Reading Fred Kaplan's
defense of Richard Clarke over at Slate, "Why I Believe Richard Clarke", I was struck by the closing paragraphs of his screed (reproduced below in extended copy).
The gist of it is this:
In December '99, every day or every other day, the head of the FBI, the head of the CIA, the Attorney General had to go to the White House and sit in a meeting and report on all the things that they personally had done to stop the al Qaeda attack, so they were going back every night to their departments and shaking the trees personally and finding out all the information. If that had happened in July of 2001
That's it! If the threats coming into the Bush Administration had truly been taken seriously, than Ashcroft would have found out that lower-level FBI agents were concerned about suspected terrorists doing flight training.
This knowledge would have ramped up the warnings coming from abroad or at home that involved plane hijackings, especially suicidal plane hijackings, and we would have been on our way to cracking the case or at least greatly ramping up airline security (and at least having a decent plan in place to deal with the contingency of this happening and getting through the security...instead we weren't even able to shoot down the plane that crashed into the Pentagon when it flew by the White House anti-aircraft guns).
Even something as simple as an all-points email sent to FBI special agents would have piqued the interest and attention of the special agents in Arizona and Minnesota who had become suspicious.
Instead, we were badly taken unawares on 9/11, and we claim to have had no knowledge, or, from the current hearings, any opportunity to have prevented that attacks.
In our leader's words, nothing could have been done.
Of course, that is qualified by Rumsfeld with "militarily", and, in that sense, he's right. Rumsfeld is in the clear.
But gross FBI and inter-agency intelligence mismanagement is something that did not have to be, and, given a strong executive leader, wouldn't have been the case.
I do workflow and information architecture for a living, and can attest to the fact that the FBI has no excuse for bungling or losing information of this magnitude, and the blame squarely falls on executive management for the priorities and expectations they put in place.
Here's more of the last piece by Kaplan:
He contrasted July 2001 with December 1999, when the Clinton White House got word of an impending al-Qaida attack on Los Angeles International Airport and Principals meetings were called instantly and repeatedly:In December '99, every day or every other day, the head of the FBI, the head of the CIA, the Attorney General had to go to the White House and sit in a meeting and report on all the things that they personally had done to stop the al Qaeda attack, so they were going back every night to their departments and shaking the trees personally and finding out all the information. If that had happened in July of 2001, we might have found out in the White House, the Attorney General might have found out that there were al Qaeda operatives in the United States. FBI, at lower levels, knew [but] never told me, never told the highest levels in the FBI. ... We could have caught those guys and then we might have been able to pull that thread and get more of the conspiracy. I'm not saying we could have stopped 9/11, but we could have at least had a chance.