The 9/11 Commission Report

¶ … 911 Commission: the Clinton Administration's Response in 1998 versus the Bush Administration's Response to 2001

After the Cold War, the state of American intelligence was in incredible disarray. The Cold War had ended. The purpose of all of American intelligence efforts had been shifted from a Cold War focus on the Soviet Union to a more chaotic, diverse, and internationally and ethnically divided world. The 9/11 commission, when comparing the Clinton Administration's response to the 1998 Al Qaeda bombings of American embassies, admitted that during this period of world history the Clinton Administration was still in a difficult and transitional world period, and domestically, the nation was uncertain as to how to go forward. The Clinton Administration made a cautious response that did not fundamentally reconfigure the systems of intelligence gathering in the nation, or the bureaucracy of the intelligence agencies in the United States. This was difficult to do in a short period of time, true, but such caution, the commission stresses, without attacking the Clinton administration, is no longer warranted. However, the commission also allowed that the negotiations going on between Israel and the Palestinian representatives made a strident response difficult, as if the United States were to respond forcefully, it could not with good moral conscience criticize Israel for doing the same, when Israel was attacked by terrorist bombings on its territories.

But the intelligence miscommunications that still characterized the Clinton Administration continued to characterize the Bush Administration's response to terrorism before, during, and after the September 11th attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. This, the 9/11 Commission stressed, cannot continue, lest the United States' sense of security in the world continue to be compromised. The commission stated that there may be more attacks in the future, but this does not mean that the United States government cannot be vigilant in preventing them. The commission stated that rather than a singularly focused intelligence objective upon one nation as it was in the past, the focus of American intelligence agencies must be multinational and multifaceted as the terrorist networks these agencies such as the CIA are attempting to study.

Greater communication between local and international law enforcement is one way this may be achieved. Without local law enforcement's connection to international systems of authority, and vice versa, terrorist networks can make local incursions into the infrastructure of the United States as Al Qaeda through flight schools, and through other grass roots means of communication, such as simple as a call on a untapped cell phone. The commission calls for a comprehensive overhaul intelligence gathering in the United States.