WHAT THE FBI SHOULD HAVE KNOWN: Lots of readers have emailed in response to my earlier post (it’s neck-and-neck with the one on wrenches!), taking both sides. Here are some samples. Reader Phillipe Richard writes:

Another reason it should have occurred to somebody:

The FBI was concerned because Middle Eastern men were training in flight schools. So obviously they were concerned about planes being hijacked? Does it take flight training to hijack a plane? No. You get the pilot to fly where you want to go. That’s a traditional hijacking, as Ari Fleischer puts it. So why would you need pilot training? Because you’re planning to kill the pilot. Why?Because you want the plane to go somewhere no pilot, even with a gun to his head, even when you threaten to blow up the plane, would go. And you don’t need pilot training to crash a plane just anywhere, just a hand. You might need to crash it into a specific target.

The fact that this went all the way up to the President suggests that somebody was awfully worried. I really fail to understand how nobody along the way could have guessed. Especially when someone all the way at the bottom did.

Howard Owens adds:

Glenn, did you ever watch the first episode of “The Lone Gunmen,” the X-Files spinoff.

It will probably never air again.

It was about the Lone Gunmen foiling a plot to hijack a plane and fly it into the WTC. In this episode, it happened at night and the hijackers were using a computer, but it was the first thing I thought of on Sept. 11.

Though personally, I’m willing to cut the FBI a little slack. The mistake was in not having a centralized anti-terrorism squad that could have put the pieces together.

Yeah, there’s something to that. What I find upsetting — and, in a way, insulting, — is the notion that the 9/11 attacks were utterly beyond imagination. Obviously, they weren’t. David Hecht makes the following points:

1. The intelligence business is composed of two major parts: assessing the
adversary’s capabilities, and assessing his intentions. Certainly, it is possible that our intelligence services realized that a hijacker had the capability to fly an airliner into a soft target: as you point out, anyone who had read Tom Clancy’s “Debt of Honor” could not but have been aware of the possibility. The problem comes in assessing intentions: WHY would anyone do such a thing? You will note that, even in the Clancy scenario, the person who does this is a lone actor, and he succeeds _despite the fact that the US is already in a shooting war_! Given that Mr. Clancy’s intel people are undoubtedly smarter and more imaginative than the ones in Real Life, what does this say about the difficulty of determining that this could be a threat?

2. Even within the framework of adversary capabilities, I do not have any doubt but that, on any given day, there are multiple potential threat indications and warnings. This has been rendered far more problematic in a post-Cold War environment where the threat axis can be virtually anywhere, rather than being limited to a few principal sources. It seems likely that, on any given day, the threat estimates emanating from our intel community must rank the threat of a 9/11 type incident as low: especially without
collateral indications and warnings (e.g., that such an effort was part of a decapitating strike complementary to other military action).

3. Let us also not forget that the threats, in this case, came from people who lived and worked in the U.S. (although they were foreign nationals). Given the hypersensitive civil-rights environment that we lived in prior to 9/11, what are the odds of our finding out what was going on and assessing it correctly? The CIA is forbidden by statute from domestic surveillance: the FBI’s counter-terrorism units have been starved for funds that have been used to feed the Drug War instead. The other intel agencies are primarily
concerned with military threats of a more traditional type and might not have recognized indications and warnings pertinent to acts of the 9/11 type even if they had received them.

Kierkegaard famously said that “Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.” I think we do ourselves an injustice when we condemn intelligence “failures” until all the facts are in.

Hmm. Well, there’s something to this — but I’d feel better about adopting a “wait until all the facts are in” approach if I didn’t have the strong impression that the past few months have been an orgy of bureaucratic ass-covering that will make it hard for the facts to come in. I have no confidence, at this point, that the intelligence system is being given the shakeup it needs to do the job it faces. I’d very much like to be wrong in this, and it’s possible that behind the wall of secrecy everything is being done right. It’s also possible that we have the same “top men” working on this as were featured at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. And I’m sorry to say that I know which way to bet.

UPDATE: Reader Marty Busse writes: “There was also the attempt, in December of 1994, by members of the Algerian Armed Islamic group, to crash a jetliner into the Eiffel Tower.” Also, check out the comments section after this post of Charles Johnson’s, particularly the post signed “Enough” about Cynthia McKinney-style conspiracy theorists.