A Chilling Incident During the Period When 'The System Was Blinking Red'

The American people---and in fact, people all over the world---owe a great debt of gratitude to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the 9/11 Commission) and its staff. The report they produced presents in copious, almost novel-like detail, how the US fell prey to the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Chapter 8, "The System Was Blinking Red," derives its title from the testimony presented by former CIA director George Tenet to the commission. He was describing the "crescendo" (the word used by former National Counterterrorism Coordinator for the National Security Council William Clarke) of intelligence flooding the US Government in the summer of 2001, indicating that a major set or major single terrorist assault by al Qaeda was imminent.

Yet, to use a trite phrase, nobody was "connecting the dots." Few believed that an attack would take place domestically. Those who suggested that a breach of airport security could happen were dismissed as chicken littles.

In a book filled with chilling vignettes---underscoring everything from the implacable hatred that al Qaeda has for the US to missed opportunities to thwart the September 11 hijackings---nothing I've read in this report yet is more chilling than a conversation that happened just weeks before September 11. It involved a Minneapolis FBI supervisor privy to the investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui, an al Qeda operative who had dumped a ton of cash to learn how to fly 747s, and an individual at FBI headquarters. Says the report:

There was substantial disagreement between Minneapolis agents and FBI headquarters as to what Moussaoui was planning to do. In one conversation between a Minneapolis supervisor and a headquarters agent, the latter complained that Minneapolis' FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] request was couched in a manner intended to get people "spun up." The supervisor replied that was precisely his intent. He said he was "trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center." The headquarters agent replied that this was not going to happen and that they did not know if Moussaoui was a terrorist.

Chilling! Almost as chilling as the response of 9-11 commissioner Jamie Gorelick during her joint appearance with three other commissioners on this past Friday's edition of Hardball with Chris Matthews. Matthews asked, reasonably enough, whether in their months of residence in the US, the September 11 hijackers had developed any friendships with Americans or any sympathy for people here. He wondered how people could be so inured to the humanity of those around them that, like mindless automatons, they boarded jetliners and killed thousands of people of every ethnic and religious background on the earth.

Gorelick responded that al Qaeda and its sympathizers have totally "objectified" Americans, regarding all Americans---even those who are Muslims, apparently---as being "sub-human." I'll have more to say about the implications of this statement in a later post.