Tom Friedman, in his
latest rumination on the NY Times editorial page, admits to not having listened to one second of the 9/11 Commission hearings this week. He didn't read the transcripts. He didn't even read any story about the hearings.
Why?
It's because I made up my mind about that event a long time ago: It was not a failure of intelligence, it was a failure of imagination. We could have had perfect intelligence on all the key pieces of 9/11, but the fact is we lacked -- for the very best of reasons -- people with evil enough imaginations to put those pieces together and realize that 19 young men were going to hijack four airplanes for suicide attacks against our national symbols and kill as many innocent civilians as they could, for no stated reason at all.
Unfortunately, Mr. Friedman was so sure that 9/11 was not a failure of intelligence that he missed the accusation by Richard Clarke that the Bush Administration could have prevented 9/11 - and would have,
if they acted in the very same way the Clinton Administration acted in a similar situation. Clarke on CNN:
Let me compare 9/11 and the period immediately before it to the millennium rollover and the period immediately before that. In December, 1999, we received intelligence reports that there were going to be major al Qaeda attacks. President Clinton asked his national security adviser Sandy Berger to hold daily meetings with the attorney general, the FBI director, the CIA director and stop the attacks. And every day they went back from the White House to the FBI, to the Justice Department, to the CIA and they shook the trees to find out if there was any information. You know, when you know the United States is going to be attacked, the top people in the United States government ought to be working hands-on to prevent it and working together.
Now, contrast that with what happened in the summer of 2001, when we even had more clear indications that there was going to be an attack. Did the president ask for daily meetings of his team to try to stop the attack? Did Condi Rice hold meetings of her counterparts to try to stop the attack? No.
...
And if Condi Rice had been doing her job and holding those daily meetings, the way Sandy Berger did, if she had a hands-on attitude to being national security adviser, when she had information that there was a threat against the United States, that kind of information was shaken out in December 1999, it would have been shaken out in the summer of 2001, if she had been doing her job.
Tom Friedman says we lacked people with "evil enough imaginations" to conjure up something like 9/11 actually happening. But the truth is, we didn't need evil imaginations to foresee 9/11. We had the warnings right there in front of us.