On the tenth anniversary of September 11, Professor Anthony Glees reflects on the intelligence failures and their consequences that led to 9/11

Glees, Anthony

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Posted by AD Brown9/11: an intelligence failure and its consequencesblogs.lse.ac.uk /waronterror/2011/09/11/911-an-intelligence-failure-and-its-consequences/On the tenth anniversary of September 11, Professor Anthony Glees reflects on the intelligencefailures and their consequences that led to 9/11.Within a few minutes of the attacks on the Twin Towers on the morning of  11 September 2001,‘9/11’ became the defining moment for the new 21st century. To western eyes the chilling film of theairplanes, the skyscrapers and the victims at once became an instantly recognisable icon ofterrorist wickedness. To many in the Islamic world, perhaps just initially, 9/11 was greeted with joy as a heroic blowdelivered by a few against the mightiest nation on earth and proving that Muslims had finally fought back against thevalues of America and its support for the hated state of Israel. To the terrorists, however, 9/11 was hard evidence ofwhat they had achieved and could achieve in the future.Within days, however, the trauma of the first hours was made worse by the understanding that in a real sense 9/11had not been the bolt from the blue it had initially seemed. People recalled that the World Trade Centre had been atarget in 1993, that in 1998 Al Qaeda had instructed Muslims to kill Americans anywhere in the world and that in2000 the US National Commission on Terrorism tried to get the American government to understand that a furtherterrorist attack on the United States was a real possibility. Actually, Arab terrorists had been using airplanes as aweapon in their struggle for more than twenty years (though not as guided missiles). The more this was thoughtabout, the clearer it became: 9/11 was the outcome of a catastrophic intelligence failure and not just a devastatingsecurity one. It should not have happened and it needed to be prevented.Reflecting on these twin failures caused two sorts of thing to happen – things which continue to shape our world tenyears on. First the US unleashed an overwhelming strike against the Taleban in Afghanistan and then, in 2003, alsoon Saddam Hussein in Iraq (both regimes being seen as strategic sponsors of what quickly became known as‘international’ or ‘Islamist’ terrorism).The second major response to 9/11 was the development of a new kind of intelligence-led security policy. As far asBritain has been concerned, 9/11 prompted ‘shoulder to shoulder’ military activity with the USA but also afundamental re-think of its domestic security policy. A few days after 9/11 British intelligence chiefs were inWashington offering collaboration and in London Sir David Omand and others began to formulate an entirely newand brilliant strategy to deal with Islamism, which he termed ‘Contest’. Its aim was to gather and exploit secret andother intelligence on Islamists in the UK to contain and disrupt them. It is true that this was policy was reactive.British domestic and foreign intelligence activity had been wound down after the end of the Cold War and althoughthere had been evidence of Islamist terrorist plots in the UK since 1999-2000, and MI5 had known there wereextremist preachers at work in Britain, the view had been that the target of their venom was mostly other Arab statesor Israel. The London Bombings of 2005 revealed the grave errors of this assessment, very much on a par with thecritical mistakes made by MI6 in its evaluation of Saddam’s WMD programme in Iraq.Reviewing the past decade today, a number of things are clear. Listing them in order of importance, it is fair tobelieve that our intelligence activity has improved beyond all reasonable expectations. Several major attacks againstthe UK or inspired from groups and individuals in the UK have been thwarted. There has been no further extensiveloss of life although in some cases (that of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, for example) this was the outcome of luck,not good security work. Individual Islamists continued to score hits, however, as the attempted assassination ofStephen Timms MP by a London student illustrated only too clearly. But it is now very hard to believe that a second9/11 in the UK could take place without our security community getting wind of it. The investment put into security byBlair and Brown paid dividends, without doubt.1/3On the debit side, however, the view that Britain’s peculiar situation in terms of its special closeness to the USA andits policies and the large number of immigrants from Pakistan required at least a period of especially robust securityactivity and laws led to hefty and often misplaced criticism from some prominent British lawyers, journalists andacademics. Rather than seeking to protect democracy from terrorists who wanted not just a different foreign policybut a Britain run by imams, these critics said Britain had become a ‘national security state’. They were not wrongabout this but their definition of what this meant was certainly off-beam. Our intelligence services, they said, wereusing blanket surveillance to stamp out all debate, serving the interests of a prime minister (Blair) who had ‘lied’ overthe existence of WMD in Iraq in order to justify a war which should never have been fought. Voices in the media andin academe could be heard prior to 2005, arguing that ‘securitization’ policies were simply exploiting fear of terrorismfor base political purposes and even yielding to ‘the power of nightmares’ as a BBC TV programme alleged in 2004.Above all, they accused British intelligence of being complicit in torture by allowing our intelligence officers toparticipate, at a distance, in the torture of suspects and offering support to regimes, like Libya, Egypt or Saudi Arabiawho used torture as a matter of course.There is no doubt that these allegations (currently being investigated) would, if substantiated, do major and seriousdamage to Britain’s intelligence community and rightly so. The systematic use of torture, or a systemic re-definitionof methods of interrogation which the world would regard as torture (such as waterboarding or beating) which are,without question, torture robs western democracy of key parts of its legitimacy in combating groups and individualswho want to use terror against it. Ironically but perhaps inevitably, greater investment in security may have madepublic opinion more skeptical about the need for ten years of tougher policies. It is easy to reinterpret the past from asafer present in the same way as few before 9/11 feared an Islamist attack on the USA.Could there be another 9/11? Plainly there could if governments decided to backtrack on security. This isn’t likely butit is possible even if at the moment the US is developing preventative measures along the lines set down by Britainand Britain is preparing earnestly for the 2012 Olympics. But surveillance, secret intelligence gathering, electronicinterception and CCTV are unpopular particularly to young citizens who think nothing of posting their personalsecrets in indelible electronic ink on the internet but object to being ‘spied on’.It is revealing that a recent BBC poll showed that a quarter of all young Britons thought the attacks were carried outby the government of the USA (just as many Muslim voices can still be heard blaming Mossad).Perhaps an even greater threat is posed by former figures of authority in government publicly disavowing the linesthey must have taken privately over the past ten years. A former Director of Public Prosecutions has condemnedfrom a new-found party political perspective counter-terrorism legislation he evidently thought was justified at thetime. A former Director of the Security Service, Eliza Manningham-Buller, now claims Britain faced ‘no threat fromIraq’ prior to invasion and said the war there would increase the threat from domestic terrorism (of course, no onehad suggested that Iraq posed a domestic threat to Britain and the view that its WMD posed an international threatwas, of course, the view taken by MI5’s sister agency, MI6 and based on intelligence work with which MI5 wouldhave had nothing to do, and on which its opinion counted for very little).But the net effect of statements like these from people who would deserve to be listened to more carefully if they hadresigned at the time is clear. It will become ever more difficult for democratic governments to continue to do the rightthing unless, God forbid, there are further terrorist attacks. Pre-emptive action whether at home or abroad willbecome harder to undertake. If that is the case, then the lessons of 9/11 will be unlearned, and we will return to thedeluded notion that terrorists will leave us alone as long as we ignore them and pursue no policy which might causethem to spring into action.Professor Anthony Glees, Director of BUCSIS at the University of Buckingham. Anthony Glees MA MPhil DPhil(Oxford) is professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham and directs its Centre for Security and IntelligenceStudies (BUCSIS). He has a specialist concern with Security and Intelligence issues and has written and lectured onaspects of the history of British intelligence, on the Stasi, on Islamism, on terrorism and counter-terrorism, on2/3subversion in western democracies both today and in the past.3/3

9/11: an intelligence failure and its consequences

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