Were warnings ignored?

There have been reports in the news lately about the Congressional report on the 9/11 attacks, and the way that, like so much else, is largely being kept secret. As Newsweek reported, "only a bare-bones list of “findings” with virtually no details was made public, and now a committee reviewing it has refused to declasify any further information, and has even sought to "reclassify" some information that had already been made public.

This morning, Atrios posted a link to a site called Cooperative Research that features a well-written and well-documented examination of what we know about the timeline of 9/11 and the official response to it. Poking around a bit more, I also found an essay on significant warnings we were given by foreign government about the potential for terrorist attacks that summer.

The Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9-11 is now finished, but the findings that have been released fail to mention any warnings from foreign governments. The US mainstream media also has paid little attention to warnings from foreign governments.

Yet there were so many warnings - from both our friends and enemies alike - often specifically suggesting the targets or method of attack. In at least one case, the warnings actually mentioned hijackers by name. This type of communication between intelligence agencies normally occurs in secret, so one can only wonder what additional warnings or details were provided to us that have never been made public.

[...] One single warning should have been enough to take precautions, but with so many warnings coming in, how can inaction be explained as mere incompetence? Yes, it is often difficult to know which terrorist threats are real, and what information to trust. But if the US couldn't take seriously warnings from close allies like Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and so on, then what were they waiting for? What would they have taken seriously? And where is the outrage, the investigation? As can be seen with the recent Congressional inquiry, the typical US government response has been to ignore these foreign government warnings altogether, or to say they were lies.

Interestingly, the essay notes that some of the warnings were ignored because of "warning fatigue" coming from the sheer number of warnings the intelligence community was receiving. Interesting, because the government has, at times since 9/11, flooded us with so many warnings of its own that there have been serious concerns that Americans will stop paying attention for that very reason. It seems to me that if the government's ability to possibly protect us from the 9/11 attacks was compromised by it's own "warning fatigue" it would then want to take steps to prevent "warning fatigue" among the general population, so that if there is another attack in the offing, we'd actually take precautions rather than just make more jokes about duct tape.

Posted by thorswitch at May 9, 2003 04:48 PM | TrackBack