Hindsight bias

ThinkProgress says the 62% of Americans who believe the government had advance warning of 9/11 are right:

The NY Post’s headline blares: “‘Blame U.S. For 9/11′ Idiots In Majority.” As frequent readers of this site are well aware, ThinkProgress does not condone 9/11 conspiracy theories which allege the attacks were an inside job. [The people in their comment section, on the other hand... - DP] But whether the Bush administration failed to heed warnings of a terrorist strike is not a conspiracy theory — it is a fact.

Here are some bits of information the NY Post may want to read up on:

1) Bush received intel briefing on Aug. 6, 2001 entitled “Bin Laden Determined To Strike In US.” The briefing specifically warned to “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks,” particularly targeted at New York.

2) CIA Director George Tenet briefing Condoleezza Rice and other top administration officials on July 10, 2001 about a specific urgent and looming threat from al Qaeda.

3) An FBI agent in Phoenix sent a memo to FBI headquarters on July 10, 2001, which advised of the “possibility of a coordinated effort” by bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation schools.

The alarming nature of the Scripps poll is not that 62 percent of Americans believe the government ignored warnings of 9/11; it’s that nearly 40 percent still aren’t aware of that fact.

In other words, the government was warned about the possibility of a terror attack, therefore they were warned about this terror attack. Richard Miniter responds:

...To prevent the 9-11 attacks (or any terrorist attack), intelligence officials need to know the target, timing, and type of attack, what counterterrorism researcher Kevin Michael Derksen calls “the three T’s of tactical intelligence.” Without knowing all three elements—when, where, and how—an attack cannot be stopped. If you knew that al Qaeda was going to attack the World Trade Center on September 11, but assumed a truck bomb attack, you would be inspecting cars while the planes crashed overhead.

A State Department intelligence officer once described the analytic side of the spy business this way:

“Imagine your boss… placing a lunch-size brown bag twisted at the top on your desk and asking you to tell him what the contents mean? Dutifully, you untwist the bag and spill the contents on your desk. The contents are some sixty pieces of a puzzle. As you look over the puzzle pieces you immediately notice that about one-third of [them] are blank, and another third appear to have edges that have been cut off. As you look at the pieces that have some part of a picture on them, you sense that this is really a mixture of about four different puzzles. Now keep in mind that you have no boxtop to tell you what the puzzle should look like and you do not know how many pieces are in the puzzle…welcome to the art of terrorism analysis. We rarely see a majority of the pieces of a terrorist threat puzzle. When we do, action is taken.

[...]

The only way that the president could have been warned prior to 9-11 would be if American intelligence had an “asset” among bin Laden’s inner circle in Afghanistan—and it did not.

Stubbornly, some believe that the CIA must have warned the president; essentially they assume that the CIA is omniscient. But as historian David McCullough, speaking in another context, told the Christian Science Monitor, “You can’t ever judge why people did things the way they did in the past unless you take into consideration what they didn’t know. Looking back, we say: They should have known, or listened to him or to her. It’s never that simple.’”

Why does this conspiracy theory linger? Historian Joseph E. Persico argues that it is simply human nature. Persico is an acknowledged expert on the last surprise attack on the American homeland, the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor. He notes that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had some inkling of Japan’s dark designs before the December 7, 1941 attack. Relations between Washington and Tokyo had been souring for years and the U.S. was opposed to Japan’s bloody invasion and occupation of eastern China. So FDR knew that Japan might attack at some point. But there was no intelligence suggesting that Japan would attack at Pearl Harbor or when it would attack or how. Still FDR’s critics and many others continue to suspect that he knew all along and that he allowed Pearl Harbor to happen as a “backdoor to war.”

Bush's actions before and after 9/11 are legitimate targets for criticism, but pronouncements about "foreknowledge" of 9/11, an attack the likes of which the world had never seen, remind me of what people once thought about the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1988, everyone thought such a possibility was ridiculous. In 1993, everyone knew it was inevitable all along.

Damian P.

Update: some readers raise the issue of Bill Clinton's anti-terrorism policies and 9/11. His record is open to criticism just as much as Bush's, but there's also a lot of hindsight bias involved in blaming Clinton for attacks which occurred over eight months after he left office.

Posted by damian at November 27, 2007 01:02 PM