The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, had a profound effect on the American psyche. The story of that day, what led up to it, and what resulted from it is slowly starting to solidify. It sometimes seems the only people questioning the official version are the “truthers”—the Michael Moore types convinced that somehow Bush and Halliburton, together with the Carlyle Group and probably Wal-Mart, staged the attack.

But the official history of September 11 has been infested by political correctness, and we do need to set the record straight. Mostly, it’s important to remember the bungling of the Clinton administration and the cover-ups by Clinton’s national security advisor Sandy Berger. Also, it’s crucial to debunk conspiracy theories about Saudi involvement; one of bin Laden’s goals was to weaken Saudi Arabia by harming U.S.-Saudi ties. We also need to squelch the claims of the blame-America-firsters. Osama bin Laden and his pawns are the only people responsible for September 11.

Guess what?

Officials in both the CIA and FBI knew that al Qaeda posed a grave threat, but because of bureaucratic red tape, they weren’t allowed to share information.

Turning the U.S. against the Saudis was a key element of Osama bin Laden’s September 11 plot.

Clinton’s team missed the al Qaeda threat

It’s crucial for the Left to claim that under Clinton Americans enjoyed years of peace and prosperity. The economy grew, they say, and government spending was even kept under control. They admit Clinton may have had personal shortcomings, but he governed well. To preserve this myth, you need to believe that September 11 came out of nowhere, with no warning at all. To believe that, you need to ignore history.

Al Qaeda was hardly unknown to U.S. policymakers before September 11. It had already carried out two ambitious and devastating attacks on U.S. targets, well outside the normal range of Middle Eastern terror groups. On August 7, 1998, the group simultaneously bombed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Together, 223 people were killed and more than 4,000 were wounded. I and many other American journalists correctly ascribed the bombings to al Qaeda at the time. The name was apparently first publicly used (spelled al-Qaida) by President Bill Clinton only two weeks after these attacks.

On October 12, 2000, al Qaeda members using nothing more high-tech than a rowboat filled with explosives severely damaged the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen. Seventeen U.S. sailors were killed and another thirty-nine were injured. The group was clearly already competent, and dangerous. The attacks on the embassies showed a capability to organize ambitious simultaneous attacks against different targets.

It later emerged that different parts of the enormous U.S. international intelligence and domestic security organizations had received disparate pieces of information indicating that al Qaeda was organizing attacks within the United States itself. This was something that neither the PLO, Black September, and or any other Palestinian terror group had dared or been able to do.

A number of senior U.S. officials were alert to the dangers al Qaeda posed. One was Richard Clarke, who was in charge of counter-terrorism in the Clinton administration, which Clinton rightly made a cabinet-level job. Another was John O’Neill, a brilliant, abrasive, go-getting deputy director at the FBI who was forced out of office in 2000 because he made slick, useless bureaucrats uncomfortable. A third was George Tenet, Clinton’s own director of Central Intelligence. To his credit, George W. Bush kept both Tenet and Clarke in their positions—highly unusual for any incoming opposition president. (Clarke’s position was downgraded.)

However, what followed was a bipartisan catastrophe. Clinton and his National Security Council team, headed by national security advisor Sandy Berger, never took the threat of al Qaeda seriously enough. After September 11, well after the Clinton administration left office, Berger, in an unprecedented and highly improper series of clearly premeditated actions between September 2 and October 2, 2003, withdrew hundreds of pages of documents dealing with Islamist terror threats to the United States from the U.S. National Archives in Washington. Many of those documents were never returned, and Berger, after contradicting himself in previous accounts, eventually admitted to destroying many of them. On September 8, 2005, he was fined $50,000 and sentenced to one hundred hours of community service for these actions. Considering that the documents he destroyed might well have served as evidence for impeachment against him by some future U.S. Congress, the penalty seems a cheap price for him to pay. It seems a reasonable presumption to conclude that Berger destroyed the documents because they contained exceptionally incriminating or embarrassing evidence about how he and top Clinton officials underestimated al Qaeda.

Books You’re Not Supposed to Read

The catastrophes of September 11 have produced a library of books, many of them very good. Two of the very best are Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror by Richard Clarke; New York: Free Press, 2004, and The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to September 11 by Lawrence Wright; New York: Vintage, 2007.

No one was in a better position than Clarke to write the inside story on the repeated bungles of top-level U.S. policymakers under both Clinton and Bush. Abrasive, opinionated, knowledgeable, honest, and outspoken, he wrote that rare thing, a Washington memoir that carries conviction. It is also a gripping read.

So is Wright’s book, focused as it is on the tragic hero John J. O’Neill, who could have stopped the September 11 terror plot in its tracks. But no one else put the pieces together, and like Clarke, O’Neill was shrugged off by the suits in both the Clinton and Bush administrations as being too hard-charging. What that meant was that he was hardworking, dynamic, intelligent, honest, and determined to protect his country.

Bush drops the ball on al Qaeda too

Unfortunately, the incoming Bush administration was just as complacent. A frustrated John O’Neill was squeezed out of the FBI. His repeated warnings about catastrophe on the horizon had discredited him in the complacent eyes of policymakers and movers and shakers in both parties. He took a job running security for the World Trade Center and was in his office on the thirty-fourth floor when the hijacked airliner struck his building. He survived the initial blast and called his family to tell them he was all right. But he insisted on going to back to help rescue others, and perished when the towers collapsed. He was one of the most heroic and certainly the most tragic figure in the whole business.

Meanwhile, able officials at both the FBI and the CIA were restricted from sharing information and cooperating effectively by congressional legislation passed in the post-Vietnam era by Democratic-controlled Congresses. ACLU-inspired queasiness about intelligence gathering kept us from acting before September 11.

As late as September 10, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a group of U.S. senators who wanted to switch $500 million—a relatively small sum by twenty-first-century defense budget standards—from high-tech weapons, including ballistic missile defense, to anti-terrorist operations that he would urge President Bush to veto any such measure. Nor is there any real indication, despite much subsequent spin to the contrary, that either Bush or Condoleezza Rice took George Tenet’s warnings about al Qaeda’s growing capabilities and evident intentions to carry out terror attacks within the United States any more seriously. Tenet tried to serve both Clinton and Bush decently, competently, and honorably. But if there was one charge that can be tellingly made against him, as a respected former senior congressional official who dealt with many of these issues told me, it was that he sometimes shrank from telling truth to power.

Thousands of Americans were about to die because of all the complacency, incompetence, and bungling.

Heroes and lessons

Only one high-tech system worked effectively to save thousands of American lives on September 11, and it didn’t take a cent from the $360 billion Pentagon budget. That system was the ordinary cell phones passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark, New Jersey, to San Francisco used to report that their plane had been hijacked. Realizing they were on a one-way trip, and with nothing left to lose, several passengers informed their loved ones they were going to storm the hijackers, who had already slit the throats of the airline pilots, as their co-plotters did on the other three planes. No one will ever know the details of what followed, but the passengers succeeded in their goal: the airliner crashed into a Pennsylvania field, killing everyone on board. Its intended target appears to have been the United States Capitol, where the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives were both in session at the time.

Bin Laden Warned Us

In his March 1997 interview with CNN’s Peter Arnett, Osama bin Laden appeared to refer directly to the attacks of September 11:

PETER ARNETT: What are your future plans?

BIN LADEN: You’ll see them and hear about them in the media, God willing.

Had that aspect of the plot succeeded, a national catastrophe would have escalated into a national crisis. What saved the nation from such an unprecedented crisis was the heroism and self-sacrifice of a handful of ordinary people.

The two hijacked planes targeted for the Twin Towers both hit their targets. They were not remotely controlled, as some more creative conspiracy nuts later claimed: a United Press International correspondent in Manhattan reported later how he observed with his own eyes that the hijacker pilot of the second airliner had corrected his flight to try to hit the tower at a lower point, to trap more people.

The towers were supposed to be able to withstand any aircraft crashing into them. Their steel structures, in fact, withstood the kinetic shocks of the two airliners, exactly as they were supposed to. But the towers had been designed before the first wide-body and “jumbo” airliners, and the hijackers had deliberately planned to hijack planes at the beginning of their cross-country flights so that their fuel tanks were still almost full.

Osama bin Laden had trained as a civilian engineer, and he boasted later that he had calculated that the intense heat of the burning gasoline would prove sufficient to melt the towers’ steel structures. The two buildings were also more vulnerable because, in a design exceptionally unusual for any sky-scraper, their steel skeletons had been erected on the outside, rather than in their inner core. Had the Twin Towers been built in the traditional manner, they might have survived.

A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read

For documentation of the serial incompetence and blindness of the Clinton administration on the subject, the book to read is Breakdown: How America’s Intelligence Failures Led to 9/11 by Bill Gertz; Washington, DC: Regnery, 2002. Gertz, the veteran intelligence correspondent at the Washington Times, produced a slam-dunk authoritative, devastating, and overwhelming in its documentation and detail.

The fourth hijacked plane was crashed into the Pentagon. The superiority of World War II architectural planning instead of 1960s sky-scrapers approved by the Rockefellers was rapidly demonstrated. The Pentagon death toll was just above 200, a fraction of the 2,750 who died in the Twin Towers. The Pentagon doesn’t even appear to have been the intended target. The hijiackers appear to have sought to destroy the White House, but they didn’t realize that the White House is carefully camouflaged from aerial recognition and has been for years. Unable to identify the White House, they then struck the Pentagon as the most easily identifiable target, assuming that their comrades on United 93 would destroy the Capitol.

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld showed—or appeared to show—great coolness and self-confidence when visiting the site of the crashed airliner in his own Pentagon headquarters. However, later reports revealed that Rumsfeld may not have been fully aware of what was going on or how to respond. He spent the rest of that fateful morning painstakingly drafting legal rules of engagement under which the U.S. Air Force could shoot down hijacked airliners.

The Saudis weren’t complicit in the attacks

Catastrophes and assassinations always produce conspiracy theories, most of them absurd, and September 11 was no exception. War hawks who wanted to invade Iraq tried to hang the blame on Saddam Hussein. There wasn’t a shred of real evidence to support that contention, though deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz was urging an invasion of Iraq within twenty-four hours of the attacks.

At the other end of the spectrum were the left-wing nuts led by Michael Moore, who always had hated the Saudis because they were rich, conservative, religious, traditional, and—worst of all—friends of the United States and the Bush family.

Most of the hijackers were indeed Saudis, the rest were Egyptians. This was no accident. Bin Laden wanted to torpedo the U.S.-Saudi alliance, so he wanted as many Saudi nationals as possible implicated in the attack. He was determined to reestablish the caliphate that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk had abolished in 1924, and his first and primary targets were the rulers of his own nation, whom he hated with a virulent passion. The Saudis’ main source of income remained their oil exports, and U.S. military support remained essential to the kingdom’s survival in the face of the Iranian and Iraqi threats. Therefore, bin Laden’s strategic goal on September 11, beyond slaughtering thousands of Americans and decapitating the entire U.S. political system, was to destroy the U.S.-Saudi alliance. He didn’t quite succeed, but in the short term, he damaged it badly.

The Heroics of Flight 93

The hijackers of Flight 93 had warned the passengers to stay still, but once they learned that jets had crashed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, they realized they needed to take action. Below is an excerpt of the cell phone conversation between Flight 93 passenger Tom Burnett and his wife, Deena:

TOM: We’re waiting until we’re over a rural area. We’re going to take back the airplane.

DEENA: No! Sit down, be still, be quiet, and don’t draw attention to yourself! [the exact words taught to her by Delta Airlines flight attendant training]

TOM: Deena, if they’re going to crash this plane into the ground, we’re going to have to do something.

DEENA: What about the authorities?

TOM: We can’t wait for the authorities. I don’t know what they could do anyway. It’s up to us. I think we can do it.

DEENA: What do you want me to do?

TOM: Pray, Deena, just pray.

DEENA: [after a long pause] I love you.

TOM: Don’t worry, we’re going to do something.

Bin Laden was a renegade, but he was a renegade from one of the wealthiest, best-connected, most influential, and most respected families in Saudi Arabia. Immediately after September 11, the Saudis reacted by rushing as many of their notables out of the United States as possible. Later extensive research gave no indication that any significant figures in the Saudi royal family, government, or major institutions were involved in the plot, but the mass flight did play into the hands of conspiracy mongers. Much damage was also done by Michael Moore’s immensely popular documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. In the year before the 2004 presidential election the movie made more than $100 million—an unprecedented achievement for any American documentary on theatrical release, though the secret of its success was the anti-Saudi and anti–oil company paranoia with which Moore laced it.

The United States paid a heavy price for the anti-Saudi paranoia fanned by Moore and his friends. The Saudis were alarmed by all the rhetoric, and they feared that the tough measures in the USA PATRIOT Act that could freeze terrorist capital could freeze Saudi capital as well. They moved most of the liquid assets they had kept for decades in the United States to other parts of the world. No one knows the exact sums involved, but estimates have run as high as many billions of dollars.

Why did it happen?

Weakening Saudi Arabia was a major aim of bin Laden, but he had no shortage of reasons to hate the U.S. Self-hating Americans like to say bin Laden attacked the U.S. because we oppressed the Palestinians, or because of our capitalist greed. Others blame our corrupt culture or our military overreach. In some ways, they’re all right: bin Laden attacked us because of everything about us.

If you look at bin Laden’s various public statements, before and after September 11, you see that the list of complaints is long. In 1996, after he issued his “Declaration of War Against the Americans Who Occupy” Saudi Arabia, he attributed the jihad to the fact that the U.S. government is “unjust, criminal, and tyrannical.” He cited American “support for the Israeli occupation,” as well as our finance industry (charging interest, you know), and our consumption of alcohol. In a post–September 11 statement, he attacked the U.S. for our blockade against Saddam Hussein’s regime, Israel’s use of force against the Palestinians, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the very existence of Israel.

Very simply, the only way we could have avoided the attack was by preventing it through intelligence and counter-terrorism measures.