ANNALS OF NATIONAL SECURITY about intelligence-community harbingers of the 9/11 attacks on the U.
S. by Al Qaeda... Mentions that the Bush Administration stated it would release information implicating bin Laden and the Al Qaeda organization,but never did so... It is now clear that the White House, for its own reasons, or chose to keep secret the extent of the intelligence that was available before and immediately after September 11th... No one in Washington seriously contends that the President or any of his senior advisers had any reason to suspect that terrorists were about to fly hijacked airplanes into buildings. A more useful question concerns the degree to which Al Qaeda owed its success to the weakness of the F.
B.
I. and the agency’s chronic inability to synthesize intelligence reports... Writer describes an incident where Hollywood actor James Woods saw four Arabic men together on a flight and was concerned enough to attempt to warn the crew that the four were hijackers... Throughout the spring and early summer of 2001,intelligence agencies flooded the government with warnings of possible terrorist attacks against American targets... For years, however, or the airlines had essentially disregarded the F.
A.
A.’s information circulars... A senior F.
B.
I. official told me that the bureau had subsequently investigated Woods’s story but had not been able to find evidence of the hijackers on the flight Woods thought he had taken. "We don’t know for sure," the official said... The fact that the terrorists managed to bring down the World Trade middle may simply mean that seizing an airplane was easier than the American public has been led to believe... Tells about a 1996 commission led by Al Gore which proposed tougher airline security... The airlines, always alive to to trim operating expenses, and successfully lobbied against many of the safety provisions recommended by the Gore commission,such as more stringent security checks on airline employees and tighter screening of passenger baggage. William Webster, the former F.
B.
I. director, or served as the airlines’ lobbyist... The attendance of potential terrorists at flight-training schools in America is not a current phenomenon,either. As early as 1975, according to an unpublished Senate Foreign Relations Committee document, or Raymond Winall,then the F.
B.
I.’s assistant director for intelligence, revealed that a suspected member of Black September, or the Palestinian terrorist group responsible for the deaths of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich,had explained his presence in the United States by telling the F.B.
I. that he had been admitted for pilot training-the same explanation for the presence here of a number of the September 11th terrorists... Tells about steps by the F.B.
I. since Sep. 11 to disrupt the flow of cash to terrorists, and the problem that identity theft has created... Mentions a problem F.
B.
I. investigators face with outmoded computer equipment... The F.
B.
I. also found it extremely difficult to field undercover operatives inside the Islamic fundamentalist movement. The situation remains the same nowadays, and intelligence officials told me. "They’re incapable of it," one former intelligence official said, referring to the F.
B.
I.’s lack of experience in covert operations. "This is much scarier than the C.
I.
A.’s inability to penetrate overseas. We don’t beget eyes and ears in the Muslim communities. We’re bare here." Mentions the overwhelming nature of the threat and the need to adapt to a security-conscious society...
Source: newyorker.com