new doubts on wtc collapse, page-117

re: new doubts with trade4loss education Just put this in here to open the discussion further. Go for it guys/gals.



Speeches

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Articles/op-eds
A Scapegoat Is Not a Solution

Paul R. Pillar
National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia

The New York Times
04 June 2004

Some critics of America's intelligence services will mistakenly see George Tenet's resignation as director of central intelligence as a first reaction to the 9/11 commission and as an acknowledgement that the C.I.A. failed to anticipate the rise of radical Islamic terrorism. In this they will echo the staff report of the 9/11 commission, issued in April, which asserted that the intelligence community failed to recognize the "catastrophic threat" that Al Qaeda represented and did not shake the pre-9/11 "conventional wisdom" about the extent of this danger.

The staff report also held that the agencies might have changed the course of history if they had produced a national intelligence estimate -- an authoritative document put together by all the federal intelligence services to give the president and his national security team an overall assessment of a specific threat -- on the Osama bin Laden network.

These assertions, and the lingering criticism of Mr. Tenet, raise several questions, including what "catastrophic terrorism" means, what Al Qaeda is, what the conventional wisdom was before 9/11, and what national intelligence estimates can really accomplish.

First, starting in the mid-1990's, there was no shortage of public discussion about "catastrophic terrorism" -- although almost all of it was about possible chemical, biological and nuclear terrorism, and to a lesser extent cyberterrorism. This, in fact, was the real "conventional wisdom" of the time.

Shortly before 9/11 I wrote in a book that nonconventional attacks were a genuine and probably growing threat, but that the disproportionate focus on them left a distorted picture of the terrorist threats the United States actually faced. The equating of "catastrophic" with chemical, biological and nuclear threats was misleading, I suggested, because terrorism using conventional means could produce large-scale casualties and because not all nonconventional attacks were guaranteed to do so (as the series of anthrax letters in 2001 would demonstrate).

This line of thinking can also be found in the agencies' 1995 national intelligence estimate on foreign terrorist threats in the United States, which judged that the odds were increasing that terrorists would try to use chemical or biological agents, but that they "were more likely to use the conventional weapons with which they are familiar and which can be extremely destructive."

The estimate postulated that the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 -- in which the bombers' objective was to topple the twin towers and kill thousands -- had probably crossed a threshold in terms of "large-scale terrorist attacks" and that more of the same would be coming. The kinds of targets the estimate identified as being especially at risk were "national symbols such as the White House and the Capitol and symbols of U.S. capitalism such as Wall Street."

Even more striking, that estimate also made clear that the most likely foreign terrorist threat stemmed from the network of Islamist groups that had formed during the jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. It noted the network's continued reliance on training in Afghanistan, and the animus of its members toward the United States. It warned that members were seeking cover by blending in with the growing Muslim immigrant community in the United States, and that they could move freely because "they know how to take advantage of U.S. laws."

Among its key judgments, the intelligence estimate assessed that members of this Islamist network posed the most likely threat of terrorist attack in the United States, and that growth of the network was "enhancing the ability of Islamic extremists to operate in the United States." It also highlighted civil aviation as a vulnerable and attractive target.

At that time I was serving as chief analyst at the C.I.A.'s counterterrorism center, and as a follow-up to the intelligence estimate, an F.B.I. counterpart and I met with senior representatives of the aviation industry to discuss its conclusions. The briefings, arranged by the Federal Aviation Administration, were meant to persuade the industry that the terrorist threat required that the security of civil aviation to be strengthened. Unfortunately, our powers of persuasion were evidently insufficient to overcome the industry's resistance to expensive new security measures. Still, to imply that the intelligence agencies were in the dark about the possibility of a catastrophic attack is to ignore history.

As for the 9/11 commission staff's accusation that too little attention was paid to Al Qaeda, it too is simply not borne out by the facts. The intelligence community's early recognition of the threat was reflected, for example, in the creation in the mid-1990's of the first-ever C.I.A. unit focused solely on one person: Mr. bin Laden. The agency communicated its assessment of the danger posed by Al Qaeda in numerous papers, in briefings to senior policymakers and in meetings of Richard Clarke's counterterrorism group at the National Security Council. Mr. Tenet said publicly on many occasions that the agency had identified Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda as the No. 1 threat to American security.

It also seems that the 9/11 commission staff report, in an apparent determination to tell a tale of an intelligence service having missed the emergence of a powerful terrorist group, has the nature of the terrorism threat wrong. The report mentions several terrorist attacks by radical Islamists around the world over the last decade and implies that they were all the work of Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

This is not the case. Some were perpetrated by Muslim radicals who, while part of a wider network of like-minded Islamists, were not part of Osama bin Laden's organization. In fact, the most exhaustive analysis of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which reflected a decade's worth of research, was unable to conclude that Mr. bin Laden had instigated the attack.

Far more is at stake here than repairing the reputation of the C.I.A. The conclusions of the 9/11 commission will be important for countering the terrorist threat of today, as manifested in the post-9/11 attacks from Bali to Madrid. Al Qaeda, although still a danger, has been badly damaged by the measures taken over the past two and a half years. But the broader Islamist network it supports and feeds off of may be as strong as ever, and it constitutes a serious terrorist threat that will remain even after Osama bin Laden is killed or captured.

The big lesson of the 1990's isn't that the intelligence agencies had no idea of the threat we faced. It is that even their repeated warnings were not sufficient to change national priorities. Two more specific lessons follow. First, national intelligence estimates are not panaceas, either in adding to what the intelligence community conveys to policy makers through other means or in stimulating new agendas. Experience has shown that major policy changes tend to come only from actual disasters.

The second lesson is that the American public needs more of an education in the complexities of international terrorism, and fewer of the oversimplifications that have characterized the current blame game. George Tenet may be leaving government service, but the public would do well to take heed of his testimony to the 9/11 commission, in which he noted that "warning is not good enough without the structure to put it into action."

Paul R. Pillar, the author of Terrorism and U. S. Foreign Policy, is the officer responsible for Near Eastern and South Asian issues in the National Intelligence Council.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

This article was originally published in The New York Times, 04 June 2004

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