http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/e...nt/12427969.htm
Posted on Sat, Aug. 20, 2005
Was 9/11 preventable?
National Geographic’s intriguing miniseries says yes
AARON BARNHART
The Kansas City Star
Why is an ambitious TV special tied to the commemoration of the 9/11 attacks airing two weeks ahead of the anniversary? Perhaps because of the impertinent but entirely appropriate idea at its core: The attacks could have been prevented.
“Inside 9/11,” a four-hour, two-night documentary beginning at 8 p.m. Sunday on the National Geographic Channel, is really two specials. The first night looks at the intelligence failures leading up to 9/11; the second night (8 p.m. Monday) is a more conventional rehashing of the minute-by-minute events of Sept. 11, 2001, which other TV specials have done.
Sunday’s first part is what’s worth the investment of time. It is a painstaking time line of the history of al Qaida and the 9/11 attacks that goes back to 1990, when Osama bin Laden was spurned by the government of Saudi Arabia. The son of a billionaire, bin Laden had consolidated the radical Islamic groups that grew out of the successful resistance to the Soviets in Afghanistan. With Saddam Hussein invading Kuwait, bin Laden was ready to lend his disciplined, battle-hardened rebels to the cause of driving Hussein out. He made the case to the Saudi royal family that “holy warriors” should defend a holy land. The Saudis, however, turned to the United States instead.
“Inside 9/11” doesn’t dwell on the irony that America became bin Laden’s lifelong enemy at that moment — after all, one of the myriad reasons given for invading Iraq in 2003 was that Hussein and al Qaida were in cahoots — but there’s no time to dwell. Two hours is scarcely enough time to recap 11 years of intelligence blunders and overlooked clues that could have pre-empted the 9/11 attacks.
Take the four dozen boxes of evidence hauled off to a New York City police precinct in 1990 following the assassination of radical Jewish leader Meir Kahane by a radical Muslim. Because the murder was viewed at the time, in the words of terrorism expert Steve Emerson, as “one crazy Arab killing one crazy Jew,” investigators overlooked the blueprint, buried within the boxes, for bombing the World Trade Center. That attack was carried out in 1993.
Then there’s the laptop computer, seized by Philippine police in the mid-1990s when a bomb-making lab blew up, alleged to have information about the plot that would become 9/11. The opportunities to stop the attacks keep piling up: the abortive attempts to kill bin Laden, the foot-dragging at the government agency overseeing air security, the failure to crack down on terrorist planning inside the United States and more.
All of this is presented in a bold visual array of talking heads and arresting graph-ics. In particular, the decision to emblazon the killers’ pictures on what look like martyrs’ flags flapping in the breeze provides a constant and chilling reminder of the glory they thought they were attaining.
National Geographic Channel has marshaled perhaps the most impressive list of experts for any program on 9/11 airing in the United States. They are led by Michael Scheuer, aka Anonymous, who led the CIA’s bin Laden unit from 1996 to 2004 and whose best-selling book Imperial Hubris indicted the U.S. intelligence failures of the 1990s. Since leaving the government, Scheuer has continued to be a sort of mild-mannered Jeremiah, warning in a calm, measured voice that unless these failures are taken seriously, America will experience 9/11 again and again. He reappears at the end of Part 2, after the attacks have been thoroughly and agonizingly reviewed, to underscore that top officials should have seen 9/11 coming.
“If it surprised the policymakers, then shame on them,” Scheuer says.
Also featured is Terry McDermott, an investigative reporter at the Los Angeles Times and author of Perfect Soldiers: The Hijackers, Who They Were, Why They Did It. At a press event last month in L.A., I asked McDermott what he thought of the media coverage of the motives behind the 9/11 attacks.
“We’ve tended to take the easier, good-evil, black-white, ‘They hate us, they don’t understand us’ approach, and I think that’s not helpful,” McDermott said. “That’s not the way the world is.”
“Inside 9/11’s” first hour is a primer in how radical resentment of the West grew not out of our adoration of material goods and MTV, but our alliances with the enemies of al Qaida.
Also interviewed are a whistleblower from the Federal Aviation Administration, investigative reporter and author Peter Lance, and Yosri Fouda, who happens to be the London bureau chief for al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based news service that was widely reviled for its coverage of the Iraq war just two years ago. That someone from al-Jazeera would be used extensively for an American-produced special about radical Islamists is a sign of how far National Geographic Channel was willing to go to tell an authoritative story.