Explanation: In the lead-up to 9/11, the CIA received several credible reports that Al-Qaeda, radicalized by (checks notes) the Saudis letting US troops station in the sacred territory of Saudi Arabia during the First Gulf War, were planning an attack on US soil. One of the warnings came from Mahmoud Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance fighting against the Taliban in Afghanistan, who noted that his own intelligence networks had upturned talk of an attack from (allied to but separate from the Taliban) Al-Qaeda.
On one hand, the CIA deals with a lot of foreign actors making threats, few of which end up amounting to anything; and even those threats which are credible are not always immediately identifiable in route, method, timing, etc.
On the other hand, to anyone who is aware of the CIA’s long history of incompetence and failures instead of just the image of the shadowy all-powerful intelligence agency, it’s just as likely that the CIA dropped the fucking ball - or those officials in the Clinton and Bush administrations who received the CIA reports dropped the fucking ball.
The Clinton admin handed over a lot of info to the Bush admin, who then tossed it. Including them in the ball dropping maybe implies that the info they had wasn’t convincing enough, i.e. they ignored better data that would convince the next Presidential administration? It’s been a while since I’ve been down that rabbit hole, but I did not get the impression that whatever incompetence that existed was equally shared on both sides.
Basically, this was all
Bush’sCheney’s baby.My money would be on the Bush admin bearing the lion’s share of the blame, but I’ve also not done enough of a deep dive on it to absolve the Clinton administration of responsibility, so I included them as possible ball-droppers.
You might want to check out “The Looming Tower”. Its probably over dramaticized, but it follows FBI agent John O’Neil played by Jeff Daniels. It shows how frustrating it was to deal with the Bush administration. O’Neil was fired and went to work security at the WTC and was killed by the attack.
I think Clinton et al. fumbled some balls in their own efforts to address the problem, probably made others worse. But it was the discarding of intelligence as if it wasn’t worth at least monitoring that caused 9/11. Something may have eventually happened even with attention to the data, they were dead set on coming after the US, but in a sense we let them in when we didn’t have to. I’ve always said, what if the gov’t made the FAA mandate a closed cockpit to all airlines before then, how would that have changed things? A huge shift from just a rule change.
From everything that I’ve read it in the past, it was the Bush White House that dropped the ball and the CIA agents who were getting increasingly frustrated + desperate to get the white house to listen and act.
I don’t have much time, so I can only link the first article I found that narrates some of those events, there’s probably better/more complete ones. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/11/george-w-bush-s-white-house-ignored-these-extremely-dramatic-pre-9-11-warnings-george-tenet-and-cofer-black-reveal.html
Part of the problem is intelligence work is usually hidden. There’s a survivorship bias problem where people become aware of any failures but aren’t aware of successes. While that was unquestionably a very dramatic failure, it’s not particularly useful for gauging their effectiveness more broadly.
Historians will hopefully have access to better, more complete information in the future, but we just don’t. All we can do is make guesses based on the very limited data we have access to. Leaves us with no actual clue what their real success rate is. All we can say for sure is it’s not 100%.
