The 9/11 Commission issued its final report on Thursday, July 22. (Visit the Perrspectives Document Library to access the final report and related documents.) The report highlights 10 missed opportunities by which the U.S. national security community could have (though not should have) prevented the devastating attacks in New York and Washington. The 9/11 panel report also describes crippling organizational shortcomings of and bureaucratic miscommunications between the CIA and FBI. Among its key recommendations is the creation of a unified, cabinet-level national intelligence czar spanning the CIA, FBI and Pentagon intelligence operations.

While Chairman Tom Kean cited a pervasive "failure of imagination", the Commission's assessment essentially misses the central role of cognitive dissonance among American policymakers in the run up to the massive national security disaster of September 11, 2001. The tragedy was not merely a breakdown of planning, bureaucratic coordination, and vigilance by the Clinton or Bush administrations: it was a psychological failure. That is, the American national security establishment simply could not absorb, process, and filter data regarding threats so fundamentally at odds with its post-Cold War mind set and conceptual framework.

In a nutshell, the "pre-9/11 mindset" Madeleine Albright described to the Commission saw only major power wars fought by rational state actors with conventional and possibly nuclear weapons. With few exceptions, the American security consensus simply did not foresee conflicts with non-state terrorist groups, guided by charismatic, "irrational" leaders and utilizing asymmetrical weapons to inspire fear and create chaos.

For the American people and the 9/11 families, the answer to the question of why the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks were not prevented may have a simple, but ultimately unsatisfying answer. Apparently, we simply couldn’t conceive of it.

—Perrspective 8:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) |