11 September, redux

Rico says there are a bunch of stories in The New York Times about what didn't happen yesterday:

Sarah Maslin Nir has a column about scary stuff:
The tenth anniversary of 11 September, as well as unconfirmed intelligence about an al-Qaeda plot, had civilian and military defenses working overtime on Sunday, with the police around the country chasing down thousands of tips about suspicious vehicles and fighter jets escorting two planes on which passengers spent too long in the bathrooms.
Two F-16s shadowed American Airlines Flight 34 from Los Angeles as it approached John F. Kennedy International Airport until it landed at 4:10 p.m. The jets were scrambled after “the failure of three males to leave the aircraft’s bathroom,” created suspicion, said the NYPD’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne. “The trio emerged from the john with no threat to the passengers, the aircraft, or the crew,” Browne said. The men were not charged.
Nearly the same circumstance— multiple passengers holed up in the bathroom— led to F-16s shadowing Frontier Airlines Flight 623 from Denver as it neared Detroit. No danger was found and no charges were filed, said Scott Wintner, a Detroit Metropolitan Airport spokesman.
At Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, a rental truck filled with pyrotechnics and several guns set off an investigation. The contents turned out to be equipment for the Discovery Channel show Sons of Guns, said Mark White, a special agent for the FBI in Dallas. A man, identified by a law enforcement official as a former NYPD officer, was detained at the Kansas City, Missouri airport and a terminal shut down after the authorities found suspicious items in his carry-on bag. The authorities said the items tested negative for explosive materials. In Brooklyn, a busy stretch of Court Street was shut down because of a package that turned out to be an empty box.
Much of the edginess came from reports of a possible al-Qaeda plot to set off a bomb in Washington or New York. From Friday through 4 p.m. on Sunday, the NYPD handled 342 calls of suspicious packages, more than triple the same period last year, Browne said. There was no indication that the packages were linked to terrorism, he said. “It may be a cooler, and inside is a sandwich bag, so it kind of gets ridiculed,” he said. “We think it’s important for people to be vigilant, because the next time could be catastrophic.” 

Scott Shane has an article about dysfunction inside the government at the time:
In a new memoir, a former FBI agent who tracked al-Qaeda before and after the 11 September attacks, paints a devastating picture of rivalry and dysfunction inside the government’s counterterrorism agencies. The book describes missed opportunities to defuse the 2001 plot, and argues that other attacks overseas might have been prevented, and Osama bin Laden found earlier, if interrogations had not been mismanaged. The account offered by the agent, Ali H. Soufan, is the most detailed to date by an insider concerning the American investigations of al-Qaeda and the major attacks that the group carried out, including bombings of American embassies in East Africa and the American destroyer Cole, as well as the 11 September attacks. The book is scheduled to be published Monday, with redactions to several chapters by the Central Intelligence Agency, the target of much of Soufan’s criticism.
In the 571-page book, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda,” Soufan accuses CIA officials of deliberately withholding crucial documents and photographs of al-Qaeda operatives from the FBI before 11 September 2001, despite three written requests, and then later lying about it to the 9/11 Commission.
He recounts a scene at the American embassy in Yemen, where, a few hours after the attacks on New York and Washington, a CIA official finally turned over the material the bureau requested months earlier, including photographs of two of the hijackers. “For about a minute I stared at the pictures and the report, not quite believing what I had in my hands,” Soufan writes. Then he ran to a bathroom and vomited. “My whole body was shaking,” he writes. He believed the material, documenting a al-Qaeda meeting in Malaysia in January of 2000, combined with information from the Cole investigation, might have helped unravel the airliner plot.
Soufan recounts how he began a promising interrogation of a knowledgeable al-Qaeda member, Abdullah Tabarak, at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, only to be told by the military authorities that he could no longer speak to the prisoner. He later learned the prisoner was sent to Morocco and subsequently released.
On another occasion, he questioned a Yemeni al-Qaeda operative known as al-Batar who had once carried money for Osama bin Laden as a dowry for the terrorist leader to marry a young Yemeni woman. The prisoner gave him some information, but said he would tell the rest of his story only if he was allowed to make a phone call to his family, a request the Pentagon denied. The interrogation was cut off, losing what Soufan regarded as a possible lead on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.
After a CIA officer disobeyed her bosses’ instructions and gave Soufan 45 minutes to question Ramzi Binalshibh, one of the 9/11 conspirators, and another unidentified prisoner, Soufan and his colleagues learned of a plot to bomb an oil tanker off the Yemeni port of al-Mukalla. But their memo was ignored, and a few weeks later the French tanker Limburg was attacked, killing one crew member and wounding twelve others.
Soufan writes that the most consequential mistake of all was the CIA’s embrace of brutal tactics for interrogation, which Soufan says were directed from the White House and opposed by some CIA officers. The book calls the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, the first important prisoner questioned by the CIA, as a fateful wrong turn toward torture and away from what he considered more effective traditional interrogation methods.
A CIA spokesman, Preston Golson, said the agency had ordered redactions to the book only to protect classified information, not to strike back at the author. Still, he said, “With all due respect to Soufan, the Central Intelligence Agency has a very different assessment, as you might expect, on these events.” He called “baseless” the assertion that the agency “purposely refused to share critical lead information on the 9/11 plots.” And without addressing the agency’s harsh interrogations, which were banned by President Obama in 2009, he said the CIA “has significantly degraded al-Qaeda”, and has produced intelligence that allowed the United States and others “countless times to save lives and disrupt plots.”
Golson said the accusations contained in the book “diminish the hard work and dedication of countless CIA officers who have worked tirelessly against al-Qaeda both before and after 9/11— hard work that culminated in the operation that found Osama bin Laden.”
Soufan said in an interview that he had the highest respect for many of the CIA officers he worked with in the field. “Unfortunately, there were people in Washington making decisions out of fear,” he said. While the CIA’s interrogation program produced a great deal of valuable information, he said, it did so despite the use of brutality, not because of it. “There are some politicians and bureaucrats who live in an alternate universe, who are invested in that small part of the program and defend it regardless of facts,” he said. The use of coercion prompted the FBI director to ban his agents from CIA interrogations, Soufan noted, meaning that some of the government’s most knowledgeable experts were unable to speak with the most important terrorists. “Professional interrogators, intelligence operatives and investigators were marginalized, and instead of tried and tested methods being used, faith was placed in EIT’s,” or “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the government’s euphemism for waterboarding and other harsh methods, he writes.
Soufan, who was born in Lebanon and is a native Arabic speaker, recounts interrogations that he conducted without physical abuse, building a rapport with terrorist suspects who gave extensive information about al-Qaeda. By his account, he disarmed prisoners by addressing them in their native language, using their family nicknames, surprising them with details they did not expect him to know, and bringing them their favorite foods. He sparred with them over their interpretation of the Quran. He tricked them into talking by persuading them that their associates had already talked. He showed one prisoner a doctored photograph and persuaded another that a colleague was a “human polygraph” who could tell when the prisoner was lying.
The book also gives an account, gathered from al-Qaeda operatives whom Soufan questioned at Guantánamo Bay, of Osama bin Laden’s conduct at his camp in Afghanistan as the 9/11 plot was carried out. The al-Qaeda aides described Osama bin Laden as “especially excitable” that day, and only a few people in his entourage knew why.
As the hijacked airliners neared their targets, he asked an aide to get a Western news channel on the satellite television in his van. But the aide, Ali al-Bahlul, could not get a signal. So they turned to the radio, Soufan was told, switching between the Voice of America and the BBC, and then cheering and firing their guns in the air at the first bulletin announcing that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. 

Elisabeth Bumiller has an article in The New York Times about the ceremony at the Pentagon:
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Sunday told the families of the 184 men, women, and children killed at the Pentagon a decade ago that “I know what it’s like to receive that call out of the blue that the dearest thing in your life is gone.” Biden, referring to the call he got when his wife and infant daughter were killed in a car crash in 1972, presided over the tenth anniversary service commemorating the horrific morning when an American Airlines Boeing 757, Flight 77, crashed into the seemingly impregnable headquarters of the world’s most powerful military.
“I know these memorials, and you’ve been through many, are bittersweet moments for you, because as you sit here right now, unlike a month ago, everything’s come back in stark relief,” Biden said, in unusually personal comments that appeared to veer off from his prepared statement. “It’s not a thought, it’s precise. You remember that god-awful empty feeling; you remember being sucked into your own chest and that feeling of hollowness. My prayer for you is, ten years later, when you think of them,” he added, “that it brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye.”
Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, who introduced Biden at the ceremony, told the crowd that “no words can ease the pain you still feel.” He said that the country would never forget the human cost paid by this generation— including “the more than 6,200 soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines lost in the line of duty” since 9/11.
Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said: “Today, we stand on this hallowed ground to honor those who still live on in our hearts.” He was in the building when the plane hit and has said that it felt like an earthquake. “Two of my aides looked out the window and saw a 757 fly in under their feet,” Admiral Mullen told the American Forces Press Service in a recent interview.
Panetta, who was not in government service at the time but was in Washington when the attack occurred, recalled how he rented a car to drive across the country to his home in California after all commercial planes were grounded. “It was a drive I will never forget, not only because I made it back in record time, but more importantly because of what I witnessed across this nation,” Panetta said in a speech at the Newseum in Washington. “Communities throughout the heartland of America had come together, were posting signs on storefronts, in front of motels: ‘God bless America’. They were raising flags. They were gathering in churches. They were holding hands. You could sense that great spirit of America reacting to the tragedy that had happened.” Panetta continued: “And out of that terrible tragedy, I suddenly recalled the statement that Admiral Yamamoto made following the attack on Pearl Harbor, when he looked at his subordinates and said: ‘I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant.’ 9/11 awoke a sleeping giant.”
The west side of the Pentagon has long since been repaired, and a memorial to the victims opened three years ago, well ahead of the 9/11 memorial in New York, and with little of the argument that accompanied the design and planning of the two waterfall pools at the World Trade Center. The Pentagon memorial is nearly two acres outdoors with 184 benches, each inscribed with the name of a victim, shaded by 85 paperbark maple trees.
It was dedicated on 11 September 2008 by President George W. Bush, who said at the time that the anniversary brought to mind a specific number: 2,557, or the number of days that had passed since 11 September 2001, without another attack on American soil. On Saturday, Bush, along with the defense secretary he fired, Donald H. Rumsfeld, was at the Pentagon to lay a wreath of white flowers by a memorial stone embedded in the Pentagon wall near the site of the plane crash.
Biden, his voice at times husky and filled with emotion, spoke last. “At 9:37, an unconscionable tragedy struck,” he said. But he called what happened next “far more remarkable.” First responders, people going about their jobs at the Pentagon and even Rumsfeld, who was in the Pentagon at the time, rushed toward the broken section of building, Biden said, “risking their lives so their friends, their colleagues, and total strangers, people they had never met, might live.”
After Biden spoke, 184 members of the armed services each laid a single wreath of white flowers on a memorial bench, one by one, until every person fallen had been honored.
President Obama arrived at the Pentagon shortly before 3:25 p.m., placed a large wreath of white flowers at the 9/11 Memorial, bowed his head, and then moved to greet the family members of the victims. He shook hands, posed for pictures, and put his arm around one person after another. 

Anemona Hartocollis has an article in The New York Times about the memorial at Ground Zero:
They clutched slips of paper bearing letters and numbers, trying to navigate a strange new map created by a computer algorithm that was designed to place people next to other people whom, in life, they had cared about. The visitors looked hopeful, dazed, afraid.
One family made a beeline for Mark Louis Rosenberg on Tablet 7 of the north pool, or N-7 for short. The three teenage Berry brothers searched for their father, David Shelby Berry, at S-36. They touched the sharp edges of his name, carved into the cool metal in austere capital letters. They left their fingerprints and became connected to the families of 2,982 others in a way that they had not felt before. “You go your whole life thinking you’re always the only one in the classroom who’s affected by 9/11,” said Nile Berry, 19, a student at Hamilton College. “And then you come here and you’re just another face in the crowd. You get a lot of perspective.”
Ten years later, it had come down to this: a quick caress of hands on bronze, an electric sense of connection to the past, a hope that this anniversary would become a turning point toward a better future. For at least a few moments, the newly built 11 September memorial, which opened to victims’ families on Sunday and opens to the public, via reservation, on Monday, triumphed after a decade of battles over cost, designs, fund-raising, how to order the names and whether to include ranks, places of business and other identifying details.
“This is now a place, not a construction site, not a design,” Alice M. Greenwald, the director of the memorial museum, said. “It’s now a place in New York, and I think that’s transformational.”
Most of the families pronounced the memorial beautiful, and they were moved, they said, just to have the names of their loved ones permanently displayed. For the more than 1,100 families who have never received a trace of remains, not even a fragment of bone, the memorial is a kind of graveyard. After the first moment of silence, at 8:46 a.m., they began filtering into the plaza. They wore blue ribbons on their lapels as their entry credentials and as a symbol of the clear blue sky that preceded the moment everything changed. In twos, in threes, and even in tens, they followed the hard stone sidewalks to the memorial’s salient feature, two giant pools in the footprints of the twin towers; arrayed around them were the names of 2,983 victims of the attacks in the twin towers, at the Pentagon, aboard United Airlines Flight 93, as well as those killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
The pools were black and a little intimidating, and the cascading water was as deafening as Niagara Falls. But as the families grew more comfortable, they began to relax.
“They did a fantastic job,” said Bernard Monaghan, whose son, Brian Patrick Monaghan, 21, a carpenter, died at the World Trade Center. “To me it’s very peaceful.”
Children tumbled in the grass. “I guess it’s not as maybe morbid or morose as it normally is,” said Stacy Cooke, watching her daughter, Caitlin, 4, turning somersaults with her cousins on the strips of lawn. Cooke lost her father, Captain David T. Wooley of Ladder Company 4 in midtown Manhattan. “They never found him,” she said. “This is kind of where we think is his resting place.”
Families began to personalize the site, leaving their own memorials on top of the official one. Ingeniously, they used the cut-out names as holders for a raft of mementoes: small American flags, roses, hydrangeas, and sunflowers sprouted from the letters. A rolled-up note was stuck in the final ‘o’ of Nobuhiro Hayatsu’s first name, as if at the Wailing Wall. A small, ordinary-looking gray stone had been placed over the middle name of Jane Eileen Josiah. Blue entrance ribbons had been stuck by their safety pins into name after name. Over the name of Gary Jay Frank, someone had taped his photograph and these handwritten details: 11-5-65 to 9-11-01. AON Corp — WTC #2-92nd FL We will never forget you!!!
Some people made ink rubbings of their loved ones’ names, often on the official event program. Staff members of the memorial distributed crayons, pencils, and spare programs.
One flag stuck out of the name Charles F. Burlingame III. Burlingame was a pilot on American Airlines Flight 77, which hit the Pentagon. “These are all his crew,” his sister, Debra Burlingame, said, pointing to the surrounding names. “These people are real people to me. It’s very touching to see all these people here together.” She pointed to the legend, “Renee A. May and her unborn child.” May was a flight attendant. Nearby were the names Jennifer Lewis and Kenneth Lewis, flight attendants who always flew together. “The base called them Kennifer,” Burlingame said; she had American Airlines pilot’s wings pinned to her chest. Other families wore t-shirts printed with photographs of their loved ones, or medallions showing their pictures. “All these tokens and totems, it’s part of what we do,” Burlingame said. “We do it to have some tangible thing we can touch, given we can’t touch them.” But, now, she touched her brother’s name and burst into tears. 

Mark Landler and Eric Schmitt have an article in The New York Times about Obama and Bush at the New York memorial:
On Sunday, for the first time, President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush stood together at the site of the 11 September attacks, listening as family members read the names of lost love ones and bowing their heads in silence to mark the moments the planes hit. In May, Bush declined Obama’s invitation to join him at Ground Zero after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. But, on this morning, they stood shoulder to shoulder— commanders in chief whose terms in office are bookends for exploring how the United States has changed since 11 September 2001, particularly in its response to terrorism.
The tableau was striking: the President who spent years hunting Osama bin Laden next to the one who finally got him. The President defined by his response to 11 September standing alongside the one who has tried to take America beyond the lingering, complicated legacy of that day.
Obama read from Psalm 46: God is our refuge and strength, which an aide said he chose because it spoke of perseverance. Bush, the wartime leader, read a letter from Abraham Lincoln to a widow who lost sons in the Civil War.
Unlike Obama, Bush drew a cheer from those who remembered him shouting through a bullhorn atop the smoldering rubble. For Obama, 11 September is perhaps a less wrenching experience, though it underpins what has become one of the great paradoxes of his presidency. He is a Democratic leader who opposed the Iraq war and is pulling troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, but has notched up a record as a lethal, relentless hunter of terrorists. He is a President who banned torture in the interrogation of suspected terrorists and pledged— unsuccessfully, so far— to close the military prison in Guantánamo Bay, but carried out more drone strikes in Pakistan in his first year in office than Bush did in his eight years.
In the process, the White House said, it has killed more officials of al-Qaeda in the last two and a half years than were eliminated during the entire Bush administration. Among the big names: two top al-Qaeda managers, Sheik Saeed al-Masri and Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, and one of its most feared field commanders, Ilyas Kashmiri. “We have taken the fight to al-Qaeda like never before,” Obama said in his weekly address.
On Sunday, Obama moved quietly through the rituals of remembrance, laying a wreath at a memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where a United Airlines plane crashed after passengers fought with the hijackers, and later another wreath at the 9/11 Memorial at the Pentagon.
When the President finally spoke, at a concert in Washington on Sunday evening, he celebrated a nation that had not “succumbed to suspicion”. But he also signaled that the 11 September decade— one of endless war in Afghanistan and Iraq— was drawing to a close. “Our strength is not measured in our ability to stay in these places,” Obama declared. “It comes from our commitment to leave those lands to free people and sovereign states, and our desire to move from a decade of war to a future of peace.”
In counterterrorism, there is no question that in Obama’s intense use of drones and his laser focus on al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups was a departure from the Bush administration’s “global war on terrorism”. But there has been as much continuity as change in the Obama method, according to terrorism experts. Obama, for example, has continued the full government response to terrorism that the Bush administration eventually adopted. This approach— with the CIA and FBI working more collaboratively with agencies like the Treasury and the State Department, especially in the field— culminated in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
“What you’ve seen from the Obama administration is fundamental continuity in the counterterrorism policies handed over in 2009, while sharpening the campaign to eliminate core al-Qaeda leadership and disrupt safe havens in western Pakistan and Yemen,” said Juan Zarate, a top counterterrorism adviser in the Bush administration, who has nevertheless criticized the Obama White House for its muddled detention policies.
To be sure, Obama made important refinements and changes. Most notably, he has significantly increased the use of covert and clandestine operations by CIA paramilitary and Special Operations forces from the United States military.
In Obama’s first year in office, the CIA carried out 53 drone strikes in Pakistan. The next year, it more than doubled that figure, to 117, according to The Long War Journal, a website that follows the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The pace is off a bit this year— 49 through late August— but the drone campaign is spreading to other countries.
The CIA plans to carry out armed drone missions against al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen, and the military has conducted drone strikes to kill insurgents in Somalia. “Stepping up the drone strikes has been a game changer,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. “It is frustrating al-Qaeda’s movements enormously.” Still, while Hoffman said that al-Qaeda’s core network had been crippled, its offshoots in Yemen and North Africa continued to put down roots, posing a potentially greater threat to the United States than Osama bin Laden’s surviving lieutenants. “We can say we turned a corner with al-Qaeda,” he said, “but we can’t say we turned a corner in the war on terrorism.”
For all its achievements, the administration has also been lucky. A Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, almost blew up a Northwest Airlines jet on 25 December 2009, with explosives sewn into his underwear. Six months later, a Pakistani-American, Faisal Shahzad, parked an SUV loaded with a bomb that failed to detonate in Times Square.
“Obama is rightly proud of his counterterrorism record, but had Umar Abdulmutallab not lost his cool on that plane, he wouldn’t have had much of a record to point to,” said Bruce O. Riedel, a former intelligence officer who has advised the White House. “His presidency would have been transformed that Christmas.” 

The New York Times has a slideshow retrospective from the last ten years here.

Rico says that 'multiple passengers holed up in the bathroom' is problematic, and wonders if you 'degrade' al-Qaeda by telling them how badly they dress, and What, you didn't get the memo? is even more poignant now, but he can't imagine why these idiots (even though Rico likes their show) brought 'a rental truck filled with pyrotechnics and several guns' to any airport: