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COMMENTARY
July 26, 2003
The rehash
Of 900 pages in the U.S. Congressional report on the intelligence failure that made 9/11 possible 28 were blacked out by the Bush administration for security reasons. It is generally understood that most of the deleted material pertained to Saudi Arabia. My own information was that the report would be extremely damning of the House of Saud; that it would show the complicity of very senior figures in Al Qaeda operations and funding. And I' m not the only reader who feels almost cheated of the "good bits". Given the sievelike nature of all large bureaucracies -- and the U.S. government certainly is one -- I expect many of these details to be available soon anyway. I think I understand the administration's motives in making the deletions: for it is better placed to put pressure on the Saudis privately than publicly and push gradual change instead of stark confrontation. The administration's domestic political calculation is however harder to plumb. They have in effect removed the principal distraction the Democrats and the media would have had to having a field day at the administration's expense -- taking the dog's bone away and instead presenting their own leg. The report is big and complicated; I have yet to assimilate the whole thing. The smokiest gun I can find is reference to a report available to both CIA and FBI in December 1998 which showed that Arab terrorists had already done a dress rehearsal for a hijacking from New York airport successfully evading all checkpoints. This should indeed have been taken as a tip. But the inability to imagine let alone anticipate a large terrorist attack on the U.S. was more basic than that. It was something the people at the top either were or weren't thinking about; and clearly they weren't. The people who were thinking acting or speaking were nowhere near positions of power. Example. When the World Trade Centre was first hit in February 1993 I myself explained to a table of companions in the Beverley Tavern in Toronto that this was no mere terror strike but the first shot in a war. I explained the significance of the WTC as an infidel symbol in Islamist propaganda and gave it as my opinion that they will keep shelling until that sucker comes down . Yet I knew perfectly well no one would take me seriously; that there was no point in making what would be interpreted as a crank call to the FBI. And since it took eight-and-a-half years for the follow-up shot I myself stopped muttering about it. I was not unique. Peggy Noonan was among several American journalists who made remarkably prescient statements in print long before 9/11. At least one independent organization was gathering files on suspected Islamist terrorists from public sources that the FBI were not allowed to use by law. And the Middle Eastern scholar Daniel Pipes had been tireless in warning America of the Islamist threat from within over many years -- backed up with his own sound research. The Congressional refusal to heed such warnings continues to this day. Just this week three Democrat senators led by Edward Kennedy succeeded in delaying a confirmation vote on Dr. Pipes's appointment by President Bush to the U.S. Institute for Peace a publicly-funded think-tank. They are fighting the appointment tooth and nail on grounds that Muslim organizations have branded Dr. Pipes "anti-Islamic" which he is not. The issue is whether you want to survive or you want to be politically correct. You can't choose both. Yet to this day even in the tone of the Congressional report we find people trying to have it both ways. President Bush himself has tried from the beginning to do this by maintaining rules against "ethnic profiling" that hamstring efforts by the FBI immigration authorities and local police to cast necessary dragnets. And the media can be counted upon to dog such efforts at every turn in the name of a false and impracticable ideologized doctrine of human rights. As Mark Steyn argued when the first intelligence failures were being exposed after 9/11 political correctness had already cost 3 000 lives; we didn't yet know where and when it would cost many more. And while human rights are an important issue and must be protected in emergencies so far as possible life and death is a more important issue. The inability to make this priority plain and to everyone is the chief cause of the intelligence failure. This you will not find in the Congressional report. It is instead a catalogue of specific acts of incompetence none of them very surprising. Nor is it surprising that this material is already being used in a dishonestly selective way to score cheap political points against President Bush. The administrative failures began long before his election. Read impartially however the report gives some useful insights into the nature of the enemy the West is facing. It puts beyond doubt the impossibility of defeating this enemy by means of conventional police methods and civilian courts. It vindicates what the Bush administration has done in taking the battle to the enemy rather than hoping the threat will go away. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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