Lifting the Veil

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Lifting the Veil
by James Hall, Associate Editor

May 22, 2002

"Leaning Left"

James Hall ""An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." - Proverb

Forget the politics for a minute--the charges and countercharges--enough was known before 9/11 to stop the hijackers cold. The World Trade Centers could still be standing today, the Pentagon sitting unmarked. Three thousand dead could still be alive and in the arms of their families. The fault lies with no one person, no one organization, but with our government's unwillingness to tell us everything for fear of alarming us. This must change, if we are to prevent future attacks.

There's plenty of blame to spread around if it's a blame game we want--a bureaucratic FBI (seal, right) that refused to pass up the chain the shrewd guesses of its field agents; a Justice Department more concerned with getting a conviction on one terrorist than catching the rest; a CIA that seemed more concerned with quantity of information than its quality; an FAA that cried "wolf" on hijacking too many times; airline companies that ignored the cry; and a White House obsessed with secrecy that preferred to bury the whole mess rather than worry about its political fallout.

We can even go back and play the historical blame game. Why didn't Bill Clinton go after Osama bin Laden in the mid-nineties, when he became implicated in a series of terror attacks overseas? Why didn't George Herbert Walker Bush and Ronald Reagan realize that it was a double-edged sword training and equipping fanatics like bin Laden to fight the Soviet Union, or realize that those same fanatics might turn against us when Bush stationed US troops in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War?

These are fruitless questions. Let's focus instead on preventing future attacks by keeping Americans informed in the future, even if the threat seems vague. Let our own citizens judge their risk, let them be the eyes and ears that ferret out the terrorists before they can act.

This week in Orlando, we had a chance to see this openness work when our local sheriff informed us all that a terrorist threat had been made to tamper with our water supply. The information, passed from the FBI to local authorities, did not panic the populace. The water was tested, water plants were secured and guarded, and the people went about their lives knowing of the threat and knowing what to do if they fell ill or saw someone trying to sneak into a water plant or substation.

Contrast that kind of openness to the hidden reports of potential al-Qaeda hijackings before 9/11 or to the largely unreported plans of al-Qaeda terrorist Ramsey Yusef to seize airliners and use them to destroy American landmarks. Had these warnings and plans been publicized and openly discussed by all Americans, someone might have been alerted to the behavior of the 19 hijackers on 9/11, or the deviation of the hijacked planes from their courses. A pilot or stewardess or baggage checker might have put two and two together and stopped one or more of these planes from being taken over.

If the FBI had released the concerns of its field agents, flight school operators around the country might have reported the names of students who simply wanted to learn to fly a plane, not to land it or take off, and the FBI would have had more names to work with, and some of those 9/11 hijackers might have been pulled aside when they entered the country or bought a ticket.

Why sequester information in a bureaucracy when there are 300 million pairs of eyes, 300 million sets of ears in this country? Every week sees criminals arrested when their names and pictures are displayed on the popular television show, "America's Most Wanted." This program shows the power of information shared and a people alerted to danger.

If our law enforcement officials hid the real extent of crime from us, more of us would fall victim to it. Instead they openly discuss it, and conduct widespread training in crime prevention, talking to citizens, organizing community outreach, setting up neighborhood watches to reduce crime's impact.

Our national security bureaucracy should take a page out of law enforcement's book. Instead of telling us we're going to be attacked, tell us how we might be attacked and what we can do to prevent it. Organize a community alert and community response to potential terror attacks. Put us on our toes and let us assess our risk realistically. In other words, stop treating us like children or cattle and let us behave as adults defending themselves. ***

Photo of the author courtesy of staff files
FBI seal courtesy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation