BUSH'S "NEW
PEARL:"
NEGLIGENCE IN PREVENTING ATTACK?
"Al
Qaida's
expected
retaliation
for
the
U.S.
cruise
missile
attack
against
al
Qaida's
training
facilities
in
Afghanistan
on
August
20,
1998,
could
take
several
forms
of
terrorist
attack in the nation's capital. al
Qaida could detonate a Chechen-type building-buster bomb at a federal
building. Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al Qaida's Martyrdom Battalion
could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and
semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), or the White House.....
"If Iran's mullahs or Iraq's Saddam Hussein decide to use terrorists to
attack the continental United States, they would likely turn to Bin
Laden's al-Qaida. Al-Qaida is among the Islamic groups recruiting
increasingly skilled professionals, such as computer and communications
technicians, engineers, pharmacists, and physicists, as well as
Ukrainian chemists and biologists, Iraqi chemical weapons experts, and
others capable of helping to develop WMD. Al-Qaida poses the most
serious terrorist threat to U.S. security interests, for al-Qaida's
well-trained terrorists are actively engaged in a terrorist jihad
against U.S. interests worldwide."
-THE
SOCIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF TERRORISM: WHO BECOMES A TERRORIST AND WHY? Report
prepared under an Interagency Agreement by the Federal Research
Division, Library of Congress, September 1999
The
legacy of "Pearl"
lives on more strongly than ever
after the suicide hijackings which surprised the world and killed
thousands on September 11, 2001.
These attacks raise long familiar issues about the nature of
intelligence and surprise. As in the case of Pearl Harbor, the
discussion of why the United States was caught napping may continue for
years.
In mid May 2002 major American news media reported that although
generalized warnings of Osama Bin Laden's plans to hijack American
airliners reached the White House just weeks before 9/11, no specific
warnings or preventative steps were taken. Opposition Democrat leaders
quickly seized upon the reports to push for an investigation.Skepticism
of official accounts, especially by families of 9/11 victims, led to
establishment of the 9/11 Commission by the President and Congress,
Novemeber 27, 2002. The Commission's full
report was issued on July 22, 2004.
Early press revelations suggested a pattern familiar in other
successful surprise attacks, including Pearl Harbor:
A)
Bureaucratic "filtering out" of
what in hindsight appear as compelling specific early warning signs.
B) Failure to analytically link reports scattered over time and
location by different intelligence groups, reports which, if pulled
together, might suggest "new" enemy tactics of surprise attack.
C) An overburdening of analysis by multiple clouds of what later
appeared to be misleading, inconsequential generalized warnings. This
sometimes leads to emphasis on protecting the wrong possible targets.
D) A tendency for high policy makers to demand specific information on
specific attack plans at specific times, rather than to take
precautions based on general intelligence, possibilities, and
probabilities. This demand for what may be impossible can hamstring
defensive preparations by federal, state or local authorities.
Patterns such as these can be reinforced by bureaucratic
disorganization, turf rivalries, and fragmented analyses left to gather
dust on shelves or in computer databases. There can be emotional and
intellectual "blind spots" at low, middle, or higher levels of
intelligence gathering and policy making. Such blind spots can be most
telling when multiple decisions and overwhelming emphasis on other
matters rule the day.
Only the work of future historians is likely to reveal what happened
before the September 11 attack. With an inexperienced new president and
a sometimes "out of control" intelligence bureaucracy, the results are
not in any way surprising.
Indeed it would have been a sharp break with the history of modern
intelligence and modern warfare if the attack of September 11 had been
successfully predicted and headed off by American intelligence and
policy makers.
(For an analysis of surprise and the 9/11 attack see "Strategic
Insight:
Surprise
and
Intelligence
Failure,"
by Douglas Porch and James J.Wirtz, Center for Contemporary Conflict
(CCC), the research arm of the National Security Affairs Department at
the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.)
*******
The following revelations gradually reached the American public. They
are systematically dealt with in the July 22, 2004 report
of the 9/11 Commission.
Some were highlighted by a joint Congressional committee staff report
released September 18, 2002. It concluded the U.S. failed to act on
warnings in 1998 of a possible plane attack.
An August 1998 intelligence report from the Central Intelligence Agency
was just one of several warnings the United States received, but did
not seriously analyze, in the years leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks,
according to the study detailed at a Congressional hearing. The
existence of the 1998 intelligence report was disclosed in a
presentation by the committee's staff director, Eleanor Hill.
From 1998 to the summer of 2001, the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and other
agencies repeatedly received reports of al Qaeda's interest in
attacking Washington and New York, either with airplanes or other
means. The threat level grew so high that by December 1998, the
director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, issued a
"declaration of war" on al Qaeda, in a memorandum circulated in the
intelligence community. Yet, Ms. Hill was quoted as saying, the
intelligence agencies failed to adequately follow up on the
declaration, and by Sept. 10, 2001, the F.B.I. still had only one
analyst assigned full time to al Qaeda.
The 1998 intelligence report about the trade center cited plans by a
group of unidentified Arabs, who the United States now believes had
ties to al Qaeda, to fly an explosives-laden plane from a foreign
country into the trade center. American intelligence officials were
quoted as saying that despite the similarities, they did not believe
that the 1998 report was related to the Sept. 11 attack.
While the joint committee made public several intelligence reports that
had been received in the years before Sept. 11 that related to al
Qaeda's intentions to launch an attack inside the United States and its
interest in using aircraft for terrorism, Ms. Hill emphasized that the
joint committee had still not found a "smoking gun" that could have
helped prevent the Sept. 11 attacks.
"People have said there was no smoking gun," Ms. Hill said. "But there
was still a lot out there that was never pulled together."
As with Pearl, "revisionist" interpretations of September 11 already
emerge. Critics
argued President Franklin Roosevelt knew of the coming attack and
allowed it to happen as a way of overcoming public opposition to
joining a war against Germany and Japan. As of this writing, there are
no serious accusations that Bush knew of the specific coming attack,
but rather that he ignored warning signs presented to him.
A parallel line of revisionism is likely to open. Some revisionists
with an isolationist bent argued Japan was "forced"
to attack at Pearl because President Roosevelt was moving aggressively
to use an oil embargo to force Japan out of China and block its its
plans for a Japan-dominated "co-prosperity zone" in Southeast Asia.
Some on the Left have begun to interpret the September 11 suicide
attack as a "preemptive strike" by Osama Bin Laden amid American plans
to launch a worldwide offensive against the al Qaeda network.
Unlike Pearl Harbor, the Twin Towers attack was aimed at civilians, not
military forces. The attack on the Pentagon was largely symbolic, with
no serious aim to knock out US military capacity. By contrast Japan's
December 7 attack was clearly targeted to disable American military
forces in the Pacific long enough for Japanese armies to conquer China
and Southeast Asia.
The Twin Towers attack was no doubt planned long before any final White
House decision to step up actions against Bin Laden. But the September
11 attacks were clearly an escalation of a deeply rooted conflict waged
between Bin Laden and the American government for many
years.
American plans to take a more aggressive approach toward Bin Laden's
terrorist network were suggested in a May 16, 2002 MSNBC report by
NBC's Jim Miklaszewski.
According to the report, which cited U.S. and foreign sources,
President Bush was expected to sign detailed plans for a worldwide war
against al Qaida two days before Sept. 11 but did not have the chance
before the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.
The document, a formal National Security Presidential Directive,
amounted to a game plan to remove al Qaida from the face of the Earth,
one source was cited as saying.
The plan dealt with all aspects of a war against al Qaida, ranging from
diplomatic initiatives to military operations in Afghanistan, the
sources said on condition of anonymity.
In many respects, the directive, as described to NBC News, outlined
essentially the same war plan that the White House, the CIA and the
Pentagon put into action after the Sept. 11 attacks. The administration
most likely was able to respond so quickly to the attacks because it
simply had to pull the plans off the shelf, Miklaszewski reported.
*******
In
a detailed May 16, 2002 press briefing, as
reported in next day's The New York Times,
Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, said the
government had received numerous reports of terrorist threats in
summer, 2001. But she emphasized that the information seemed general
and pointed toward potential attacks overseas. In addition, Ms. Rice
said that the briefing Mr. Bush received from the C.I.A. on Aug. 6 did
not mention a July memorandum from an F.B.I. agent in Phoenix who had
warned that Middle Eastern men connected to Mr. Bin Laden might be
receiving flight training in the United States
According to reporting by Bob Woodward and Dan Eggen in the Washington
Post Staff, May 18, 2002, the top-secret briefing memo
presented to President Bush on Aug. 6 carried the headline, "Bin Laden
Determined to Strike in U.S.," and was primarily focused on recounting
al Qaeda's past efforts to attack and infiltrate the United States,
said the Post report, based on "senior administration officials."
The document, known as the "President's Daily Briefing," underscored
that Osama Bin Laden and his followers hoped to "bring the fight to
America," in part as retaliation for U.S. missile strikes on al Qaeda
camps in Afghanistan in 1998, according to "knowledgeable sources."
According to this account, Bush had specifically asked for an
intelligence analysis of possible al Qaeda attacks within the United
States, because most of the information presented to him over the
summer about al Qaeda focused on threats against U.S. targets overseas.
But one source was cited in the Post as saying the
White House was disappointed because the analysis lacked focus and did
not present fresh intelligence.
Philip Shenon reported May 18, 2002 in The New York Times
that law enforcement officials acknowledged that the F.B.I. never
ordered a comprehensive investigation of flight schools before Sept.
11, even as individual F.B.I. offices were gathering compelling
evidence about links between students trained at the schools and al
Qaeda.
Shenon
noted the Phoenix memorandum was not the
first warning that terrorists affiliated with al Qaeda had interest in
learning to fly. In his 1996 confession, a Pakistani terrorist, Abdul
Hakim Murad, said that he planned to use the training he received at
flight schools in the United States to fly a plane into C.I.A.
headquarters in Langley, Va., or another federal building.
According to Shenon, since at least the mid-1990's, law enforcement
officials have known that some terrorist organizations were considering
suicide attacks using commercial jets.
In 1994, French investigators have said, a group of Algerian hijackers
seized a Paris-bound Air France flight and planned to crash it into the
Eiffel Tower or blow it up over Paris. The plot was foiled when French
commandoes stormed the plane.
In 1995, Mr. Murad, the Pakistani pilot tied to Mr. Bin Laden, was
captured, and under interrogation by
Philippines intelligence officers working
with the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., American law enforcement officials
said, he confessed on video to his role in the plot to bomb airliners
over the Pacific.
The American officials said he also acknowledged he had planned to fly
a plane packed with explosives into the C.I.A. headquarters or another
federal building. Details of the plan had been shared with F.B.I.
headquarters by the middle of 1996.
Mr. Murad's plot was noted
in a September 1999 U.S. intelligence report suggesting that al Qaeda
might hijack an airliner with the intention of crashing it into the
Pentagon or another government building. The intelligence report, The
Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes
a Terrorist and Why was
prepared
for
the
National
Intelligence
Council
by
the
Federal
Research
Division
of
the
Library
of
Congress.
It
was
widely
shared
within
the
government
and
has
long
been available to the public over the Internet.
(For an exercise in the ambiguities of intelligence analysis, pull up
the above voluminous
report
on the internet, search it on
subjects of airliner hijacking and suicide terrorism -- then evaluate
for yourself how compelling these "warnings" might have appeared AT THE
TIME. Next, to see how this report looks with the "benefit of
hindsight" examine a CBS TV news
report from May 17, 2002, '99 Report
Warned Of Suicide Hijacking.')
9/11 COMMISSION
REPORT: CALL FOR
REORGANIZATION
NEGLECTS HISTORY, CULTURE, MINDSET
Conclusions of the 585 page 9/11
Commission Report, released July 22, 2004,
largely dovetail with previous studies such as the Joint Congressional Report,
released July 21, 2003. New is the graphic, extremely readable quality.
The Commission strategy was to produce a report which would be so
widely read that enormous public pressure would build on the winner of
the November presidential election to consolidate and streamline
intelligence gathering and review. Critics have already argued such
reorganization to increase bureaucratic and political restrictions on
sound intelligence analysis and communication.
The Report proposed a Senate confirmed National Intelligence Director
within the office of the President. The leader of a proposed National
Counter terrorism Center (NCTC) beneath the intelligence director would
have deputy cabinet secretary rank.
Surprisingly the 9/11 Commission Report places almost no emphasis on an
understanding of history, culture, and mindset as a foundation for
intelligence analysis of leaders of other countries and movements.
There is no vigorous exploration of how politics and bureaucracy can
undermine intelligence analysis built on an understanding of history
and culture.
The 9/11 commission report devotes only eight of its 585 pages to
historical and cultural context (page 47 to 55). There is almost no
mention of American support for Israel, and is little explicit analysis
of Islamic extremism as in part a "reaction" to or "blowback" from
growing American power in the Mideast. Absent is any sustained analysis
of the cultural and historical interaction between the U.S. and the
Islamic world.
Here are some key points:
1)
In the months leading up to 9/11
Osama Bin Laden's major priority was to strike INSIDE the US -- not
outside. American policy makers understood in general terms that he
wanted to attack inside the US but because they had more specific
intelligence on his plans outside the US than inside the US, they
failed to see that his CENTRAL PLAN was a crippling attack inside the
U.S.
Lack of HARD intelligence of an attack inside the U.S. was interpreted
as meaning LOW PROBABILITY when it really meant American intelligence
had not penetrated Bin Laden's network, was unable to put together the
limited evidence and speculation at hand -- and just did not know what
was going on.
2) In the months leading up to 9/11 top officials focused mainly on the
possibility that OVERSEAS Bin Laden operatives would strike at OVERSEAS
American targets. They assumed that any attacks inside the US would be
carried out by Bin Laden sleeper cells ALREADY inside the US. Because
they were never shown compelling intelligence on ongoing infiltration,
upper level officials never focused on what was happening: OVERSEAS
operatives were slipping inside the U.S. largely unnoticed.
Fragmentation of American domestic intelligence prevented the emergence
of HARD evidence which might have gotten the ATTENTION of upper or
middle level policy makers.
Policy makers thus did not consistently pushed for intensive,
coordinated surveillance of infiltration into the US from outside,
which would have required a shakeup of domestic intelligence procedures
involving the FBI and the CIA.
.
3) While intelligence analysts had long speculated on hijackings which
used airliners as weapons against government buildings, busy upper and
middle levels of US government lacked the imagination, attention span,
or "space" to understand the significance of this speculation -
especially in light of absence of specific intelligence coordinated and
communicated to the top.
Speculation, without hard evidence, is often dismissed, partly because
upper level officials, confronted with all kinds of speculation, are
reluctant to make it the basis of policy. But once a THREAT is
emotionally and politically enshrined as valid, then speculation can
become the basis of policy -- as for example the frequent focus on
WORST CASE SCENARIOS during the Cold War.
THE
"INTRACTABILITY" OF STRATEGIC
SURPRISE
Even before the hijack attacks,
the "legacy of Pearl" was a major foundation for Bush Administration
proposals to build an antiballistic missile system and ditch the 1972
Treaty
on
the
Limitation
of
Anti-Ballistic
Missile
Systems.
(Review Clinton Administration ABM
policy.)
Bush Administration officials clearly understood the danger of
surprise, but they focused on sophisticated missile, space and
communication technologies, rather than on simpler tactics of
disruption open to clever, determined "low tech" adversaries.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had distributed Roberta Wohlstetter's
classic 1962 study, Pearl
Harbor:
Warning
and
Decisions. to members
of the House Armed Services Committee. One purpose: to gain support to
make defense against surprise attack a major
aim of American military planning.
The Wohlstetter study, with its classic forward
by Thomas C. Schelling, concludes that because of subjective human
factors surprise can occur despite and even because of vast amounts of
intelligence data. Its conclusions had a deep impact on some American
military planners at the height of the Cold War.
In his work Clausewitzian Friction and Future War
defense analyst Barry D. Watts has labeled the inherent difficulty of
predicting surprise attack the "intractability
of
strategic
surprise." (Download .pdf
version).
This analysis draws on concepts of "friction and fog of war" derived
from the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz to suggest why
attack so frequently comes as a surprise despite advances in
information technology.
Wohlstetter's study, influenced by Cold War concern that the Soviets
might repeat a "Pearl," has reemerged as a briefing paper for the new
century, even after the Soviet Union has gone.
Rumsfeld was only one of those who warned that planners must consider
new forms of possible surprise attack, such as those on sophisticated
computerized information systems which support transportation,
communications, finance, and utilities.
**********
In January 2001, just months before 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld released a
report by a commission he chaired dealing with the danger of a future Space
Pearl Harbor. A future surprise attack
could target, among other things, American civilian and military
communication systems based on satellite technology.
"We found that the US in general, the DOD (Department of Defense) and
the intelligence community, in particular, are not very well arranged
to meet the national security space needs of the 21st century," said
retired admiral David Jeremiah.
Jeremiah took over the chairmanship of the commission from Rumsfeld the
previous month when the latter was picked by President-elect George W.
Bush as his nominee to head the Pentagon.
He said the country was becoming increasingly vulnerable as it faces
growing needs for communication satellites for cell phones, Global
Positioning System equipment, spying and ground infrastructure.
The report gave no price tag for new technological systems, but the
cost of replacing obsolete military satellites over the next decade is
estimated at 50 billion dollars.
It cited several examples of vulnerability to attacks. In 1998, 80
percent of US pagers broke down because of a problem with the Galaxy IV
satellite. Early the previous year, the United States lost contact for
three hours with several satellites because of computer problems at its
ground stations.
"Increasingly, people like (suspected terrorist
mastermind) Osama Bin Laden may be able to acquire capabilities on
satellites" and will be able to threaten US ground stations, Jeremiah
added.
The commission said that while it appreciated "the sensitivity that
surrounds the notion of weapons in space for offensive or defensive
purposes," it believed the US president should "have an option to
deploy weapons in space to deter threats to and, if necessary, defend
against attacks on US interests."
**********
President Bush's choice
of Air Force Gen. Richard Myers as new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff had reflected this Administration's emphasis on high technology,
space, and cyber war. Gen. Myers, a former head of the Air Force's
space programs, had headed a major study of strategy commissioned by
Rumsfeld. One of his tasks was to be to balance the new hi-tech
concepts of war with more traditional missions.
The Gulf War and NATO operations in Kosovo had reinforced this emphasis
on high technology: the lesson that a critical part of future war may
be the battle to attack and defend satellite-based systems of command,
control, communications, and information (C3I).
Implicit in the planning for such surprise attacks was the question:
who is, or is likely to become America's new enemy? How much spending
for this is "prudent" -- or will all the talking and spending for
military preparations in space create a new, unnecessary arms race?
After September 11 many of these questions seemed academic. The nation
would have to place immediate emphasis in the short-term, at least, on
preparing for terrorism and biological warfare.
KOREA'S LESSON
All
this seems quite peaceful, a long way from China's massive "human wave"
attacks against American soldiers in Korea.
The intelligence failures of Pearl Harbor seemed quickly repeated when
the Truman Administration failed to anticipate, deter or detect North
Korea's coming invasion of
the South in 1950. (Check the
analysis of intelligence
failure relating
to the North Korean attack in James F. Schnabel, United
States Army in the Korean War; Policy and Direction: The First Year, Center of Military History, United
States Army.)
The Americans followed up with still another "intelligence failure"
when they failed to take seriously early enough China's many open
warnings it would directly intervene. (Check Schnabel's analysis of how Chinese intervention caught
the Americans off guard.)
For who would have thought the Chinese would dare to make war on
America as U.S. troops confidently swept to the Chinese border after
repulsing a North Korean invasion? Americans had the atomic bomb.
Surely no Chinese in his "right mind" would dare risk an American
nuclear attack!
Then, as with Deng Xiaoping in 1979, China's leaders were determined
that "China must stand up."
Chinese like Deng were not in their "right minds." They gambled they
could face down American nuclear blackmail to demand China be treated
with respect. They issued a carefully escalating series of warnings
which American policy makers largely ignored. Whatever the cost, China
would stand up.
Beginning in October
1950, thousands of poorly armed, poorly trained Chinese young men went
to their deaths in attacks on the American soldiers marching across
North Korea to the Chinese border. The Americans reeled southward.
Thousands died on all sides in two years of wintry stalemate.
Nearly three decades later, in January of 1979, Deng Xiaoping and Jimmy
Carter consigned the Korean War legacy to history's dustbin by
establishing full diplomatic relations.
As they opened the door to peace, the brief but violent "Third
Indochina War" was about to erupt.
