"a real and growing threat…"

It turns out the FAA types had more info about possible al Qaeda attacks in the months leading up to 9/11. From the Chicago Tribune account:

In the months before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal aviation officials reviewed dozens of intelligence reports that warned about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, according to a previously undisclosed report from the Sept. 11 commission.

Some discussed airline hijackings and suicide operations.

But "intelligence that indicated a real and growing threat leading up to 9/11 did not stimulate significant increases in security procedures," the commission report concluded.

Whole story here.

NY Times account here.

Comments

[Suite]

This is neither meaningless, as the Bushies will say, nor damning as the lefties will say. It is mildly disturbing but needs to be kept in perspective:

"Among other things, the report says top FAA officials received 52 intelligence reports from their security branch that mentioned bin Laden or Al Qaeda from April to Sept. 10, 2001. That represented half of all the intelligence summaries in that time.

Five of the intelligence reports specifically mentioned Al Qaeda's training or ability to conduct hijackings, the report said. Two mentioned suicide operations, although not connected to aviation, the report said."

So 5 of 104 reports mentioned hijackings, and 2 of 104 mentioned suicide attacks, though not in connection of aviation. What sort of things are hinted at in less than 5% of intel reports these days? How much do people think we should be acting on/ignoring these? It seems the most effective way to respond to these reports would have been more racial profiling. Yet that has been impossible to implement even with the towers gone. What would the ACLU have said if current measures (no, I don't think they are great, but just using an example) were implemented prior to 9/11? What would the Reason staff have said? What would people say if significant restrictions were developed based on a few reports?

If tomorrow it was discovered that among 100 recent reports, 5 mentioned rental truck bombings, and another two mentioned using one state as a base of operations and then travelling to the attack state only on the day of the attack, what should be done? Would people accept/decry racial profiling or more invasive background checks to rent trucks? Would they accepted police checkpoints at interstate crossings?

Another thought, let's say some measure was introduced that stopped the 9/11 attacks, would we have heard of it? would we care? and how long would we allow the instituted measures to stay in place before demanding their removal, stating that the threat was probably trumped up in the first place?

[Russ D]

What does securing cockpit doors have to do with racial profiling?

[PintofStout]

Those are some fine points, Suite.

[PintofStout]

If that was all they did Russ, that would be fine. What are the odds of that, though?

[bendover]

Russ,

Securing the cockpit door is all well and good. But in a pre 9/11 world, as soon as a knife was held to the throat of a crewperson or passenger, those doors would have been opened by pilots in a flash.

[Suite]

Russ,

Making the doors more secure may have prevented the events of 9/11, or it may have made them worse. As it stands, no one knows exactly how cockpit entry was gained by the hijackers. It could have been by force, and therefore the weakness of the doors was an issue. It also could have been by coersion (killing an attendant and threatening to kill more if the door wasn't opened), and therefore the Common Strategy taught to each of the flight crew was the problem. We simply don't know. But had the crews been coaxed out of strenghtened cockpits, it is quite possible that the flight 93 passengers never would have made headway in retaking the cabin (which we know they attempted to do by force), and we very well might have been missing a whole swath of our legislative branch. All jokes aside, how much more aggressive would our foreign policy have been then? Keep in mind that replacements would have been voted in by a very scared and angry public, and those sentiments would have been represented in the attitude of those replacements.

While your point about the doors is worth considering, your narrow focus and gotcha attitude are what continue to stifle dialouge. One more thing to consider, if doors had been made more secure, was al Qaeda patient, flexible and capable enough of modifying their efforts?

[rst]

I wonder if these intelligence reports were more or less compelling than reports of WMD in Iraq.

[Russ D]

But had the crews been coaxed out of strenghtened cockpits...

...then the cockpit was no longer secured.

Racial profiling does NOT secure cockpit doors, at best it only redcues the possibility that someone will try to coax their way in. And then when some Pakistani suicide hijacker takes over a plane and crashes it into a building, we'd wonder why we only profiled Arabs. And then when the IRA takes a plane....

And there's still the possibility that a pilot for Saudi Arabia Airlines could, on a flight to LaGuardia, decide he's a martyr and crash his plane. Perhaps we should racially and psychologically profile all the pilots on the planet.

Securing the cockpit wouldn't prevent a crazed mass murderer (as opposed to a sane one?) from trying to kill all the passengers, but as long as the cockpit is secured, the plane can land safely and people on the ground can then deal with the asshole rather than leave open the possibility that some other asshole could take over the controls. I'm still not convinced that in our post-9/11 world that the pilot won't come out of the cockpit in a flash.

[sage]

I thought I read that (most?) commercial airliners had separate air supplies for the pilots and passengers. It would seem easy enough to allow some sort of sleeping gas to enter the cabin and put out the passengers (and hijackers) so the pilots can keep control of the plane.

[mith]

Until September 11th, flight crews were told to do whatever a hijacker wanted, to the best of their abilities. Most of the crews probably got out of their seats of their own fee will because that is what they were told to ALWAYS do.

After September 11th, flight crews were told to fight to the death rather than allow a hijacker to gain control of the aircraft. The secured doors help them maintain control of the cockpit against an actual assault, and I think only an idiot is going to open that door, even if the hijackers start piling bodies outside it.

As to the separate air supplies - general cabin pressurization is all supplied by the same system for both the cabin and the cockpit. However, emergency O2 supplies are actually separate for each seat of the aircraft on most modern airliners, with the crew having O2 bottles in the cockpit and each passenger having their own O2 generator tied to that mask that drops from the ceiling (you have to pull on it to fire a primer that starts the generator working).

[not saying]

And there's still the possibility that a pilot for Saudi Arabia Airlines could, on a flight to LaGuardia, decide he's a martyr and crash his plane.

Remember the Egypt Air crash? First attack averted?

[Ayatollah Usoe]

I guess I see things differently. The 9/11 Commission Report, a big heavy book that was a best seller, apparently could have been bigger. This redacted release never made it to the book, and there is whatever is under the redaction.
(I used a black highlighter in college, now its called redaction.)

We're arguing with with a universe that excludes the most controversial parts.

[Suite]

"We're arguing with with a universe that excludes the most controversial parts."

Yes, and while this is regretable it shouldn't stop all discussion. We make assessments and judgements all of the time off of incomplete info. Decry that lack in the proper venue, but use opportunity to discuss what is know.

Also keep in mind, as I mentioned prior that we also live in a world with varying political restraints on action regardless of info known. Think of the friction we've seen on virtually every action, foreign or domestic, taken AFTER 9/11. Now honestly consider how much greater that friction would have been even if some one had had the foresight to implement it.

[overWhelmed]

there is no guranteed defense against terrorism

profiling dosen't work as you really don't know who the terrorist are, currently their arab, but that could change, to korean(north), or caucasian(now that would really be a problem).

so many problems so few solutions!!!

[Call me snake]

sage: Aren't you talking about Auric Goldfinger's plane, with sleeping gas for the passengers?

I concur with bendover in that 9/11 could not have been prevented short of an announcement by the FAA that the response plan for plane hijackings had been completely revised, and that passengers, crew and pilots must now fight to the death when the threat is revealed.

Impregnable cockpit doors are unnecessary when the principle is to let the hijackers complete the flight in the hope they release the hostages.

The downside to passengers that will fight to the death is that you're prevented from diverting a plane to Havana to draw attention to a good old fashioned radical cause. (and to smoke Bolivars as well)

[a]

"let's say some measure was introduced that stopped the 9/11 attacks, would we have heard of it?"

Yeah, you are right. We never heard of the millenium plot.

[Stevo Darkly]

What's a shame is that the people who stopped the 9/12 attacks can't be given credit. But that has to stay secret until the danger from the 4/1/05 attacks is past.

[Suite]

"Yeah, you are right. We never heard of the millenium plot."

Check again, I posed a question, how is that right? As for the millenium plot, we have heard about it, though not extensively for the average citizen. What of others? There have been 30 mass casualty attacks planned for western Europe since 1998, only one was successful. How many of these is the average European familiar with? What of Americans who are generally poorly informed of what goes on across the pond already? What about the Jordan chemical attack that was to have included to the US consulate? It seems fairly clear that attacks that are stopped don't get nearly the same press. As for knowing about even the ones we do, how widespread is that info amongst most of the US population? How likely would cursory knowledge of failed attacks have been to have convinced the US population that drastic changes were needed?

You seem to wish to avoid answering questions or asking your own, preferring smart ass dismissal. That is your freedom to do here, but it seems that you are useless in informative discussion. I'll grant you one last try, then have nothing more to do with you.

How likely would the average voter in the US have been to be familiar with even the most superficial aspect of the millenium plot had the 9/11 attacks never succeeded?

My answer is unlikely as I recall being the case in the interim between the two event dates. If it had been higher, perhaps the US poulace would have been more demanding of increased security measures. But it would have had to have been much higher since this is barely the case 3 1/2 years post 9/11.

[MikeP]

Suite's opening comments here were most excellent.

I was and have been quite irritated with the haranguing. "Why didn't we do anything about the threat given what we now know we knew before 9/11?"

What we have is one data point. You can't get results from one data point. It could be a real indicator, or it could be an outlier. As others mention, there have been averted attacks, which could serve as other data points. But there have also been a number of false data points, with arrests for dirty bombs and other plots whose prosecutions seem to have disappeared.

Anyway, given only one actual attack on American soil and the attempts by all to draw conclusions from it, I propose the following experiment to gather another data point. Have a dozen bright intelligence experts in a dozen different offices each sit down and plot out an attack on the United States. Then draw one of them out of a hat. Then have an independent body sum up the attack, response, and result.

Then hold hearings in front of the same 9/11 Commission to find out why the attack wasn't forseen or the result mitigated. Why didn't we see the warning signs? What could have been done to prevent it? Who should we fire? Make the hearings and investigation as fully public, as full blown, and as expensive as the actual 9/11 hearings. Publish the conclusions, redacting what one must.

How do these conclusions differ from the actual 9/11 conclusions? What common deductions can be drawn? What special case knowledge will make this particular attack less likely?

Repeat as necessary until you actually have enough data points to really draw appropriately conclusions on national security.

Am I hopeful or just stupid to imagine that intelligence services do this kind of thing all the time -- minus, of course, the public hearings and published conclusions? If not, what the hell do they do all day? That deserves a commission of inquiry!

[Ken]

Offshore air travel security to the Isralis - they seem to have a working system.

[Suite]

Mike,

That's an interesting idea. I think one of the most important findings of the 9/11 commission was that there was a failure not just in intelligence, but in imagination. Though the effort was somewhat mocked, I thought that the US govt asking various authors, moviemakers, etc to try and come up with more attack scenarios was a good one. Trying to explore the edges, rather than just shoring up the already struck middle is important.

Minus the public hearings and some of the real world reprecussions, I think this is already done to some degree both in intel and also in the media and think tanks. The upside is as you stated above. The downside is the flood of info and trying to determine which hypothetical scenarios to act upon. Also, much like failed attacks, hypothetical attacks lack the most important impetus for change: bodies.

[Nobody Important]

The new report said that bin Laden followers might seek to hijack U.S. airliners.

"So what?" demanded McKinney. "Since when don't we know that terrorists might seek to hijack U.S. airliners? It's cold in Alaska, too. Did anybody mention that?"

In another alternate universe where the terrorists are stopped, they're considered The Victims of George W. Bush.

And imagine what would have happened if Bush had invaded a terrorist-sponsoring middle-eastern country to prevent a terrorist attack.

[Ken Layne]

To me, this is the important part:

The Bush administration has blocked the public release of the full, classified version of the report for more than five months, officials said, much to the frustration of former commission members who say it provides a critical understanding of the failures of the civil aviation system.

It's going on four years since 9/11, and every step of the way the Bush White House has shown zero shame in attempting to stop the release of every bit of evidence surrounding the crime.

"We're arguing with a universe that excludes the most controversial parts."

Yep. And those who pick the scab are fired, shuffled away, and damned as terrorist sympathizers, "conspiracy theorists," outright traitors or Democrats. It's quite a production.

[dhex]

its funny how so many people i listen to in real life, regardless of their political bent (bush is god versus bush eats babies) are all peddling their own theories as to why the funny brown people were able to pull this off. some of it is a freakish collection of ideas which revolve around the idea of government infallibility.

in an unrelated note, 102 minutes is a good, if difficult to get through at times, read.