The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [79]
“Why did 9/11 happen on George Bush’s watch,” Senator Patrick Leahy asked in 2006, “when he had clear warnings that it was going to happen? Why did they allow it to happen?” Just what the President and his senior aides had been told, when they had been told it, and how they responded, had long been a vexatious issue. Why did CIA director Tenet tell the Commission that he had not briefed Bush in August 2001, only for it to emerge that he in fact saw him twice?
The previous month, according to Tenet, he and top aides had met with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to deliver a dire warning that a major al Qaeda attack was imminent. According to one of America’s most distinguished reporters, she responded by giving them the “brush-off.” Rice said she could not recall the meeting. The record shows the 9/11 Commission was told of the meeting, but there was no mention of it in the 9/11 Commission Report. Why not?
“As each day goes by,” Senator Max Cleland had said shortly before resigning as a member of the 9/11 Commission, “we learn that this government knew a whole lot more about these terrorists before September 11 than it ever admitted.” Such doubts proved durable.
The agency most directly responsible for protecting the almost two million people who took flights every day in the States, the Federal Aviation Administration, seems to have been at best ineffectual, at worst fatally irresponsible, in the months and years before the attacks. The 9/11 Commission heard shocking testimony, which went unmentioned in its Report, from an experienced FAA team leader whose job it was to conduct undercover tests on airport security.
After September 11, said Bogdan Dzakovic, “officials from FAA as well as other government agencies made defensive statements such as, ‘How could we have known this was going to happen?’ The truth is, they did know.… FAA very deliberately orchestrated a dangerous facade of security.… They knew how vulnerable aviation security was. They knew the terrorist threat was rising, but gambled nothing would happen if we kept the vulnerability secret and didn’t disrupt the airline industry. Our country lost that bet.”
In the spring and summer of 2001, half of the FAA’s daily summaries had mentioned bin Laden or al Qaeda. In July, it had “encouraged” all airlines to “exercise prudence and demonstrate a high degree of alertness.” There was little or no real drive to ensure that better security was enforced, however, no sense of urgency at the level that mattered.
The US Airways ticket taker who checked in Atta and Omari in Portland for the first leg of their journey, Michael Touhey, would recall having had a “bad feeling” about them. They arrived just minutes before departure and carried expensive one-way, first-class tickets—though most business travelers fly round-trip. Had he received instructions to be more vigilant, he said later, he thought he would have acted differently. He might have ordered a search of the men’s bags, which could have turned up suspicious items. There had been no such instructions, however, and Touhey let the men go on their way.
“I’ve been with American for twenty-nine years,” said Rosemary Dillard, whose husband died aboard Flight 77. “My job was supervision over all the flight attendants who flew out of National, Baltimore or Dulles. In the summer of 2001, we had absolutely no warnings about any threats of hijacking or terrorism, from the airline or from the FAA.” A key part of the FAA’s mandate is to keep air travelers safe, and in that it signally failed.
The intelligence agencies failed, too, in ways that could perhaps have changed the course of history. The CIA and the FBI were both at fault, in part because of sheer inefficiency. The most scathing criticism of the FBI has come from insiders.
“September the 11th,” said FBI agent Robert Wright, who had long been assigned to a Terrorism Task Force in Chicago, “is a direct result of the incompetence of the FBI’s International Terrorism Unit. No doubt about that.… You can’t know the things I know and not go public.” Wright