One of the greatest analytical failures before the September 11, 2001 attacks was the belief that Osama bin Laden was content being a gadfly. The policymakers were sure that the man was only interested in making trouble abroad. Post-event analysis shows that there were indeed rumblings that his group would attack the homeland directly (Dahl, 2013). The decision makers at the time seem to have come to the conclusion that Osama and his motley crew was not capable of an attack on the American heartland. The failure in analytical processing directly led to the horrendous attack.
Secondly, there was the naive belief that Osama was just like other terrorists who had come before him, and there was no need to act rashly against him. In fact, the Clinton administration had argued against acting in a manner that would have elevated bin Laden’s status (Dahl, 2013). What the nation’s decision makers did not realize was that Osama was intent on making his own name. He was not like any the local terrorist in the Middle East: he had grand ambitions and the will to achieve his objectives. The lesson was learned the hard way in the form of thousands killed on 9/11.
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Another significant failure in analysis at this time was how much support bin Laden was getting from both state and non-state actors. The US knew that Sudan was defiant. That meant that bin Laden and his people could hide in the country in relative safety (Posner, 2009). What the US underestimated were the networks on support bin Laden had in Saudi Arabia. The Saudis were and still are American allies, and many American officials chose not to come down hard on the kingdom. It turned out that most of the hijackers would be Saudis, and much of bin Laden’s money would come from the kingdom’s prominent citizens.
Another analytical failure was a failure of imagination. Up to that point, the US anti-terror system had dealt with improvised explosive devices. These would either be delivered by suicide bombers, be packaged in objects, or carried by vehicles. In Yemen, Al-Qaeda even used a boat to deliver explosives to the USS Cole’s side. The result was that the whole national security apparatus in the US was geared towards stopping bombings of different types. The country’s security experts could not conceive the idea that people could hijack a plane and ram it into buildings. The problem is that the incredulous nature of the attack continued to baffle intelligence analysts even after some of the details had been confirmed to them in early 2001. It seems there was a willful desire to avoid the matter and ignore it for as long as possible (Dahl, 2013). The powers that be appear to have decided that such an attack was too crazy for anyone to pull off. They allowed their lack of imagination to interfere with the decision-making loop. The result was that the terrorists were not stopped and the nation witnessed its worse terror attack ever. Finally, this inability to comprehend such a plot directly resulted in the US not doing enough to intercept the terror group that carried out the attack. There was a web of laws which made it difficult to go after foreign citizens in friendly countries. However, many of these laws derived their authority from executive orders (Posner, 2009). It would have been possible for the president to act unilaterally and deliver a fatal blow to Al-Qaeda before the group even got to the implementation stages. Instead, the policymakers continued to believe that the danger was overstated, and in the process they allowed the attack to occur.
The system itself was extremely inefficient and many doubt whether there was any political will to go after the terrorists. According to multiple officials, the end of the Cold War had lulled the whole national security apparatus into a sense of security. Policymakers looked at the evidence available to them and decided that they had to cut the intelligence and security budget. The belief was that the homeland was no longer in mortal danger and there was no need for such a massive infrastructure. The decision proved to be fatal for thousands of Americans.
The failure was especially visible in the lack of investment in human intelligence. Before the attack, records show that there was a deliberate move to shift the intelligence community’s focus from human to electronic intelligence. Millions of dollars were siphoned from human intelligence departments and funneled into research labs. The problem, as explained by intelligence officers then, was that electronic surveillance was never effective on its own. The system would break down if the terrorists chose to eschew every method of electronic communication. The shortcomings of the reliance on SIGINT were clear when the hijackers came into the US and lived relatively comfortably.
It is also critical to consider the fact that the political overlords at the time did consider the Central Intelligence Agency and its sister entities anachronisms of a past age. It was especially the case for the CIA’s operations department. Both sides of the political aisle seemed to believe that the days of old school espionage were over (Posner, 2009). It resulted in a stunning lack of investment in human assets. CIA officers say that they would often lack the money to pay their informants in the Middle East. This particular mistake allowed bin Laden to work in relative safety.
The lack of human intelligence assets also affected domestic intelligence gathering. A former top official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation asserts that he detected a lack of political will when it came to counter-terrorism. The lack of internal assets meant that a group of Saudis was able to take flying lessons without the national security apparatus noticing. One of the hijackers even told his instructor that he did not need to know how to land (Posner, 2009). All these red flags were missed because there was no real structure. The failures became apparent on the morning of September 11, 2001.
Summing up, the reality is that the chain of analytical failures reflected a deep erosion of capacity on the part of the American national security apparatus. The analysts on the payroll were evidently not skilled or imaginative enough to comprehend the threat. Additionally, there was a sense that the homeland was safe and America only had to worry about its assets abroad. Intelligence agencies were also largely considered superfluous as the Cold War ended. The reduced political and financial investment directly led to the failures which resulted in the nightmare on 9/11. The records are clear: the great disaster could have been prevented.
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