The CIA and/or NSA very likely knew that the 9/11 terrorists were in the US, learning to fly airliners. Not long after 9/11, there were reports that Mossad agents (the "art students", as I recall) had been tailing the 9/11 terrorists. Almost all of whom were Saudis. But I've seen no credible reports that any of them knew what was planned.
> The CIA and/or NSA very likely knew that the 9/11 terrorists were in the US, learning to fly airliners.
Has there ever been an explanation why the hijackers risked conspicuously attending flight schools under the noses of the US authorities, rather than, say, absolutely any other country in the world?
Terrorists tend to be stupid. Honestly. Look at Richard Reid, the shoe bomber. The guy goes to the airplane bathroom to prepare his shoe bomb, then he returns to his seat, covers himself with a blanket, and tries to detonate the bomb by lighting the fuse with matches. People next to him notice this easily and maul him. Plot over. So, ummm, why not just detonate the thing while locked in the bathroom??? The guys in flight school just got lucky for the most part, but you're right that it was a strange decision.
Yeah, I've always thought it was insane that for an operation as huge as 9/11 they'd do something as risky as train in the US itself. Rather than venture into conspiracy land (nothing against conspiracies in general; they're often entertaining and, depending on the subject and degree, are not necessarily invalid), I wondered if there were plausible explanations for it.
I can buy the idea that they either didn't think the possible risks through, or just believed they could get away with it long enough to pull off the attack. And also that they may have thought they could learn more about US aviation policy or protocol in the US than elsewhere.
I was sceptical about it being because there are more flight schools in the US, because AIUI they only acquired limited training anyway, which they could have received anywhere. But whatever competence and training they ended up with, they probably at least intended to get as much as possible, and train in bigger, more appropriate aircraft, so that is possibly a factor too.
When you only have a small explosive, you want to detonate it as close to the wing as possible, as this is the weakest spot on the plane - you're basically hoping for the wing to fall off, or at least sever the connections to the control surfaces. Even with a decent hole in the fuselage, there is a very good chance of landing the plane safely as long as the wings stay on.
To be clear, the wingbox is, by far, the strongest part of a plane, but it's the most devastating if you can compromise it. (And its primary design goal isn't to account for explosive loads coming from the fuse.)
Not only that, but for the plot to work, the hijackers had to start from within the US. Implanting them in the US long before the attacks made it easier for them to reliably get to their target airports the day of the attack.
In a sense, the comment upthread litigates the whole idea of a "sleeper cell."
It's cheaper in the US than pretty much anywhere else, and there are large numbers becoming pilots, so more noise to hide in. It might be cheaper to train is some weird and wonderful corners of the world, but they'd have been far more noticeable.
>Has there ever been an explanation why the hijackers risked conspicuously attending flight schools under the noses of the US authorities, rather than, say, absolutely any other country in the world?
Because there are more flight schools in the US than anywhere else, and if you want to do some flying in US airspace, those are in the best position to teach how it works, what controls there are, how to avoid them, etc.
The NSA also had a tap on the Yemeni safe house where the attackers were calling to coordinate.
The hijackers even stayed in Laurel, Maryland, from which you can literally see Alpha and Bravo.
Yet the 9/11 commission only spent three visits and a paltry amount of time up at Fort Meade and NBP, anecdotally because the commute to the Fort is too long.
So did the NSA know what the attackers were going to do?
I find it very hard to imagine that the NSA and/or CIA would have let the attacks happen, even to protect key assets and methods. Maybe they had compromised some Mossad communication channel. Or maybe they had a double agent. But what would have been worth the risk to DC and NYC?
To an extent, as with all big data systems, massive collection of data has both opportunities and risks. The risk in overcollection (e.g., the NSA type programs) is that you collect so much damn information that you are either behind in analyzing it or flat out never get there [1-2]. Combine that with (as others have noted) the lack of translators and you get what you got [3]. The old maxim* that not all data is information (DIKW) heavily applies here [4]. This whole phenomenon becomes especially problematic when you are spending all that time energy and money largely trying to predict 'black swan' events using what has happened before as what to look for in the future (e.g., the TSA as a whole or the NSA still focusing on cold war languages pre-9/11 [3]).
More likely, they had taps but did not know what they were talking about. It was widely reported that, pre-9/11, Arabic translators were scarce in most Western intelligence services including the US, since their traditional focus were Russian, Eastern-European languages, and Chinese. You just need basic informal codes for most logistic purposes (which would be mostly "I've done this, I've done that" to confirm timings and prepare the next steps, rather than "I will hijack a plane and crash it into NYC" which would have been agreed beforehand) to make it very difficult for people who might not know all the intricacies and slang of regional Arabic varieties.
So the NSA might have known these people were learning to fly and maybe even preparing a hijack, but until 9/11 this was not dramatic -- if and when the hijack happened, they would have been expected to fly to Cuba or something and then dealt with. Pre-9/11, airplane hijacks had become rare since their '80s and '70s heydays, maybe there was some complacency (as in "yeah these guys will never manage it, and even if they do, we'll likely get most passengers back safely anyway, let them play"). Or at least that's what a sharp Occam's razor would suggest.
Old style hijack had become rare because police forces around the world made sure that you couldn't come out a winner, you typically get killed. Hijacker are at a disadvantage: limited resources, stuck in a small space easy to surround.
The fact that the 9/11 highjackers had planned to die as part of the hijack was a game changer.
Exactly. A 9/11 style attack is also a single time event. Now that passengers know the outcome, they simply will not let it happen again. The only possible method would be to turn an existing pilot into a suicide killer.
The reinforced doors they introduced after 9/11 make this strategy particularly good. The passengers can't do anything if the pilot decides that he has a death wish.
An example of such would be the Germanwings Flight 9525 crash from May 2015, where the copilot locked the cockpit door after the pilot left for a bathroom break and then flew into a mountain.
Crashing highjacked planes was a known scenario. In fact, FOX broadcast a fictionalized scenario where a commercial airliner was highjacked and set on a crash course with the WTC about six months before 9/11/01.
Tom Clancy's wrote a fictional book about lone mentally disturbed Japanese pilot flying a plane into the pentagon. I read it that book maybe a few weeks before 9/11. Was shocked that the US intelligence didnt see something like this happening when a fiction author did.
Edit: the author of your link addresses the episode in the comments section, "The Lone Gunmen Pilot Episode", and says that the article you linked was only focused on things "in production" when the attack occurred.
Wow, I had forgotten that series (X-Files spinoff).
Vince Gilligan was an Executive Producer.
The actor playing the father, George Coe, was one of the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players on SNL, then later played Ben Cheviot on "Max Headroom".
I agree that it is extremely unlikely they let it happen. I think if all the documents are ever declassified it will be a case study in the breakdown of communications in a large organization. There was office politics (FBI vs. NSA vs. CIA), no overall coordination, and plain incompetence to name a few things that were wrong.
We see this all the time in large companies now, the difference is that rarely do people die as a consequence. Maybe the NASA Challenger accident is a comparable organizational breakdown.
>I think if all the documents are ever declassified it will be a case study in the breakdown of communications in a large organization.
I have always been curious about this as an organizational phenomenon. What percentage of documents are classified for actual security reasons as opposed to things like embarrassing the country or allies, covering up misconduct or outright illegal conduct, or just as the default reaction. Study would be impossible/impractical even with access, but it sure would be interesting.
> Indeed, some of the C.I.A.’s best information about Al Qaeda came from the F.B.I. In 1998, F.B.I. investigators found an essential clue—a phone number in Yemen that functioned as a virtual switchboard for the terror network. The bombers in East Africa called that number before and after the attacks; so did Osama bin Laden. The number belonged to a jihadi named Ahmed al-Hada. By combing through the records of all the calls made to and from that number, F.B.I. investigators constructed a map of Al Qaeda’s global organization. The phone line was monitored as soon as it was discovered. But the C.I.A., as the primary organization for gathering foreign intelligence, had jurisdiction over conversations on the Hada phone, and did not provide the F.B.I. with the information it was getting about Al Qaeda’s plans.
So was the NSA also monitoring the Hada phone? Or maybe providing technical support for the CIA?
There's a good reason for lack of sharing as both Aldrich Ames (CIA) and Robert Hanssen (FBI) ended up providing much more sensitive information to the adversary than their rank qualified them for.
The agencies seem to be on the cycle of high compartmentalization -> criticism for lack of sharing -> low compartmentalization -> major spy scandal -> high compartmentalization.
Those guys committed treason by sharing with the Soviets. I don't see how that's relevant. The reason for the wall is because they have conflicting mandates.
The natural response of each agency to prevent such massive information losses in the future is to limit the amount of information available, make it accessible only on the need-to-know basis, and introduce bureaucracy into the information retrieval process by keeping the logs and requiring sign-offs.
Well, some of those pages have been leaked by the German Federal Intelligence Agency (BND), because some of the attackers lived in Germany before and it was a priority for them.
Funnily, one of the attackers used to have a small internet cafe in my city before he learned to fly an airplane.
I think we generally know what's in those pages. Seymour Hersh (multi Pulitzer winning journalist who, among other things, uncovered the Mi Lai Atrocities) broke the story that the assassination of Osama Bin Ladin was mainly an attempt by the US to cover up the deep ties between OBL and the Saudi government.
To say that Hersh's story about the OBL Killing is controversial, especially among journalists, would be understating it quite a bit.
The London Review Of Books is not a conventional outlet for Hersh's investigative journalism (he's a regular at The New Yorker, which has one of the more notoriously elaborate fact checking apparatuses in the industry) and not Hersh's first choice for publishing that story.
Normally I would be more skeptical. But the assertions Hersh is making about this is so far beyond the "official" narrative, you can't seriously think someone with Hersh's reputation would just make that up?
Also worth weighing is that another reporter, R J Hillhouse, reported many of the same facts about the bin Laden raid shortly after it happened, to almost no attention[0]. However, she does not believe Hersh plagiarized her[1] (as Politico dubiously claimed, and she refuted), nor does she think that Hersh even had the same sources as her. She even noted that one of the more lurid details (dumping parts of Bin Laden's corpse out of the helicopter over the Hindu Kush mountains) was one she had come across but did not report because she couldn't verify it.
This amounts to two serious, if heterodox, journalists coming to the same story about the Bin Laden raid independently. I'm convinced, personally, but I was already deeply jaded by the many retractions in the official story issued early on regarding the vital intelligence being arrived at by use of torture and mass surveillance, and what they cynically implied about State Department attitudes towards shaping public discourse.
The "report" you're referring to is a blog post, which appears to:
(a) confirm no sources
(b) never have been fact-checked
(c) received no editorial scrutiny
Its author is offended that Hersh didn't give credit for the following claims, which the blogger claims to have broken herself:
* The US cover story of how they found bin Laden was fiction
* OBL was turned in by a walk-in informant, a mid-level ISI officer seeking to claim $25 million under the "Rewards for Justice" program.
* The Pakistani Intelligence Service -- ISI -- was sheltering bin Laden
* Saudi cash was financing the ISI operation keeping bin Laden captive
* The US presented an ultimatum to Pakistan that they would lose US funding if they did not cooperate with a US operation against bin Laden
* Pakistani generals Kiyani and Pasha were involved in the US operation that killed OBL
* Pakistan pulled out its troops from the area of Abottabad to facilitate the American raid
* The Obama administration betrayed the cooperating Pakistani officials
* The Obama administration scrambled to explain the crashed helicopter when their original drone strike cover story collapsed
But if you look carefully at these claims, you'll see that they're not particularly specific (the closest they get to "specific" is "knowing the names of two Pakistani generals who are so well-known they have Wikipedia pages"), have been corroborated nowhere, and, most importantly, are all predictable points in any narrative about Pakistan deliberately sheltering Bin Laden.
I think there's a reason nobody reported on Hillhouse originally.
Sure he can. All he has to do is have too much faith in a source that puts him on the wrong narrative --- that Pakistan is deliberately harboring (and concealing) Osama Bin Laden. The rest of his claims fall into place from that, and they all make sense if that's what Pakistan is doing.
Why is Hersh having to publish some stories at LRB not more of an indictment of the New Yorker (et al) than Hersh? Hasn't the Obama administration been subject to curiously little investigative journalism?
Second: because the implication is that the New Yorker was unwilling to publish a piece that didn't fact-check out, and the London Review of Books was.
Yes, that is the conclusion pushed in the usual organs. But the New Yorker had already published a bin-Laden assassination piece that supported the official narrative. Hersh himself says they (i.e. David Remnick) simply weren't interested in revisiting the story. Hersh further claims that he warned Remnick soon after the bin-Laden raid that the official story was being disputed by his sources and suggested he write a story, which Remnick countered with the suggestion of a blog article. (A blow-off?) If it's true that Hersh personally warned Remnick that the official story was problematic, the New Yorker publishing Nicholas Schmidle's story and passing on Hersh's looks to have less to do with fact-checking and more to do with editorial position. Since the New Yorker didn't want to buy, Hersh shopped the story elsewhere, which is simply how freelancers go about business. (It was actually the Washington Post that allegedly passed on the story because of "sourcing" standards.)
Hersh claims to have sold the story to LRB for the "politics" of it, the meaning of which is uncertain. But as he hopes to have a book published on the "war on terror", it is not out of the question that he selected them to establish rapport. And that he chose them, instead of resorting to them out of some kind of desperation owing to defects in the work itself, seems pretty clear.
The Obama administration is widely claimed by non-partisan journalists and journalist groups as being openly hostile toward the press and has used espionage provisions to prosecute officials deemed to have "leaked" inside information via the types of conversations that would previously have been considered business-as-usual. (Despite opening his presidency with rhetoric about being the most "open" and "transparent" administration in history.) This has resulted in administration staffers & officials being paralyzed and fearful of speaking with the press at all, stymieing journalists' attempts at effectively covering the government and acting as the fourth estate. While it is unfortunate that we cannot quantify whether one administration has experienced more or less scrutiny than others, blithely asserting to the contrary is not a reasonable position in this context.
The most important takeaway is that the sample size on leak prosecutions is very, very low, so happenstance alone can make a President look unusually hostile. Here, it's a combination of happenstance, a shift in media norms, and cases begun under the previous President.
The story seems appealing at first but it has many holes. Saudi royal family wouldn't really care about OBL. The team wouldn't dump his body over a mountain and then also have a cover story that falls apart the moment the body is found. Pakistan is a huge country, the aid is fraction of its gdp so US couldn't really threaten Pakistan. Nor would Pakistan likely host OBL and risk becoming a pariah state if not everything rolled out according to their plans. Pakistanis wouldn't hold him prisoner in an urban center and the exchange wouldn't happen there either.
Hersh did not "uncover" the My Lai massacres. Hersh ran with a tip fron Ridenhour that other reporters had turned down. Hugh Thompson or Ron Ridenhour "uncovered" My Lai.
Serious question but are the contents likely to be anything more than "SA money ended up in AQ hands"? I can't imagine too many bombshells being able to remain classified.
What would you do with them? Surely you can't believe that keeping them secret protects an ally to the expense of America? Surely it's much more likely that keeping them secret protects an ally to the benefit of America.
There is significant differences in what exactly the phrase "to the benefit of America" means. In matters that fall under the purview of the Department of State, that far too often means "to the benefit of American or international corporations", with no regard for either environmental concerns or what is to the economic benefit of the American poor and middle classes.
I agree entirely, but that is somewhat different from the flavour of the other comments on this topic which seem to be suggesting something quite different (unless I am getting a completely wrong impression).
You're asking for an act of faith in murderers, assassins and spies, people who believe that public scrutiny is a nuisance. The whole point of a democracy is that "what benefits America" must be determined by an active conversation amongst the public. The idea that a few individuals can decide what is best for our "national security" is antithetical to any notion of democracy.
I want those pages.