Dans
une série d'articles à paraître tous les jours pendant une bonne semaine, Timothy Noah, Américain et journaliste, revient sur les craintes exprimées au lendemain du 11 septembre et étudie les raisons possibles de leur non-concrétisation, de la plus rassurante à la plus terrifiante.
Hier c'était "The Terrorists-Are-Dumb Theory". Aujourd'hui Noah évoque "The Near Enemy".
Je me demande où se situe "George W. Bush was right all along" dans la liste. Rassurant ou terrifiant ? :D
(Bon en fait les réactions (ainsi que les préventions (sic) : voir extrait ci-dessous) de l'administration US aux attaques contre le sol américain sont déjà prises en comptes dans les modèles proposés)
Extrait de la première partie :
"Al-Qaida's successful elimination of the Twin Towers, part of the Pentagon, four jetliners, and nearly 3,000 innocent lives makes the terror group seem, in hindsight, diabolically brilliant. But when you review how close the terrorists came to being exposed by U.S. intelligence, 9/11 doesn't look like an ingenious plan that succeeded because of shrewd planning. It looks like a stupid plan that succeeded through sheer dumb luck.
Consider:
• Conspirator Khalid Almihdhar, who was (at least theoretically) under U.S. surveillance for his suspected role in the bombing of the USS Cole, aroused suspicion at a San Diego flight-training school with his impatient request that he be taught how to fly a Boeing jet. (On 9/11, Almihdhar would help crash American Flight 77 into the Pentagon, killing 189 people.)
• Another conspirator, Nawaf Alhazmi, aroused suspicion when he boasted to a fellow gas-station employee that he would become famous. (Alhazmi would go down with Almihdhar on Flight 77. For more on what the Federal Bureau of Investigation knew about Almihdhar and Alhazmi prior to 9/11, click here.)
• By late July, former Central Intelligence Agency chief George Tenet told the 9/11 Commission, "the system was blinking red," and earlier that same month, FBI special agent Kenneth Williams sent a memo from the Phoenix office to Washington noting "an inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest" attending flight school in Arizona. (To read the memo, click here.)
• In early August, President Bush received a classified daily brief famously titled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in U.S." (To read it, click here.)
• Later in August, the FBI's Minneapolis office interrogated Zacarias Moussaoui, who had aroused suspicion at a Minnesota flight school by asking about New York City flight patterns and whether a jetliner's cockpit doors could be opened while it was airborne. (To read a summary of what the Minneapolis office knew as of Aug. 19, click here.) Moussaoui's recklessness and volatility made his al-Qaida superiors reluctant to use him in the 9/11 attack; he was likely being held in reserve for a future al-Qaida attack, or possibly as a backup pilot for 9/11.
• Tenet, despite knowing "the system was blinking red," did nothing after he was briefed about Moussaoui on Aug. 23. (To read Tenet's "Terrorist Threat Review Update" for that day, click here.)
• In trying to obtain a warrant to examine Moussaoui's laptop, a field officer in the FBI's Minneapolis office told FBI headquarters that he was "trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center." The FBI did not obtain the evidence of Moussaoui's al-Qaida link deemed necessary to obtain that warrant until two days after 9/11.
Nearly eight years after the attacks, it remains physically sickening to review these for-want-of-a-nail details about what the U.S. government knew prior to 9/11."
À suivre, donc.