Tag: 9/11 Terrorist Attack

U.S. Pilots on Potential 9/11 Suicide Mission?

Both the BBC and ABC News reported last week that in the efforts to intercept and possibly shoot down United Airlines Flight 93, the closest jets to that plane were two F-16s conducting a training mission near Detroit.

They were dispatched to intercept UA93, but there was one major problem — both planes were unarmed. ABC quotes U.S Army Brig. Gen. W. Montague Winfield as saying that the two planes had orders to get as close to the UA93 and try to force it to land.

And if that didn’t work? The pilots likely would have been ordered to fly their jets into the hijacked plane.

Sources:

Any Means Necessary: Fighter Jet Pilots Faced Possible Suicide Mission On Sept. 11. Martha Raddatz, August 30, 2002.

US considered ‘suicide jet missions’. The BBC, August 29, 2002.

Where was the FBI on 9/11? Undercover Staking out a Prostitution Ring

The Libertarian Party put out a press release a few weeks ago with an interesting claim about the FBI’s pre- and post- 9/11 priorities,

In an unusual federal prostitution case that has set New Orleans abuzz, the FBI is prosecuting a mother-daughter team who ran a bordello out of a white-columned, Victorian mansion in the French Quarter. …

The agency revealed last week that an FBI undercover team had eavesdropped on more than 5,000 phone calls to the brothel over the past year, and as a result it has indicted the two women and 12 prostitutes on conspiracy and racketeering charges. The most shocking bit of information to emerge: On September 11, the day terrorists commandeered four airliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, FBI agents were conducting an “investigation” by eavesdropping as hookers arranged sexual liaisons, according to the Washington Post. Even worse, agents continued monitoring the brothel after the 9/11 attacks, Dasbach noted.

Just a classic example of who the distinction between state and federal crimes has almost disappeared. I’m assuming here that the FBI used the fact that money used in this criminal venture crossed state lines, but surely even without the 9/11 attacks the FBI had better things to do than protect some ex-football star from paying $300 an hour to get laid.

Orin Judd on the Damned If They Do, Damned If They Don’t FBI

The other day I complained that the second-guessing of the FBI’s decisions prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks was somewhat unfair because of the mixed messages that the FBI receives from the press and American public. Orin Judd digs up the sort of thing I was talking about by examining a couple of columns by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

In a November 2001 column, after an attack that killed a few thousand people, Dowd warned the public to be skeptical of Ashcroft’s edicts,

But even as we cut the guy some slack, we have to be really skeptical about his assertions of power. It was telling that the first resistance to his edict to interview 5,000 Middle Eastern men came from police chiefs objecting to racial profiling. We’re trying to trust someone whose instincts once did not inspire universal trust to rethink the way civil liberties will be treated for a generation.

But then, this weekend, Dowd had this to say about the Coleen Rowley memo (emphasis added),

Now we know the truth: The 9/11 terrorists could have been stopped, if everyone in the F.B.I. had been as hard-working and quick-witted as Special Agent Rowley. Or if the law enforcement agencies had not been so inept, obstructionist, arrogant, antiquated, bloated and turf-conscious — and timid about racial profiling. As The Economist notes, “There is a big difference between policemen picking on speeding black drivers and spies targeting Arabs who might harbor plans to set off nuclear bombs.”

Huh? If the FBI had acted on that Phoenix agent’s memo and began interviewing all Arab immigrants taking flight training, does anybody really think the New York Times and Maureen Dowd would have done anything but scream to the heavens about the evils of racial profiling?

The reaction of civil libertarians about the recent revelations has been very disappointing. Such people commonly throw around Ben Franklin’s adage that “Those that would sacrifice their freedom for safety will find they inherit neither,” and yet the second a few terrorists manage to exploit surveillance holes to carry off a major terrorist attack, suddenly everybody’s running around wondering why the FBI wasn’t doing more intensive monitoring and racial profiling. (And, of course, then they turn around and freak out when Ashcroft says the FBI can do a Google search.)

Personally, I think people like Dowd are vastly overestimating the odds that the FBI would have been able to prevent 9/11 or some version of it. Even if the FBI searches Zacarias Moussaoui’s computer and devotes the necessary agents to search flight schools, would they have been able to stop the 9/11 plot? I doubt it, and even if they had, it is simply impossible to protect an open society such as ours from this sort of terrorist attack. Resources would be better devoted to finding and killing terrorists abroad as well as cutting off the lifeblood of money and supplies that the terrorists need (which, at the moment, still is too politically touchy to do since it would mean isolating a number of states which are officially U.S. allies).

Colleen Rowley’s “Bombshell Memo”

Time magazine has appropriately called FBI counsel Colleen Rowley’s memo to FBI director Robert Mueller “The Bombshell Memo”.

The most disturbing thing about the memo has to be that the higher ups that Rowley dealt with in the FBI were so dismissive of the Minneapolis field office’s views of the risk posed by Zacarias Moussaoui, that this continued into the post-9/11 period. In her memo, Rowley writes,

Just minutes after I saw the first news of the World Trade Center attack(s), I was standing outside the office of Minneapolis ASAC M. Chris Briesse waiting for him to finish with a phone call, when he received a call on another line from this S[upervisory] S[pecial] A[gent]. Since I figured I knew what the call may be about and wanted to ask, in light of the unfolding events and the apparent urgency of the situation, if we should now immediately attempt to obtain a criminal search warrant for Moussaoui’s laptop and personal property, I took the call. I said something to the effect that, in light of what had just happened in New York, it would have to be the “hugest coincidence” at this point if Moussaoui was not involved with the terrorists. The SSA stated something to the effect that I had used the right term, “coincidence” and that this was probably all just a coincidence and we were to do nothing in Minneapolis until we got their (HQ’s) permission because we might “screw up” something else going on elsewhere in the country.

This from the same SSA that had previously dismissed French intelligence information about Moussaoui’s terrorist connections as worthless, and, according to Rowley, had acted to sabotage efforts to obtain a search warrant for Moussaoui’s laptop.

Why would an FBI agent be this obtuse? Rowe cites disincentives within the Bureau to take risks, but ultimately those disincentives come back to the schizophrenic views that the American public has of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.

You can see this depicted in films where the two popular genres of police-oriented movies are alternatively a) the super cop who kicks ass, saves the day, and rarely considers the constitutional rights of suspects and b) the corrupt cop who usually does all of the above but is condemned for it. It is as if Americans do not realize that the cops from Lethal Weapon and Training Day are almost identical (though, for some reason, the Lethal Weapon cops are cheered when they step outside the limits of the law while clearly audiences are not meant to cheer for Denzel Washington’s corrupt narcotics officer).

Within the FBI, this sort of dichotomy seems to have induced bureaucratic paralysis. On the one hand, the American public wants the FBI to catch the bad guys no matter what. On the other hand, when the risk taking leads to screw ups like Waco, Ruby Ridge or COINTELPRO, we are suddenly shocked that the FBI would so routinely sidestep constitutional protections.

In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. Congress quickly passed and the President signed the Patriot Act. That act was decried by many civil libertarians, pundits and not a few politicians — many of whom are now wondering why the FBI did not search Moussauoi’s laptop sooner.

Similarly, on the one hand the political climate dictates that even in the post-9/11 era, airports cannot target Arab men for special treatment. On the other hand, much of the debate over a memo authored by an FBI agent in Phoenix center around why the FBI did not conduct a nationwide investigation of Arab men at flight training schools.

Is it really that surprising in this sort of environment that an FBI bureaucrat would decide to take a safe, easy choice rather than risk making national headlines?

Rebuilding the WTC: The Liberty Square Plan

As I said on Sept. 12, the best revenge for the 9/11 attacks (aside from eliminating the Taliban and killing Osama bin Laden) would be to rebuild the World Trade Center. The best proposal I’ve seen so far for doing this is the Liberty Square Plan which would have as its cornerstone the tallest building in the world and a very elegant memorial in a building plan that is straight out of some Ayn Rand architectural porn fantasy.

The skyline just reeks of one big “F— You” to nutbag Muslim terrorists. I say build it just to show off that timeless American decadence that bin Laden and others seem to detest so much about America.