mentioned Al Qaeda’s training or capability to conduct hijackings, the report said. Two mentioned suicide operations, although not connected to aviation, the report said.
A spokeswoman for the F.A.A., the agency that bears the brunt of the commission’s criticism, said Wednesday that the agency was well aware of the threat posed by terrorists before Sept. 11 and took substantive steps to counter it, including the expanded use of explosives detection units.
“We had a lot of information about threats,” said the spokeswoman, Laura J. Brown. “But we didn’t have specific information about means or methods that would have enabled us to tailor any countermeasures.”
She added: “After 9/11, the F.A..A. and the entire aviation community took bold steps to improve aviation security, such as fortifying cockpit doors on 6,000 airplanes, and those steps took hundreds of millions of dollars to implement.”
The report, like previous commission documents, finds no evidence that the government had specific warning of a domestic attack and says that the aviation industry considered the hijacking threat to be more worrisome overseas.
So there you have it:
- The FAA had lots of warnings.
- The Bush administration kept this from becoming public until after the elections…after the the convention in New York City with all the talk and imagery about 911…until after Ms. Rice’s statements and sworn testimony that gave no indication that the government had received this HUGE number of warnings…warnings mentioning bin Laden specifically.
We adults teach kids there are consquences. So: who has been fired? Who will be fired? As AMERICANS will people of both parties be outraged over the pre-election 911 explanations being so at variance with what this report suggests…or will both sides fall into their predictable partisan (attack and defend no matter what) positions? Was there perjury by anyone who testified? If so, what’s going to be done about it?
The GOP rightfully attacks Bill Clinton for his statement “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” This administration’s watchword increasingly is “It all depends what the meaning of the word ‘was’ was.”
BUT THERE ARE OTHER VOICES ON THIS ISSUE AS WELL:
—Jeff Jarvis:”During the commission hearings and when its report was released, based on what we were told, I was one of those who said the blame for not stopping the attacks could not fall on one administration, neither Clinton nor Bush. But now we are told this:…Now we must know who decided to classify this material and keep it from the nation before the election. Who and why?”
—James Joyner:”If there’s a legitimate reason for the classified parts of the report to be classified, then obviously the administration shouldn’t release it to the public. Indeed, releasing classified information is a felony for those with security clearances. If the administration is protecting sources and methods, they should continue. If they’re misusing the classification system to hide information that’s merely politically embarrasing, that’s another matter entirely. Unfortunately, the nature of our classification system is such that we may never know.”
—The Sideshow:”Yes, they had over 50 warnings that were ignored. Yes, they talked about suicide hijacking. Yes, it was all as plain as the nose on my face, and just as plain that this report was delayed purely for the purposes of allowing Bush to slip through again lest the scales be tipped by a few more naive people realizing at last that maybe, just maybe, President Gore might not have let it happen.”
—Davd Johnson:”And Rice was confirmed as Secretary of State without the public being told of this.”
—Ranting Profs:”The other thing I’d say about this article is this: when will people figure this out? Don’t dribble out bad news. The commission report was a sensation…But it would have been far better to get out whatever was going to get out then, all at once…How many times does that lesson need to be relearned?”
REMINDER: Be sure to check out the Outside The Beltway Traffic Jam.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.