On a balmy autumnal evening in October 2001, a secret task force assembled by the CIA and the Pentagon met in a nondescript concrete-and-glass corporate building at the end of Fiji Way, a run-of-the-mill thoroughfare 20 miles west of Los Angeles. That task force, however, was anything but run-of-the-mill. Dubbed the Entertainment Industry Task Force, it comprised 30 of Hollywood’s most renowned filmmakers and creatives, including household names such as Oliver Stone (Platoon), David Fincher (Fight Club), and Randal Kleiser (Grease). Their mission was to imagine the next devastating terrorist attack, mere weeks after the 11 September 2001, attacks set fire to the Manhattan skyline and shook the world. 

‘We actually collected a bunch of Hollywood screenwriters’, recalled former Deputy CIA Director John McLaughlin, ‘and said, “Okay, for the next three hours, we want you to be terrorists. Make a terrorist movie for us.”’ The task force was assembled to address the assumption held by many policymakers and analysts that at the core of why 9/11 happened was a failure of imagination. This assumption was, and remains, false. 

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The truth is more damning than a failure of imagination. Far from failing to foresee a black swan event, the US intelligence community and American policymakers acted out of bureaucratic negligence, complacency and incompetence in the lead-up to the 11 September attacks. The source of failure was not the inability to imagine the atrocity. It was failing to identify terrorism as the state’s most acute security threat and to take proportionate security measures.    

The warning signs of a large-scale terror attack had been evident since the December 1992 bombing of a hotel in Aden, Yemen, which hosted US Army personnel. Yet American policymakers wilfully ignored them. Between February 1993 and October 2000, there were eight terror plots, verifiably attributed to al-Qaeda and its operatives, attempted or planned against the United States, including a successful truck bomb detonation in the basement parking lot of the World Trade Centre eight and a half years before 9/11. 

Given al-Qaeda’s trajectory from 1992, 9/11 was preventable........

© The Spectator