ABC NEWS' "MISSED OPPORTUNITIES" EVADES CENTRAL QUESTIONS OF GOVERNMENT
ROLE IN SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS
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News & Analysis: North America
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/mar2002/abc-m02.shtml
By Kate Randall

On February 18-20, the ABC News evening program World News Tonight
broadcast a three-part series titled "Missed Opportunities," which
purported to explain the lapses in US intelligence that opened the way for
the September 11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The airing of the series was undoubtedly a response to growing concern in
the US population over the lack of any investigation into the colossal
breakdown in security that attended the disaster. After nearly six months,
there has been no accounting by the Bush administration or any government
agency for what took place, and Congressional hearings into the attacks
have yet to get under way.

The ABC News report, however, was a study in superficiality and evasion,
suggesting an effort at damage control rather than serious investigative
reporting. Dubbed an "in-depth investigation," the series was deficient in
details and provided only the most cursory account of the events leading up
to September 11. Each segment lasted about two minutes--considered
"exhaustive" by today's network news standards--but hardly sufficient to
probe such a critical and complex issue.

Even more significant, those facts that were adduced were used to bolster
the series' main contention, which was summed up in the report's title:
"Missed Opportunities." The report began by baldly asserting: "The
terrorist attacks of September 11, the worst in US history, came as a
complete surprise to US law enforcement and intelligence agencies."

Everything that followed this introduction--including details about US
intelligence agencies' knowledge of the hijackers and their activities, and
numerous warnings to government officials of an imminent terrorist
attack--was skewed to support the program's main theory that the
intelligence breakdown was the product of mistakes, which, at worst, rose
to the level of official negligence.

Patrick Martin's series Was the US government alerted to September 11
attack?, published on the World Socialist Web Site in January in four
parts, outlined in detail the many facts that have come to light in the
months since the terror attacks which fly in the face of the claim that the
events of September 11 took the government by surprise. He wrote:
"Certainly the least likely and least credible explanation of that day's
events is that the vast US national security apparatus was entirely unaware
of the activities of the hijackers until the airliners slammed into the
World Trade Center and Pentagon."

Each of the three parts of the World News Tonight series provided certain
details of advance warnings of a terrorist attack, explained how the FBI
and CIA failed to act on these warnings, and concluded that this breakdown
in security was the result of mere oversights and errors. But despite the
conclusions of the "Missed Opportunities" report, the information presented
in the series contradicts a theory that says the US government was
blameless in the events.

The February 18 segment, titled "Early Warnings: Pre-September 11 Cautions
Went Unheeded," noted that Marvin Cetron, an author and speaker on
terrorism, warned in a report to the Pentagon that the US was extremely
susceptible to a domestic attack. He told ABC News, "We saw Osama bin
Laden. We spelled it out and we said the United States was very vulnerable.
You could make a left turn at the Washington Monument and take out the
White House. And you could make a right turn and take out the Pentagon."
Cetron said he was told to remove the warning from his report by Pentagon
officials, who told him, "We don't want it released because you can't
handle a crisis before it becomes a crisis, and no one is going to believe
it anyhow."

This installment also reported that shortly before September 11, the US
National Security Agency intercepted "multiple phone calls from Abu
Zubaida, bin Laden's chief of operations, to the United States." These
intercepts were reportedly never passed on to other intelligence agencies
or the Bush administration.

"Warning Signs: Government Missed Trail of Messages Before the Attacks,"
the second segment of the series aired February 19, recounted the case of
Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian-American living in Brooklyn, who was arrested in
1992 for the 1990 assassination of Zionist extremist Meir Kahane. During
their investigation into Nosair's case, the FBI seized "bomb-making
instructions, pictures of New York City landmarks, including the World
Trade Center, and pages of handwritten Arabic." Prosecutors attached little
significance to this evidence, and the material was never translated until
after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

The segment also recounted the case of Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted of
terrorism charges in the 1993 bombing. ABC News reported, "Investigators
later learned Yousef intended to hijack a plane and fly it into CIA
headquarters or a nuclear power plant. At the time, the FBI thought the
idea was farfetched."

The report related as well what was described as "another possible missed
opportunity," which came in 1996. That year, at the urging of the United
States, Sudan expelled Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, and also allowed the US
to photograph suspected terrorist training camps in the country. ABC News
said that the Sudanese government then sent a message via American
businessman Mansoor Ijaz indicating it was willing to share information on
bin Laden's Al Qaeda network. Tim Carney, the former US ambassador to
Sudan, told ABC News, "It was an offer US officials did not take
seriously."

According to the report, the US also received intelligence a month before
September 11 that Ayman Al-Zawahiri, a key associate of bin Laden, was
receiving medical treatment at a clinic in Yemen. Sources told ABC that the
Bush administration "rejected a plan to capture him as officials could not
be 100 percent sure the patient was Al-Zawahiri."

The final segment, "US Targets Overlooked," broadcast February 20, began by
noting that "in the weeks before September 11, both the FBI and the CIA
were almost certain an attack by Osama bin Laden was coming." According to
the report, however, the intelligence agencies made the mistake of
anticipating that such an attack would take place overseas.

This argument was exposed by the information presented in the segment,
which cited numerous indications that an attack was being prepared on US
soil. On August 21, the FBI put the names of two Al Qaeda suspects on a
border-watch list--and soon thereafter learned that they were already in
the country. These two men--Kahlil Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhamzi--were to
become two of the nineteen hijackers on September 11.

In the WSWS series, Patrick Martin asked: "How was it possible for two men
being sought by the FBI and CIA, with alleged ties to the man the US
government had branded the most dangerous terrorist in world, to buy
expensive first-class one-way tickets for an airline flight, then board and
hijack a jetliner on September 11?" "Missed Opportunities" left that
question unanswered.

The ABC News report also noted that in early August the FBI office in
Phoenix alerted FBI headquarters about an unusual influx of Arab students
at local flight schools. This warning was also ignored.

"Missed Opportunies" then referred to the case of Zacarias Moussaoui. The
series explained how on August 15 the FBI received a call from a flight
instructor in Minneapolis reporting on a foreign student who "wanted to pay
cash to learn to fly a Boeing 747." ABC News reported, "Moussaoui was taken
into custody on August 16, but to the outrage of FBI agents in the field,
headquarters was slow to react and said he could not be connected to any
known terror group."

ABC News quoted former FBI agent Bill Gavin on the Moussaoui case: "If you
look and you have a person with a bad passport who's trying to learn how to
fly a big aircraft--flying bombs, as it were--you have to really think
about [whether he is] a loner. The bell goes off. Could there be somebody
else trying to do this, too?"

"Missed Opportunities" provided no explanation for why US intelligence
agencies failed to act on crucial data, such as that in the Moussaoui case.
The ABC News investigation turned up what is referred to in the series as
"a trail of missed signals, missed opportunities, and warnings ignored."
But there can be no innocent explanation for the refusal on the part of US
intelligence to carry out basic defensive actions in the face of mounting
evidence of an imminent terrorist attack in the US.

It is impossible to determine, outside of a thorough investigation, the
extent of advance knowledge the American government had about the planning
and execution of the September 11 terror attacks. What is clear from what
is known so far, however, points to a conscious decision at high levels of
the US government to impede measures--in some cases, measures demanded by
lower-level agents--that would have headed off the attack.

By painting the US authorities as naïve--guilty merely of "missed
opportunities"--the ABC News series served to further the official cover-up
of the tragic and unexplained events of September 11.

Copyright 1998-2002 World Socialist Web Site. All rights reserved.

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