Word: attacked
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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What was your involvement with the 9/11 Commission? I was assigned to head a team looking at the day of 9/11 itself and our response to the attack. I thought it would be one of the easier stories to put together because there was so much already written and broadcast about it. But as we started to get access to primary source material, the stories didn't match. And they didn't match in some pretty significant ways. What became clear was that during the time that the attacks were occurring, there was a complete disconnect between the national command...
...think government proved to be so inept at dealing with both the terrorist threat and the actual attack? The chaos that occurred on 9/11 was really inseparable from the various policy decisions and communication lapses and failures to share information throughout the government in the preceding decade. It all revolved around what I call an estrangement between the people running the departments and agencies and the people who were actually operational. [Former FBI Director] Louis Freeh could identify terrorism as a major threat, but that imperative got lost somewhere in the bureaucracy. The same thing happened throughout the government...
...book, you draw a lot of parallels between the response at 9/11 and the response to Hurricane Katrina. The chaos of 9/11 has been ascribed in large degree to the fact that the nature of the attack was a surprise. We knew there was a terrorist threat; we didn't know it would become manifest in this particular way. What was different with Katrina was that it was an event that had been anticipated and planned for in the gulf region for decades. So whatever you can say about the response to Katrina, it was not a consequence of surprise...
...Today, however, al-Qaeda is believed to comprise a couple of hundred desperate men, their core leaders hiding out in Pakistan's tribal wilds and under constant threat of attack by ever present U.S. drone aircraft, their place in Western nightmares and security determinations long since eclipsed by such longtime rivals as Iran, Hizballah, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. This year's official threat assessment by the U.S. Directorate of National Intelligence cited the global economic downturn as the primary security challenge facing the U.S. The report found "notable progress in Muslim public opinion turning against terrorist groups like...
...Sure, al-Qaeda continues to issue vituperative missives by video from its hideouts, many of them directed at the likes of Iran and Hamas. But Hamas spokesman Osama Hamdan seemed to sum up al-Qaeda's plight two years ago, when responding to a particularly rabid attack from bin Laden's No. 2. Ayman al-Zawahiri had accused Hamas of "joining the surrender train" by participating in elections and agreeing to form a unity government with Fatah. Hamas, sneered Hamdan in response, had no need of advice from a "fugitive in the Afghan mountains" and did not accept criticism from...