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April 12, 2004

The Memo

So now the full text (almost) of the 6 August PDB is available, and the reactions are pretty much what one could expect: the Left says this proves that Bush knew 9/11 was coming and should have done more to prevent it, while the Right says that this memo doesn't contain actionable intelligence and it proves Richard Ben-Veniste is just a partisan hack.

I'm not sure that it really proves much of anything, though. There is certainly a great deal of historical information in the memo, but there is also the news that the FBI was conducting "approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Ladin-related," not to mention the "patterns of suspicious activity...consistent with preparations for hijackings." That is somewhat damning, but the flip side of it is that I'm not sure what else the President would be expected to do without some more background information.

I would guess that the average listener hears that there are 70 investigations going on and asks, why didn't we go to a fuller alert? But we're missing a key piece of data: how many investigations did the FBI have working at any one time normally? Was this a spike, or was this average? If the FBI normally had 40-60 al Qaeda-related investigations going on prior to 9/11, this number wouldn't sound too far out of the ordinary. If the norm was closer to 10-30, however, this was a clear spike that might have warranted further attention. Without that information, it's hard to draw an accurate conclusion about the number.

If it was a spike, though, I think this does suggest that the President might have reacted inappropriately. (Note that it's obvious in hindsight he didn't do enough, but I'm looking to judge based on what we knew then, not what we know now.) Again, assuming this was an unusually high number, you're looking at increased terrorist chatter, increased activity within the United States, and possible preparations for a hijacking. You've already got the FBI and CIA looking hard at al Qaeda here and abroad, but wouldn't it make sense to at least alert the FAA that the risk of hijackings was significantly higher than usual?

On the other hand, that probably still wouldn't have stopped the plot. The hijackers did not carry anything illegal onto the aircraft that we're aware of, and there would have been no reason not to treat these hijackings as no different as any others before 9/11, which would have meant cooperating with the hijackers and allowing them (inadvertently) to still plow the aircraft into the WTC and Pentagon.

So while I can see some reason to believe that the President did not act forcefully enough on the information provided in this PDB, I'm not sure that doing so would have altered the outcome of 9/11 at all. Prior to September 11 we simply had the wrong mindset for fighting terrorism: the Bush administration, the Clinton administration, the first Bush administration, the Reagan administration, the Carter administration. They all treated terrorism as a law enforcement issue rather than a war, and they all bear some responsibility for allowing the 9/11 to occur. President Bush gets a little bonus responsibility because he was in office; it may not be fair, but that's how the system works. So history should probably assign him a few minus points for not doing more to prevent the attacks.

But I'm still more interested in the question of what he did afterwards. I've seen nothing to convince me that a President Gore or a President Kerry would have acted significantly differently prior to the attacks, so I see little value in playing the blame game without a clear smoking gun indicating someone missed something that should have been obvious at the time. And this memo just doesn't seem to meet that bill.