Was it a failure of intelligence? Or did the terrorists who attacked the Pentagon and World Trade Center succeed because they did something that, until Sept. 11, was unthinkable?
Both.
The senior military officer nominated to lead President Bush’s war against terrorism said the attacks took place as the Pentagon was in the midst of a sweeping review to reorganize how the nation collects and distributes intelligence.
“A major review of our intel apparatus is going on right now,” Air Force Gen. Richard Myers told the Senate Armed Services Committee just 52 hours after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Myers, deputy chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has been nominated to replace Army Gen. Henry Shelton, who is due to retire as chairman Sept. 30.
“It goes without saying that our intelligence operations are structured as they were during the Cold War,” Myers said in his confirmation hearing. “My guess is they’ll have substantial changes in the way [the assets are] organized and for sure equipped to deal with the 21st century.”
The United States spends, by some estimates, $30 billion a year to gather intelligence on potential enemies. Yet the suicide hijackers apparently studied U.S weaknesses for more than a year before striking.
For months, Pentagon officials have said they have ambitious plans for updating intelligence operations and speeding information to everyone in the government who needs it.
No clues
Myers, in his hearing, said he was aware of no warnings to the Pentagon from other federal agencies about aircraft being hijacked and aimed at public buildings.
Lawmakers agreed with senior military leaders that more must be done to modernize the ways the government gathers intelligence. “We need to look at the intelligence and counterintelligence operations of this country and determine soon whether we could enhance the capability, which is obviously insufficient,” said Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa.
However, others said the surprise attack would have been difficult for any expert to predict.
Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., is the former chairman of the emerging threats panel on the Senate Armed Services Committee. In that role, he acted as something of a gadfly, urging the Defense Department to pay more attention to unconventional threats and the type of conflict that bears the abstract label of “asymmetrical warfare.”
Yet the attack also caught Roberts by surprise.
“If you had asked me what we would have expected, I don’t think any of us would have come up with a Top 10 [list] saying terrorists would hijack four airplanes, kill the crews and endanger and kill the passengers, then attack American icon infrastructures,” he said.
Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga., another Senate Armed Services Committee member, said he had reached some “awfully simple” conclusions after the attack.
America needs to boost its intelligence capabilities and counterterrorism assets — and the U.S. military “needs to be a part of this,” he said.
“It is amazing that we spend well over $300 billion a year on defense, and yet Tuesday we seemed very much defenseless,” Cleland said.
Myers said that in the aftermath of the attacks, the United States must take a deep look at the role its military forces should play in domestic terror attacks.
What is the military’s role?
A legal tradition of more than 200 years favors using civilian police in domestic emergencies, with federal troops performing secondary and supporting roles.
National leaders must decide “what is our role, what is our mission,” Myers said. “That’s our homeland defense issue.”
In the aftermath of the bombings, Myers said he also was struck by the importance of communications during such an emergency.
“Another issue that came to my mind is the absolute essential nature of our communications,” testified Myers, who spent the initial hours following the attack inside the Pentagon’s command post.
“They worked fine in this crisis,” he said of the nation’s military and civilian communications. “But you could envision other scenarios, other asymmetric attacks on the United States, where maybe our communications wouldn’t work so well.”
The Pentagon has plans to “spend a lot of money for secure, survivable communications,” he said. But, he added, there are “funding problems right now.”
Barbary Coast precedent
The Sept. 11 attacks are causing national and world leaders to stretch their thinking in many new directions as they contemplate how to respond to attacks once inconceivable.
Analysts have questioned whether a war against terrorists can succeed, or whether such a war — directed against a group instead of a country — would even be legal.
“There is precedent to do such action,” said Rep. Peter Deutsch, D-Fla. In the early 1800s, he noted, the United States went to war against the Barbary pirates of North Africa. The U.S. Marines in 1805 stormed a Barbary stronghold in what is now Libya. The reference in the Marine Corps Hymn to “the shores of Tripoli” commemorates that assault.
“The Barbary pirates were not a country,” Deutsch said. “They were terrorists in their day, and this Congress — the same body we serve in today — declared war on the Barbary pirates.”
