still more 911 report

Truths vs. Soundbites

By LOUIS J. FREEH
July 23, 2004;

With the benefit of hindsight, and with much speculation and conjuring, the 9/11 Commission has come up with 10 "missed opportunities" which, in a perfect world, could have derailed all or part of the 9/11 conspiracy.

The list spans two administrations -- one Democrat, the other Republican. Experience has taught us that it would take a huge stretch of the imagination to think that any of these opportunities could have been perfectly exploited, especially given the rules and laws in place at the time. Both the president and Congress recognized this with the swift enactment of the Patriot Act. Even so, sensibly the report is a far cry from much of the public rhetoric and soundbites generated by some of the Commissioners over the last two years.

The 9/11 Commission has to its credit also discarded the silly idea of creating an MI-5-type secret police in the United States, something many, myself included, believe would be ineffective against terrorism and ultimately dangerous to our liberty. In short, the 9/11 Commission has ended up where the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) did in December 2002. The JIC concluded that ". . . neither President Clinton nor President Bush nor their National Security Councils put the government or the Intelligence Community on a war footing before September 11th."


This unilaterally declared war culminated on September 11, 2001, and, like Pearl Harbor 60 years before it, finally pushed the United States into war. Thirty-one months after that Day of Infamy, exhaustive study by the Joint Intelligence Committee "uncovered no intelligence information in the possession of the Intelligence Community prior to the attacks of September 11th that, if fully considered, would have provided specific, advance warning of the details of those attacks." This was so even though al Qaeda and its political leadership openly and repeatedly declared war against America.

Even after the Commission completed its work, the complex question that remains not fully answered is why the political leadership of our nation -- which included presidents and Congresses -- declared war back on al Qaeda only after that horrific day. Osama bin Laden had been indicted years before by the FBI for blowing up American soldiers and embassies and was known as a clear and present danger to the United States. The FBI put bin Laden on our "Top Ten Most Wanted List" in 1999. Endless and ultimately useless speculation about "various threads and pieces of information," which are certainly "relevant and significant," at least "in retrospect," do not take us very far in answering this central question: What would have happened had the United States declared war on al Qaeda in 1998?

I firmly believe that any American president and Congress faced with the reality of September 11 would have acted swiftly and overwhelmingly as did President Bush and the 107th Congress. They are to be commended for their courageous political leadership, decisiveness and conviction to engage the enemy with military might. However, those who came before can only be faulted if they had the political means and the will of the Nation to declare a war back then -- but failed to do so. The fact that terrorism and the bloody war being waged against us by al Qaeda was not even an issue in the 2000 presidential campaign -- at the very time al Qaeda attacked the USS Cole in Yemen -- strongly suggests that the political means and will to declare and fight this war simply didn't exist before September 11.

In hindsight, we all now agree that six years ago the United States should have responded to al Qaeda's acts of war against us by declaring and waging a real war against these enemies. Now, going forward, we can take some lessons and experience from this history and commit, as the president has done, to trying to prevent an enemy from ever again gaining such an advantage against our nation. It will be a long and difficult struggle from which we, as a nation, cannot waiver, regardless of the temptations to do so.

And while we are at this, the natural tendency to blame someone or some agency for 9/11 needs to be avoided. The courageous men and women of the FBI and CIA who put their lives on the line for our country every day are our heroes, not our adversaries. The men and women of the FBI -- and the New York office in particular -- have done an extraordinary job in pursuing and preventing terrorism over the decade preceding 9/11, saving countless lives by their courage and skill. They deserve our gratitude and respect. They also deserve, as do people in uniform, the laws and resources necessary to do what we expect them to do.

Certainly, while changes and improvements are always in order, the blame for the 9/11 attack rests solely on the terrorists who did it. This central truth has often been ignored by the endless talking heads and soundbite analysis with which we have been saturated in the last two years.

Mr. Freeh is a former director of the FBI.