Council of War: Rumsfeld, Powell, Bush and Cheney on September 12, 2001

A few weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon, a top official of the George W. Bush Administration told a closed-door gathering, "Our chickens have come home to roost." The candid submission was more than an attempt to deflect the blame from the present administration. It was a tacit acceptance of the long-term failure of American foreign policy.

It was foreign policy that permitted the fostering of Islamic militant facilities within the US. The aim was to export their ideology in pursuit of strategic objectives. For instance, mosques in New York were allowed in order to help train recruits for the Russo-Afghan war, 1979-89. It was only a matter of time before these terror cells turned on the US.

The errors of diplomacy were compounded by a flat-footed secret service, as much out of sync with post-Cold War realities as handicapped by red tape and turf wars. As Senator Bob Kerry asked in the aftermath of the tragedy, "How is it possible that Al-Qaida could operate for so long inside the United States of America without our detecting it? How's it possible?" He could have been speaking for every American.

The sheer lethargy of security agencies frustrated the individual investigators who were smart enough to see the clues. There were enough early warning signals:
« the Manhattan assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane in 1990 by a group led by Egypt-born El Sayyid Nossair;
« the decision to allow cleric Sheikh Abdel-Rahman, a leading jehadi figure, to emigrate to the US;
« the first WTC bombing in 1993;
« the attacks on US embassies in Africa and USS Cole.

Each event was seen in isolation. Nobody bothered with the big picture.

In The Cell, their recent book, US journalists John Miller, Michael Stone and Chris Mitchell argue investigators had come close to uncovering, at its very infancy, the network that became Al-Qaida, "When the guys from New York office (of the Joint Terrorism Task Force) were trying to hunt down bombing conspiracies halfway around the world, the battle they saw and the one they were asked to fight had become two different things. They tried, but they were unable to make their superiors ... adequately appreciate why."

As far back as 1994, investigators had unravelled an Islamist plot to blow up 12 intercontinental flights almost simultaneously. In addition, the group also planned to hijack and fly a plane into a monument in Washington. The plans came unstuck when the mastermind, Ramzi Youssef-also architect of the 1993 WTC bombing-was arrested in 1995.

Hub of Failure The damaged wing of the Pentagon being rebuilt this summer

"The president knew what? My constituents would like to know the answer." Senator Hillary Clinton

The idea that planes could be hijacked and flown into high-rise buildings had obviously been part of the jehadi bush telegraph. Shortly after the attack on the Twin Towers, it emerged Manila police had alerted the US to such a possibility in New York.

Through the summer of 2001, there were general warnings of an attack on US territory. There were also specific pointers. In mid-July, the Central Intelligence Agency speculated on an Al-Qaida strike at the G-8 summit in Genoa, which Bush was to attend. The White House was told of an Egyptian report that terrorists were conspiring to ram a plane into a US building. On July 10, 2001, Ken Williams, a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent in Phoenix, Arizona, sent his superiors a memo detailing his suspicions about Arab students at a local pilot-training school. He calculated a possible Al-Qaida link. His report got lost in the FBI bureaucracy.

Given this background, it was not surprising the FBI made a mess of its strongest lead, the Zacarias Moussaoui case. There were 19 hijackers on September 11; Moussaoui was allegedly meant to be the 20th. On August 16 this French citizen busy at a flying school in Minneapolis was arrested. Paris passed on a thick folder outlining his radical Islam connections. A week or so before 9/11, an FBI agent working on Moussaoui wrote a report on how the man could, in theory, fly a plane into the WTC.

The feedback on Moussaoui didn't reach FBI headquarters. It was a chronicle foretold. In July 2000, a Congressional commission had indicted the FBI for failure to communicate with itself. Information collected in field offices often never made it to headquarters.

Admittedly, it is easy to be wise after the event. Even if the FBI had acted on leads such as the ones above, it may not have prevented 9/11. The conspiracy was as audacious as it was intricate. Nevertheless, America can't forgive itself its complacency.

-with bureau reports