Intelligence is defined as "...the process and the result of gathering information and analyzing it to answer questions or obtain advance warnings needed to plan for the future." In the wake of the attacks on the 11th of September 2001, many questions were raised. How prepared was the US to handle this threat? Did the US intelligence community have enough information to act on this threat? Was the US intelligence policy on terrorism designed well enough before 9/11, and was it simply a matter of existing organizations communicating with each other? The purpose of this paper is to shed some light on these questions, as well to prove that : The US did have enough information to prevent the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but not the organizational or political initiative to act on these potential threats.
Terrorism is an ambiguous term usually used to describe a particular form of political violence. A terrorist or a terrorist action attempts to achieve a particular political or social goal through violence. A common way to identify a terrorist action is by six characteristics: Violence, Target, Objective, Motive, Perpetrator and Legitimacy. This definition excludes governments, organized crime, war crimes, and requires that any action labeled 'terrorist' be unlawful. Also Terrorism is divided into two groups: lone-wolf terrorists such as the Unibomber and Timothy McVeigh, and state sponsored terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda and the Irish Republican Army.
The United States has been familiar with the threat of international terrorism before the 9/11 attacks. Throughout the 1970's and 1980's there were several airplane hijackings, and more specifically to the topic at hand, in three separate instances the US had direct encounters with Al-Qaeda. In 1993, the World Trade Center was bombed, in 1998 two embassies in Africa were bombed simultaneously, and in 1999 so was the USS Cole. In all three cases dealing with Al-Qaeda in the 1990's up until 9/11 there was never a paradigm shift in how the US dealt with international terrorism. It is important to point this out as policy is often determined by past conflict.
Policy determines what kind of intelligence is to be collected. Modern US intelligence is gathered in six steps. The steps are: planning and direction, collection, processing, analysis, dissemination and feedback. It is this very first step that determines what defines a policy problem and then all the other steps are logical ways to gather and present information on that problem. This means that policy makers are the ones in charge of what information is gathered in the first place because they have set the precedent for what is deemed a worthy issue. War, for example has precedent, and a long standing methodology as to how to go about engaging in war. Therefore the collection, processing, analysis, dissemination and feedback of information about foreign powers and foreign governments all comes to be because of a desire from the top leadership policy team to get information on foreign countries in order to prepare for / prevent war. Terrorism too, has precedent, however, the threats of terrorism before 9/11 were not met with the same tenacity as a leader would have gone about going to war.
Some facts stand out. In early 2001, the newly elected Bush administration did not have counter-terrorism high on its list of priorities. The intelligence community had known of Al-Qaeda itself as a terrorist organization since 1999, and even up until 1997 had considered Osama Bin Laden to be simply a financier of terrorism. This (in hindsight) may seem absurdly inadequate. To better understand how urgent threats are dealt with in the intelligence community, we need only look back to the year 1999.
The biggest terror threat immediately prior to 9/11 was the millennium new years festivities, known as the 'Millennium Crisis'. A slew of intelligence began to surface. On December 4th, a sleeper cell in Jordan was caught by Jordanian authorities, revealing detailed information on how Al-Qaeda operates. As a direct result of this, on December 8th the Counter-terrorism Security Group (CSG) set out to make plans to deter Al-Qaeda plots. By accident on December 14th a Jihadist was caught smuggling explosives into the US. This confirmed to the CSG that sleeper cells in the US and Canada were receiving instruction from Al-Qaeda members abroad (It was noted that while this plot was foiled, it probably did not create any significant dent in the operational ability of Al-Qaeda). As a result, the members of the CSG met daily, and higher members were meeting constantly. The sense of heightened urgency was felt all through the intelligence community. The new year went off without a hitch, but it was noted that the foiled attack was probably just the first of a planned string of attacks. All throughout the summer of 2000 and 2001 there were similar threats and intelligence acquisitions. Most notably, the Taliban government in Afghanistan was threatened to be eliminated if any Al-Qaeda attack occurred. In effect, while these were all warning signals to policy makers, no significant intelligence policy shift occurred.
A major source of failure to prevent 9/11 came on the part of how to deal with the foreign versus the domestic threat of terrorism. The attacks fell into the gap perceived to be a line between domestic and international terrorism. The foreign agencies were prepared and informing for an attack (like what had happened before in Yemen and Africa), and the domestic agencies were watching for sleeper cells within the US borders, but each bureau responsible for gathering information on their respective threats were not sharing information in a collective way with each other. The attacks that occurred were an intermestic affair, meaning that it was eventually foreigners who had infiltrated into the US who had committed these attacks.
In this way, the bureaucratic politics model of government explains the gap - policy has not been formulated with respect to any underlying conception of US national interest. Other forces interrupted the need to prevent terrorism. Competing smaller organizations and individuals did do their jobs, but in the end they did not have a singular unified plan.
The whole intelligence community could have been helped by external guidance and initiative from the president and other higher ranking individuals as to how to proceed in combating terrorism. One stated problem with intelligence gathering is how the information gathered is eventually used. Some have said that intelligence is often not used as a means for directing policy, but vice versa. This would assume a political agenda purported by politicians outside the realm of the intelligence community, that would guide the fundamental first step in intelligence gathering. It could certainly be argued that evidence of this concept is notable in the summer of 2001, and the failure to act on information coming in from various agencies. It could also be conceded that without major precedent (like the events of 9/11) that few policy makers could perceive the threat of intermestic terror to be that real. However, this might have been prevented (in the case of 9/11) by a centralization of communication, and a single strong unified message brought to the president and other policy makers.
Altogether, while the information gathered by various agencies had completed their own goals of information gathering, in terms of combating terrorism it was fragmented and did not complete a whole. Our policy was shaped by the bureaucratic politics model of policy - making. The US intelligence community had not received enough go-ahead style initiative from higher authority to act in a manner needed to prevent the attacks on 9/11.
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Egendorf, Laura K. Terrorism : Opposing Viewpoints. Greenhaven Press, Inc. 2000.
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Strasser, Steven. The 9/11 Investigations. PublicAffairs LLC 2004.
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Nadelmann, Ethan A. Cops Across Borders. The Pennsylvania State University Press 1993.
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Hastedt, Glenn P. American Foreign Policy: Past, Present, Future. 6th ed. Pearson Prentice Hall 2006.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_%28information_gathering%29, 2005.
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