There are nine pages redacted from the 9/11 report, because they were deemed too incendiary against an ally, Saudi Arabia.
I want those pages.
I want those pages.
And yes, those pages might be very interesting.
Funnily, one of the attackers used to have a small internet cafe in my city before he learned to fly an airplane.
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.
Edit in reply: No, they never put the intelligence together. See here for a not-terrible summary: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/01/13/the-al-qaeda-sw...
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?
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.
And maybe the NSA and CIA weren't talking, either.
The fact that the 9/11 highjackers had planned to die as part of the hijack was a game changer.
I find http://911blogger.com/news/2013-05-16/hollywood-and-911-movi... but nothing there about anything broadcast on Fox.
First episode: https://youtu.be/EjbQ-BDh4PU
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.
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".
WTC was an iconic target, for sure.
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]).
[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/nsa-whistleblower-overwhelmed-w...
[2] http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/world/how-the-nsa-trie...
[3] http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/aug/31/lack-of-tran...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_Pyramid
Edit: *fixed typo of maximum to maxim
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 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?
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.
Because of that, they would probably stick out much less doing it here than trying to do it in one of the few EU airline training facilities.
In a sense, the comment upthread litigates the whole idea of a "sleeper cell."
You had organizations that had the signals but couldn't communicate, why is it anymore likely that the terrorists themselves were super geniuses?
It's hard to find good help.
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.
Thanks everyone for the replies.
Anything about the world trade center should have lit up intelligence reports like a christmas tree.
The agencies seem to be on the cycle of high compartmentalization -> criticism for lack of sharing -> low compartmentalization -> major spy scandal -> high compartmentalization.
They definitely knew something: A month before the attacks they gave President Bush a briefing titled: "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_Ladin_Determined_To_Strike...
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-...
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.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...
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.
[0] http://www.thespywhobilledme.com/the_spy_who_billed_me/2015/...
[1] http://www.thespywhobilledme.com/the_spy_who_billed_me/2015/...
(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.
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.
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.
[*] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/05/sy-hersh-bin-la...
[.] http://fpif.org/seymour-hersh-draws-even-criticism-lrb-new-y...
- edit -
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.
[:] https://cpj.org/reports/2013/10/obama-and-the-press-us-leaks...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5701813
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.
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.
America depends on an informed populace in order to guide its representative government.
Feed the population lies and hide secrets, and break democracy.