Remembering 9-11
By Larry Johnson on September 11, 2009 at 2:14 AM in Current Affairs
[A huge thanks to Linda and Susan for help in getting this piece together.]
Despite the passage of time the wounds opened on September 11, 2001 remain raw and festering. We were reminded of those events just this week with the resignation of Van Jones, who had aligned himself with those convinced the Bush Administration carried out the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Bush failed to take the terrorist warnings from Richard Clarke and the CIA seriously, but he was guilty of laziness, not malfeasance. No one connected in anyway with the United States Government was responsible for the horror of that day. The blood is on the hands of Bin Laden and his cronies.
The following snippet was recorded from NBC’s coverage of the attacks on that beautiful, sunny Tuesday in September of 2001. I was at National Airport preparing to fly to Long Island to play in a DEA golf tournament. I was standing in the bathroom at National Airport when the first plane hit the North Tower in New York City. I walked out of the bathroom toward my gate and stopped at the bar to watch the TV coverage. As I stared at the screen the South Tower erupted in a ball of fire. I realized at that point I was not going to New York.
Within five minutes my phone rang. It was the Today Show and Katie Couric had asked that I come on air with her. I went to the baggage area, recovered my golf clubs and got on a hardline phone. Here’s my conversation with Katie:
The images are seared in our minds.
I do not think we have learned any important lessons from the events of the last 8 years in the wake of those attacks. We are still susceptible to fear mongering by Government officials. We have not improved coordination among the government agencies that share the task of detecting and preventing terrorist attacks. We have left significant gaps in aviation security. And, like someone with the attention span of a three year old child with Alzheimers’ disease, we have moved on to other issues and tried to put this unpleasantness out of mind.
Too bad. Bush and Cheney like to take credit for no more attacks after 9-11. Well, the Emperor of Japan can take credit that there were no more nuclear explosions in Japan after the blast at Nagasaki. But both claims are a bit hollow. Bush and Cheney failed to fix the national security interagency process and the Obama Administration is not doing much to improve on their dismal record.
We were not attacked on 9-11 because we lacked Government bureaucracy and did not have enough government employees. And our prescription for dealing with the aftermath of 9-11? Grow the government, multiply the layers of intelligence bureaucracy and water down our intelligence capabilities. Swell. Recipe for future success.
What is truly unfortunate is that no one was held accountable for the failures that made the attacks on 9-11 possible. There is no one scapegoat. But the list of those who dropped the ball is fairly significant. For example, Condi Rice ignored Richard Clarke’s memo, ignored stark warnings for the CIA’s Cofer Black, and failed to rally the National Security Council to address the issue of combating terrorism. Rice, more than any other official in government at the time, has the most to answer for.
We still do not have a good explanation of why the CIA refused to share with the FBI the info it had that Al Qaeda operatives had come into the United States. I am not implying there was a conspiracy of silence. No. Having worked with large bureaucracies it is the nature of the beast. However, the CIA’s George Tenet and Cofer Black both insist they were on war footing and took the threats seriously. I know that Tenet and Black were concerned about the threats. But we still do not understand clearly why Tenet failed to convene weekly terrorist threat update meetings and why Cofer did not insist that all information about Al Qaeda operatives in or near the United States be treated as the highest priority. Those are some answers I’d like to get on the eighth anniversary of the attacks.
by Ronald Scott
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