Begin forwarded message:
From: "Hitchens, Ralph" <Ralph.Hitchens@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: September 12, 2005 10:18:51 AM EDT
To: "'dave@xxxxxxxxxx'" <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: RE: [IP] more on "War on Terra" saves few lives, expert says
Dave, for IP if you like.
Mr. Bray was right about one thing, even if Mr. Fairlie denies
it. Only Tom Clancy (in "Debt of Honor," I believe, published in
1994) forecast the use of a commercial airliner in a suicide
terrorist exploit. Yes, there have been many airline hijackings
in recent decades but to my knowledge no one in the intelligence
community (in which I worked for most of the last 20 years) or
anywhere else put forward a scenario that resembled Clancy's.
Had anyone done so, our counter-terrorism analysts would have had
something to work with. It's not likely that an airline pilot
could be induced -- even at gunpoint -- to fly into a building, so
al-Qaeda would need its own pilots. Flying an airliner is not
something you learn at your average flight school; you need to
attend one of a relatively small number of major flight schools
that provide training in large transport-category jets. Nearly
all the students at these schools work for airlines or large
corporate operators, as the cost of this training is prohibitive.
The Phoenix FBI office had the right idea in its now-famous memo,
but it was "too little, too late." Had the Clancy scenario been
taken seriously a few years earlier, I have no doubt that the
relative handful of unaffiliated students of Middle Eastern origin
could have been identified and investigated long before 9/11.
Scenario-based forecasting doesn't seem to be widely used in the
Intelligence Community, from my experience. It's a domain that
places the highest value on inductive reasoning.
Ralph Hitchens
-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber [mailto:dave@xxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Sunday, September 11, 2005 5:08 PM
To: Ip Ip
Subject: [IP] more on "War on Terra" saves few lives, expert says
Begin forwarded message:
From: Tom Fairlie <tfairlie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: September 11, 2005 4:40:36 PM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Cc: h_bray@xxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [IP] more on "War on Terra" saves few lives, expert says
>> The "who could have dreamed up 9/11" canard has been
so overused that I'm surprised a sharp person like Mr. Bray would
even use it--unless it was dishonestly used of course. We have had
almost 700 hijackings since 1970, and the people paid to protect
the U.S. have been working on this threat full time. The President
even received specific intelligence warning him of such an attack
only a month before.<<
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