Criticism and Cause

A large part of the criticism of the administration since the 9/11 attacks has been focused on how it is that our intelligence services failed to detect and prevent the attack. Well, here's part of the answer:

Frustration was growing at CIA headquarters. The Counter-Terrorism Center was kept away from the World Trade Center investigation--even though the CTC was designed to be the center of information on terrorist threats. The State Department, the FBI and the Secret Service had detailed personnel to the CTC to make sure that important information was shared, not hidden behind bureaucratic bulwarks. Indeed, one of the reasons that the deputy director of the CTC was an FBI official was to guarantee that information was shared among the institutions.

If the Clinton administration wanted to conduct a joint counterterrorism operation to discover the full breadth of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing conspiracy and to take action against the perpetrators overseas, the CTC would have been the perfect vehicle. That is what it was designed to do. It also had a secret presidential "finding," written by President Reagan and still in force, that specifically authorized covert operations to smash terrorist cells.

But the FBI, with the president's tacit acceptance, was treating the World Trade Center attack as a law-enforcement matter. That meant that everything the FBI gathered, every lab-test result, every scrap of paper, every interview, every lead, every clue from overseas was theirs alone. No one outside of the FBI's New York office would see it for years.

How could the FBI keep the evidence from other terror-fighting agencies? This was actually standard procedure when the FBI conducted criminal cases, as opposed to strictly counterterrorism investigations. The bureau invoked rule 6E of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. If the FBI shared the information with other federal agencies, then a judge could rule the evidence inadmissible in a court or require the government to share it with the accused terrorists, so that they could mount an effective legal defense. That would provide the accused terrorists with vital information about what the federal government knew and what it didn't. So Rule 6E was designed to prevent information sharing--and preserve the government's evidence for trial. "It is not that they [the FBI and CIA] don't get along--it's that they can't share information by legal statute" in criminal cases, said Christopher Whitcomb, an FBI veteran who worked on the 1993 World Trade Center bombing investigation.

That article is about the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and it does a lot to point out a pervasive problem with anti-terrorism efforts throughout the 1980's and 1990's: by and large the issue was not treated as a serious threat. Even after the 1993 bombing, which could have brought down one of the WTC towers had the bomb been larger, the Clinton administration not only failed to treat terrorism as a serious threat to national security, it sidelined the very organization designed to address this kind of threat. How long was it until that organization again became functional? I'm betting that the CTC didn't seriously function as a coordinated whole even after the attack on bin Laden which missed him by scant hours. In fact, I'm betting that the CTC didn't being to work until 9/12 or so.

You see, there are a few characteristics of large bureaucracies that impact on this. Such characteristics exist in large companies as well as in government agencies. The most pertinent is that the past is prologue: an established habit does not easily change. So once terrorism was designated as a criminal, rather than a security, threat, the agencies formed to fight terrorism as a security threat atrophied.

However, due to another characteristic of bureaucracies - the survival instict - those organizations did not go away. In fact, since clearly terrorism was increasing, those organizations most likely proliferated. Yet a third characteristic of bureaucracies - protection of one's own turf - most likely was the cause of these various organizations not communicating.

So the intelligence that would have indicated the 9/11 attack was coming would have been spread amongst multiple organizations, who did not share information, and would largely have been kept from the organization whose primary focus was indeed to fight terrorism as a security matter.

The one place the Congressional investigation didn't look, was the one place most critical to unravelling how we missed 9/11. The 9/11 attack was missed because of a failure of imagination on the part of the Clinton and later Bush administrations, certainly, but also with the numerous petty hand-tying rules and internecine funding battles and nasty sniping which all came from the Congress.

If we want to do our best to prevent another 9/11, we'd best look into that. Because right now, the biggest danger to the war effort is not al Qaeda or Iran or Syria - the biggest danger to the war effort is the unwillingness of Congress and the opposition parties to pull together and seriously address the nature and likely duration of this war. Until the Congress in particular is willing to do that, our gains in this war are in danger of being undone.

Posted by Jeff at September 30, 2003 10:17 PM | Link Cosmos