Failure and Crime Are Not the Same: 9/11's Limited Hangouts
by Jamey Hecht, PhD (Special to From The Wilderness)
© Copyright 2003, From The Wilderness Publications, www.copvcia.com. All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted, distributed or posted on an Internet web site for non-profit purposes only.
November 22, 2003 1500 PDT (FTW) -- Gerald Posner's new book is called Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11. This is the Posner who won fame in 1993 when he became the foremost advocate of the official story of the Kennedy Assassination. Case Closed claimed to prove that the 35th President of the United States was murdered (for no particular reason) by a lone nut. The very methodology of that book - quite apart from its conclusions - has been discredited by the fact-checking research of scholar after scholar.[1] His footnotes often lead nowhere, or direct the reader to sources whose pages say the opposite of what Posner attributes to them. But the book sold well. Like Senator Arlen Specter's recent memoir A Passion For Truth, it reassured people who were in the market for reassurance. With that success on his resume, Posner continues to practice his chosen vocation of making himself useful to those who drive the gravy train.
So before we take up this question of "why America slept," let's dwell for a moment on "failure," the mighty, little word that has done so much dutiful service in American newspapers. Just as it was ten years ago, it's the key word of Posner's explanatory paradigm.[2] Oswald did the shooting; Oswald got lucky; Dallas was a failure of security. When Secret Service agents drank themselves into a stupor until 3 a.m. the night before the Dallas motorcade; when they let open windows go unwatched all over the Plaza; when they permitted the relatively safe motorcade route to be changed to an absolutely dangerous one; when Emory Roberts ordered agent Rybka off his post on the President's limousine at Love Field; when agent Kellerman turned around in the front seat and passively watched the President, already wounded in the throat and the back, sit upright until his head exploded; and when agent Greer slowed the limousine down to a stop until the fatal shot was over - in short, when the most highly-trained professional executive protection unit in the world suffered a total collapse of the standard operating procedures which they had followed to the letter on every previous stop along the Texas trip - all of that was a failure. It's a damn shame, you see. A sorry episode of darned incompetence; spilt milk.[3]
Posner's title Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11 is intended to echo a youthful work of John Kennedy who, with a great deal of help, wrote a short study of the British appeasement of Hitler in the Chamberlain period. That comparison would be offensive if it were original with Posner, but Gary Hart made it (in quite a different spirit) on December 13, 2001 in his keynote speech at the National Academies.[4] Hart attributed the national security aspect of 9/11 to America's loss of focus in the wake of the Cold War's end:
(snip)
The American side of 9/11 (the suppression of warnings, the sabotage of investigative action, the stand-down, the insider trading, the Patriot Act, the pre-planning of the Afghan and Gulf II wars, the cover-up) was surely not built years in advance as a coherent and integrated plot using Al Qaida as assets. It was not hatched in some CIA basement. No, it was built the old-fashioned way, out of the accumulated toxic waste generated from preceding American adventures. This time around, these included the Carter - Reagan Afghan War against the USSR that produced Al Qaida; the Bush crime family and their Mahfouz / bin Laden ties; the matrix of oil and financial interests that Cheney, Rice, and Bush Sr. represent; the Clinton administration's systematic and relentless protection of the Taliban and refusals to capture Osama bin Laden; the abortive pipeline negotiations with the Taliban (represented by Richard Helms' niece); and the hidden alliance with Pakistani Intelligence (ISI). In other words, what led up to 9/11 was the systemic and ongoing deep politics of guns, oil, drugs, and war.[13]
Here in the "Homeland," what flowed from 9/11 is the newly expanded American infrastructure of fiscally disastrous militarism and unconstitutional domestic repression. Every major budgetary and policy consequence of the attacks seems like the fulfilled dream of one or another megalomaniac. For instance, I think of the Patriot Act as John Ashcroft's sweet slice of the post-9/11 pie. The Central Intelligence Agency got billions of dollars and the key to the statutory "shackles" of the Church Committee - and the Constitution - that had bound its hands. Rumsfeld's Defense Department and its arms merchants got an ocean of new money.[14] Bush got some respect and a mandate. Cheney got his reconstruction contracts. In your mind's eye you can see them all, at some point in the late 1990's, sitting in a circle with a copy of Brzezinski open on the table.[15] But some of this can't be proven yet, and almost none of it can be officially acknowledged. So Posner's country needs him again.
(snip)
David Corn, Gerald Posner, and their ilk are making a relatively bold gesture of authentic journalism when they deplore "intelligence failure," so long as we recall that a popsicle is relatively hot compared to the planet Neptune. If that sounds far out, remember the amazingly hubristic testimony of DCI George J. Tenet before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee Hearing on National Security Threats to the United States on February 6, 2002:
Whatever shortcomings we may have, we owe it to the country to look at ourselves honestly and programmatically. But when people use the word "failure"-"failure" means no focus, no attention, no discipline-and those were not present in what either we or the FBI did here and around the world. And we will continue to work at it. But when the information or the secret isn't available, you need to make sure your backside is protected. You need to make sure there is a security regime in place that gives you the prospect of succeeding-and that's what we all need to work on together.
See? No failure. So it's relatively bold, intrepid journalism to insist that there was one.
Although it's happening far too slowly, more and more members of the military and the intelligence services are emerging as critics of the Bush administration. In a June 3, 2002 entry on Miami Herald.com, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern wrote:
According to The Wall Street Journal, the FBI did not tell the White House about Moussaoui until after Sept. 11.
But it is a safe bet that the CIA's Tenet did. Even before learning about Moussaoui, Tenet's President's Daily Brief of Aug. 6 bore the title 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.' When analysts working in Tenet's Counterterrorist Center were warned about Moussaoui a few weeks before Sept. 11, it is inconceivable that they would not have told Tenet. He is, by law, 'the principal advisor to the president for intelligence matters related to national security,' and is entitled to 'all intelligence related to the national security, which is collected by any department, agency or other entity of the United States.'
Tenet's people learned about Moussaoui in a back-door message from the FBI Field Office in Minneapolis enlisting the CIA's help in obtaining information on Moussaoui from French intelligence. The French promptly pointed out Moussaoui's affiliations with radical fundamentalist groups and Osama bin Laden. (The French service had been keeping close tabs on the likes of Moussaoui, having foiled a plan by Algerian terrorists to crash an airplane into the Eiffel Tower in 1994.)[29]
This was not news to anybody who had read the Rowley Memo, but it really was newsworthy, because it came from someone closely associated with the Agency. And McGovern has been generous with his political capital on more recent occasions; he spoke at the 9/11/03 second anniversary events in New York, and though he concentrated his fire on the Neocons' Iraq fiasco, the event at which he spoke (the panel, the agenda, the literature in the lobby, the subjects of the other talks, even the date of the event) was entirely focused on 9/11.[30] Even if Mr. McGovern had adjusted his tie and quietly recited the alphabet, there would still be heavy symbolism in the sight of an ex-CIA analyst seated on a dias with Mike Ruppert, John Judge, Kyle Hence, and Cynthia McKinney.[31] The sight of McGovern on the stage was more significant than anything he was at liberty to say.
(snip)
In a recent (August 13, 2003) posting on his Internet blog, Gary Hart poignantly wondered aloud once more:
Since most of the Democratic Congressional candidates for president voted for the Iraq war, I guess no one will ask the obvious question: How many of our fellow Americans could we have helped with the $200 to $400 billion Iraq will cost us? How much better a country could we have been? Most importantly, what is it about the Iraqi people that makes them so much more deserving of help than poor Americans? Why are conservatives eager to rebuild Iraq and not to rebuild America? This is not an isolationist point of view. This is not a "liberal" point of view. This is a common sense point of view. I sure would like to hear Robert Kennedy on this issue.[35]
The title of the posting was "Where's Bobby?" It's one of those agonizing rhetorical questions, like "Where was the Air Force?"; you know the answer (he's under the hill at Arlington; it was on stand-down in the hangars), but it brings up other more terrible questions which, like the Gorgons of Ancient Greek poetry,[36] can supposedly turn anyone to stone who looks directly at them. Can't they?
Jamey Hecht, Ph.D., a resident of New York City, received his doctorate from Brandeis University in English and American literature. He is the author of two books and numerous articles. He has previously contributed to Counterpunch and been an open critic of 9/11 reporting by The Nation. Endnotes:
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