Abstract
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Mohamed Atta, age 33–an Egyptian who carried a passport from the United Arab Emirates, studied at the Technical University in Hamburg, Germany, and had taken flying instruction at Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida–settled into seat 8D in the business class section of American Airlines Flight 11, scheduled to fly from Boston to Los Angeles. For Atta and his companions, including a man who had taken the identity of a Saudi, Abdulaziz Alomari, seated nearby in 8G, September 11 was the culmination of months if not years of planning.
At 8:46 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, one of five co-conspirators on board the plane–probably Atta or Alomari–having wrested control of the plane and diverted the flight, rammed the aircraft into the north tower of New York City's World Trade Center, killing everyone on board. The collision of the fully fueled passenger jet set off a massive fire above the 90th floor of 1 World Trade Center. That fire melted the steel structure of the building, leading to its total collapse 102 minutes later.
On the same morning of September 11, Jeremy Glick, a passenger on United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco, called his wife from that plane to say that it had been taken over “by some very bad men” and that the passengers expected to die but would try to foil the hijackers' plot. He told his wife how much he loved her and their infant daughter, then added, “Whatever decisions you make in your life, I need you to be happy, and I will respect any decisions that you make.”
His flight ended soon after, the plane crashing to the ground near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
In a few short hours, four planes were commandeered by 19 terrorists, both towers of the World Trade Center were destroyed, and a gaping, burning hole penetrated the western section of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., where at about 9:40 a.m. American Airlines Flight 77, scheduled to fly from Dulles Airport to Los Angeles, had crashed into it.
More than 6,000 were dead–more than twice the number killed in the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Between the jets, the fuel, and the kinetic force of the collapsing World Trade Center buildings, the southwestern tip of Manhattan had been struck with a force estimated at twice the size of the smallest U.S. tactical nuclear weapon. It was the most deadly attack on U.S. territory in history.
What kind of people would do this?
Many of us in the United States thought we had a clear picture of a Middle Eastern terrorist–he was a young man, in his teens or early twenties, trained to perform a lone suicide mission in a crowded public space in Israel. We think to ourselves that he doesn't know any better, that he has been duped–and more sadly, that the poor kid never had a chance at a normal life.
But these modern, twenty-first-century terrorists turn out to be very different sorts of people, and that has been part of the shock of the new. As the 19 probable hijackers have been identified, we've learned that they are older and are from widely varied backgrounds. Many have spent years in Western countries, apparently melting comfortably into the culture. Some have shown no sign–even to their families–that they would be willing to take part in a campaign of terror.
The well-to-do Lebanese father of Ziad Jarrahi, one of the hijackers of Jeremy Glick's Flight 93, described his son as a good student and a secular person who enjoyed nightclubs and an occasional alcoholic drink. The grieving elder Jarrahi was as mystified as the rest of us by the horrific turn of events.
Behind the hijackers is presumed to be Al-Qaeda, a network of terrorist groups said to be led by Osama bin Laden, a multi-millionaire expatriate Yemen-born Saudi who has pledged the destruction of the United States. Bin Laden and his Taliban “hosts” in Afghanistan (he was expelled from Saudi Arabia, which holds a warrant for his arrest) might well describe themselves as Islamic purists, but it may be a mistake to believe that their underlying motives are religious.
Bin Laden argues that Islam is under threat from the United States–a country that has stood since its founding for religious tolerance. This absurdity is readily swallowed by the young, the uneducated, and the disturbed or desperate among the Islamic world's many poor. But after September 11 the world knows–as it should have known before–that what the terrorist leaders are after is power, and what they believe in is death and destruction–not the tenets of any religion.
No matter how puzzling the new terror network may be, it is critical that we come to understand how its leaders recruit (or perhaps compel?) young men like Ziad Jarrahi to join them.
Some take bin Laden's hosts, the Taliban, at their word–that they are a religious movement. But the millions of their Afghan countrymen who have fled their bloody reign might question that view. In any case, their quest for power is clear: Their leader, the Mullah Mohammed Omar, has declared himself leader of all Islam.
How did it happen?
The foremost reason the terrorist attack succeeded on September 11 is painfully simple. Aviation experts, among them former Department of Transportation official Mary Schia-vo, immediately pointed to the weaknesses of airline security systems and the country's unwillingness to pay the price or take the time to improve them. Over the last decade airport security steadily deteriorated as the recommendations of two congressional commissions, followed by new legislation, were simply ignored.
As the September 15 Economist summed it up, “Security at airports was appallingly lax. Terrorists carrying little more than knives and cardboard cutters managed to hijack commercial planes at some of America's biggest airports…. Some of the worst security breaches have occurred at Boston's Logan airport, where two of the four airliners were hijacked. In the late 1990s, FAA officials disguised as passengers repeatedly succeeded in smuggling guns and pipe bombs onto planes.”
At the same time, few would have predicted that commercial airliners would be commandeered for destruction rather than ransom. It was simply inconceivable that the planes themselves would be used as instruments of murder-suicide.
Further ironies: As Bill Nichols reported in the September 12 USA Today, “The attack was so unexpected that a joint FBI/CIA anti-terrorist task force that specifically prepared for this type of disaster was on a training exercise in Monterey, California. As of late Tuesday, with airports closed around the country, the task force still hadn't found a way to return to Washington.”
On the agenda of a House defense appropriations subcommittee, scheduled to meet the same morning, was a discussion about moving $800 million from national missile defense to counterterrorism.
In their words
Before
“We will have diverted all that money [to missile defense] to address the least likely threat while the real threats come into this country in the hold of a ship, or the belly of a plane, or are smuggled into the city in the middle of the night in a vial in a backpack.” Sen. Joe Biden, Delaware Democrat, September 10
After
“The morning after the worst terrorist attack in history, the nation's great editorial page editors have offered up the wisdom of a group of middle-aged white men whose claim to fame is that they lost the Vietnam War.” Nina Burleigh, journalist, TomPaine.com, September 12
Who's to blame?
“At a minimum, the blame can be put on ill-trained, incompetent personnel performing the screening of passengers. At the worst, security experts fear collusion with the terrorists, possibly even extending to the cockpit.” Robert Novak, columnist, September 13
“One of the few certainties about last week's terrorist attacks is that there was a catastrophic failure on the part of America's $25-billion-a-year intelligence-gathering apparatus.”
Chicago Tribune editorial, September 17
Opportunism
In a confused and chaotic time, it is not surprising (but it is appalling) that within hours Defense officials were out defending expensive weapons programs that were irrelevant to preventing or protecting against the disaster. To argue on that particular day that the United States must build an as-yet-unworkable national missile defense at any cost seemed not only hollow, but cruel.
Defense Department policy official Douglas Feith was in Moscow, busy threatening Russia yet again with a U.S. abrogation of the ABM Treaty. When questioned by reporters who suggested that the disaster in New York pointed to the possibility that other forms of defense might be more useful, Feith remarked that “if a missile defense system is designed to intercept missiles, and airplanes hit the World Trade Center, it's not what the missile defense system is designed to protect against.” He concluded, “I guess I have difficulty with the question.”
To be fair, all the weapons-of-mass-destruction doomsayers, whether their specialty was chemical, biological, or nuclear, rushed to get their messages out–despite an early reminder by proliferation expert Joe Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace that the event required them to undertake “a painful reappraisal.”
If there were any political “winners” among them on September 11, it was that group of politicians and think tankers who have spent the last two years or so pushing for something called “homeland defense.” On September 12, the co-chairs of a government commission on the subject–former senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman–expressed what Jake Tapper of Salon characterized as “something between frustration and regret” that the White House had failed to embrace the commission's recommendations. Instead, the Bush administration decided in May that it would be more prudent for Vice President Dick Cheney and cronies to produce a report of their own.
Although Rudman and Hart “predicted it,” as Hart said, (”We said ‘Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers, sometime in the next quarter century’”), neither he nor Rudman spent much time pointing out that their commission had focused much more on the idea that terrorists would attack with high-tech tools and weapons of mass destruction. Nor did they point out that many of their recommendations would have been of limited value.
Like everyone else, they had no special insight into a large, clever, but low-tech attack. Nonetheless, the disaster preparedness and emergency response provisions they envisioned in their proposed “National Homeland Security Agency,” including state-of-the-art equipment and training for “first responders” like police and firefighters, would undoubtedly have been helpful.
How the administration responded
To many, President George W. Bush seemed uncertain on the first day. After a sentence or two at the Florida grade school where he was visiting when the attacks on the World Trade Center occurred, the president boarded Air Force One, flying first to an airbase in Louisiana, and then to Of-futt Air Force Base near Omaha, Nebraska, where he considered the situation from an underground bunker at U.S. Strategic Command.
In mid-afternoon in Washington, Karen Hughes, his spokeswoman, made a terse statement concerning the attacks to the assembled White House press corps, then departed without taking questions. In the evening, back in Washington, the president gave a brief televised speech.
Critics complained the next day that flying from military base to military base, and ultimately “disappearing down the rabbit hole” as some reporters put it, did not demonstrate the confident leadership required in times of crisis.
In response, the White House circulated the story that the president's airbase-hopping was required–that although he longed to return to Washington, his odyssey had been forced on him by the Secret Service's determination to keep him safe. Massachusetts Democratic Cong. Marty Meehan was much criticized for saying this explanation was “just PR. That's just spin.”
On the other hand, the frequent, informative, and ultimately comforting public statements by New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani stood in stark contrast to the president's physical and seeming emotional absence from the scene.
Americans had two immediate needs for reassurance in the aftermath of the attacks. The first was that the organizers and remaining perpetrators would be found and apprehended. The administration made that pledge, although in terms that sounded too certain, considering the circumstances. The second was a pledge that major efforts would be taken to try to prevent such an event from occurring again, and on that the president and his administration were eerily silent.
In any case, when a crisis occurs, Americans tend to throw their support to the president they've got, and by the end of the week, polls indicated that 80 percent of respondents said they approved of Bush's handling of the crisis. And by September 20, when the president gave a major speech outlining broad efforts to combat terrorism, and announcing the establishment of a Cabinet-level Office of Homeland Security, the rhetoric, at least, seemed right.
On September 23, CNN polling found the president's popularity to be above 90 percent. But it remained to be seen how deep that support was or how long it would last.
Learning the right lessons
In the months to come, the Bulletin will continue its in-depth coverage of international security issues, but emphasizing in particular security issues that have gained new urgency. The United States needs to:
Its defenders argue that the Central Intelligence Agency has been hobbled because Americans have come to despise the idea of “covert operations.” By denying the agency the right to murder at will–or discouraging them from thinking they can buy the loyalty of those who do–say the CIA boosters, the U.S. government has set the collectors of human intelligence adrift.
In fact, the agency has hobbled itself by failing to recruit people who can understand and evaluate what is happening in much of the world, let alone those who are savvy enough to transact business with a string of shady operatives without being played by them.
For decades, a number of experts who write for this magazine have had their own moments of chilling recognition–demonstrations of the agency's arrogance and ineptitude. One Bulletin author told me about talking with CIA personnel who boasted that when they investigated the question of nuclear proliferation in “Country X,” they refused to talk to anyone but government officials.
My own chill and foreboding came in 1993, when Robert Gates, the just-retired head of CIA told a morning TV news show that the U.S. landing on the beach in Somalia could not have gone better “had we had assets on the ground.”
For years, outside experts have suggested that the agency is corrupt beyond redemption, and the only answer to obtaining the kind of information the United States needs in the twenty-first century is to start all over again. This could be a good time to develop a new and accountable intelligence bureau–one that truly serves public as well as government needs, staffed with a culturally diverse group of smart multilingual specialists.
What to do about it
“What's the sense of sending $2 million missiles to hit a $10 tent that's empty?” President George W. Bush, September 13
“This should be a transforming event in the way America evaluates its national security threats. We worried about expensive, sophisticated weapons developed by powerful nations during the Cold War and now pursued by a few ‘rogue states.’ But this terror came low-tech. The terrorists studied flight manuals, not chemistry, biology, or physics. They didn't build missiles; they stole what they needed and turned our own technological marvels against us.” Joseph Cirincione, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, September 14
“We need to deal with terrorists and criminal warriors through police work, not military action. Controlling them will require patient, dreary, endless, routine, and often frustrating police work, not warfare.” John Mueller, professor of political science, Ohio State University, September 14
“Reducing global stockpiles of nuclear weapons and working vigorously to promote negotiated solutions to key regional conflicts such as those between Israel and the Palestinians and India and Pakistan (over Kashmir) will do more in the long run to reduce the dangers of terrorism than meeting terrorist violence with ‘disproportionate’ counter-violence, as the president has suggested.” William Hartung, World Policy Institute, September 18
“Perhaps the most effective counter is for Americans to shed their daily self-absorption and become more aware of their surroundings.” Daniel Smith, Center for Defense Information, September 24
“Bomb Afghanistan with butter, with rice, bread, clothing, and medicine. It will cost less than conventional arms, pose no threat of U.S. casualties, and just might get the populace thinking that maybe the Taliban don't have all the answers.” Kent Madin, tour operator, September 14
Why did it happen?
“My jaw dropped as I read the words of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, describing the ‘super-empowered angry people’ responsible for the week's terror attacks…. Are these the same attackers who used box cutters and plastic knives to carry out their mission? … There was nothing high-tech about Tuesday's attacks, and that is one of the main reasons they were so profoundly unnerving…. Even mentioning ‘high-tech’ in the context of this story is bizarre–and one reflection of the confusion and muddled thinking that continues to characterize the dialogue in the United States about this ‘new terrorism.’” Scott Rosenberg, managing editor, Salon.com, September 13
“One would like to dismiss televised images showing Palestinian expressions of joy as unrepresentative, reflective only of the crass political immaturity of a handful. But this may be wishful thinking. Similarly, Pakistan Television, operating under strict control of the government, is attempting to portray a nation united in condemnation of the attack. Here too, the truth lies elsewhere, as I learn from students at my university here in Islamabad, from conversations with people in the streets, and from the Urdu press. A friend tells me that crowds gathered around public TV sets at Islamabad airport had cheered as the World Trade Center came crashing down.” Pervez Hoodbhoy, Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, September 16
“For a brief, terrifying moment last week people out here [the Middle East] got a glimpse of what the world could be like without America, and many did not like it. America is not something external to them; people carry around pieces of it in ways often not articulated.”
Thomas Friedman, New York Times, September 18
As for the collection of information by imaging and signals-gathering satellites, far more data are collected than can possibly be analyzed by available manpower. Recruiting more expert analysts might yield a bigger payoff than collecting so much information that either no one is available to look at it, or those who are cannot read or interpret it.
For years, the U.S. defense establishment has been issuing ominous warnings that enemies of the United States were likely to engage in “asymmetric warfare,” by which it meant that attackers might use simple, low-tech weapons in ways that a highly organized military with access to expensive, modern, and highly destructive weapons would find too primitive to be worth considering. But the military has never explained why, if asymmetric warfare is a major threat, it spends its capital almost exclusively on scenarios in which potential enemies use weapons and strategies that most resemble its own. (Recently, the public has been treated to warnings that enemies want to knock out U.S. satellites. It is unlikely that rogues or terrorists will spend their time and money building anti-satellite weapons–it's much easier to knock out ground stations. What the warnings tell us is that the U.S. military wants to be able to knock out other countries' satellites.)
Similarly, billion-dollar signals and reconnaissance satellites are genuinely useful, but not if their operators forget there are serious limits to what they can see and hear. Similarly, it's possible that a $100-billion missile defense system, aimed at poorly guided Third World Scud missiles stacked precariously one on top another, may one day be able to intercept a “rogue” missile.
But the missile threat looks even less important than it did before September. Why would a terrorist (or even a rogue nation with limited resources) bother with the difficult and time-consuming tasks of obtaining fissile material, struggling to assemble a reliable weapon, and then try to develop a reliable intercontinental missile? There are much simpler and cheaper ways to be destructive. September 11 suggests that the new terrorists know that, and the United States needs to keep it in mind, too.
Yet already, as Carnegie's Cirin-cione wrote on September 14, Congress is being pushed into supporting all sorts of weapons systems by those who are “using the terrible tragedy to justify their existing programs, slapping an ‘anti-terrorism’ label on missile defense and military budget increases.”
Although he too was swept away by the common sentiment, on September 13, Wisconsin Democrat David Obey also described the danger, telling Salon's Jake Tapper, “You don't make 10-year policy on attacking terrorism on the back of an envelope.”
From a moral point of view, this is an admirable position. Americans can and should help and respect all the people of the world. They should do the right thing–but they should do it because it is right. On the other hand, it would be the height of folly to believe that acting fairly and justly will prevent attacks from the sort of people who acted on September 11.
At the other end of the spectrum is the emotional response best represented by Georgia Democrat Sen. Zell Miller's cry to “bomb the hell out of Afghanistan.” Yet bloody retribution would only create thousands of angry new volunteers for an anti-American jihad.
The public was eager to help but felt frustrated. On September 19, the FBI finally admitted it needed speakers of Arabic, Farsi, and Pashto to read and analyze documents. They were probably needed months if not years earlier.
Meanwhile, employees at the CIA, FBI, and other agencies should remember that they work for their country, not for their agency. Their inter-agency bickering and rivalry, and unwillingness to work with local law enforcement, is dangerous. Law enforcement priorities may need readjusting as well.
September 11 should serve as a wake-up call that in the long term we are all dependent on each other.
The idea that the United States can decide its fate unilaterally was and is foolish. Too many times the U.S. government has said it doesn't like the way the game is played. The United States has taken its ball and bat home from meetings on the Kyoto protocol, the bioweapons protocol, the chemical weapons verification regime, and the ban on landmines, and it has refused to ratify the nuclear test ban treaty. Each time U.S. arrogance feels palpable. But after September 11, when the United States urged a multilateral response to the attacks on New York and Washington, the go-it-alone policy must seem foolish and hypocritical even to its strongest supporters.
Just appalling
“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union], People for the American Way–all of them who have tried to secularize America–I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”
Jerry Falwell, television evangelist, September 14
“That minds accomplish in one act [the September 11 attacks] something that we in music can't dream of, that people rehearse like mad for 10 years–totally fanatically–for a concert and then die–that's the greatest work of art there is in the entire cosmos.”
Karlheinz Stockhausen, German composer, September 16
“We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.” Ann Coulter, columnist and television personality, September 13
“I don't think it matters [whether Iraq had anything to do with the September 11 attack]…. I don't care whether or not we get them for 1993 or for this.” James Woolsey, former CIA director, on an ABC news special, September 16
“At a bare minimum, tactical nuclear capabilities should be used against the bin Laden camps in the desert of Afghanistan…. If we, as a nation, show the willingness to use the ultimate weapon in the current situation, there can be no doubt anywhere in the globe that the United States will make good on its past pledges to defend its sovereign territory with such weapons.”
Thomas Woodrow, Washington Times, September 14
“If I see someone come in [the country] and he's got a diaper on his head and a fan belt around that diaper on his head, that guy needs to be pulled over and checked.” Cong. John Cooksey, Louisiana Republican and Senate hopeful, September 17
“Dr. Laura” listeners report that on September 13 the talk show host blamed the disasters at the Pentagon and in New York, in part, on the presence of women in the military. Conveniently, her producers claim there are no tapes or transcripts of the broadcast.
Reported by Lloyd Grove, “Reliable Source,” Washington Post, September 18