Home > Government IT

Computerworld - WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration "would have moved heaven and earth" to stop the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks had it known when and where they would take place, National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice said last week in testimony before the independent commission investigating the attacks.
But "structural and legal impediments" to information sharing among U.S. law enforcement agencies prevented critical clues from reaching the White House, she said.
In stark contrast to the March 24 testimony of Richard A. Clarke, the administration's former counterterrorism coordinator, Rice stuck to a highly scripted public statement that blamed outdated legal policies and cultural obstacles throughout various federal agencies for the intelligence failure that allowed the 9/11 terrorist conspiracy to go undetected.
"The United States was effectively blind to what was about to happen," said Rice. "There was no silver bullet that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. In hindsight, if anything might have helped stop 9/11, it would have been better information about threats inside the United States, something made difficult by structural and legal impediments that prevented the collection and sharing of information by our law enforcement and intelligence agencies."
In both his testimony and his new book, Against All Enemies (Free Press, 2004), Clarke specifically highlighted the FBI's lack of IT infrastructure as a major contributing factor to critical clues being overlooked . Former Democratic senator and commission member Bob Kerrey pressed Rice on the apparent failure of the administration and the intelligence community to use Intelink, the network for sharing classified intelligence, to get the word out that certain FBI agents were concerned about possible al-Qaeda attempts to infiltrate U.S. flight schools.

National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice

"I don't need a catastrophic event to know that the CIA and the FBI don't do a very good job of communicating," said Kerrey. But if the information was put out on Intelink, "the game's over," he said. "It ends. This conspiracy would have been rolled up."
Rice countered by saying that there was little that could have prevented the attacks.
Intelink was deployed in 1994 as the first intelligence community intranet for handling classified intelligence data. However, in the decade since it was introduced, the system has grown to more than 2.4 million Web pages, managed and updated by dozens of intelligence organizations throughout the national security community.
The massive growth in the amount of data available through Intelink recently led some in the intelligence community to liken conducting searches on the network to "shooting craps" .
More troubling, however, was Rice'stacit acknowledgment that information-sharing problems still exist 19 months after the attacks.
"I would not consider the problem solved," Rice told the commission. "My greatest concern is that, as Sept. 11 recedes from memory, we will begin to unlearn the lessons we've learned."

Read more about Government IT in Computerworld's Government IT Topic Center.