September 11 Terrorist Attacks and Americans’ Preparedness for Disaster Essay Example for Free

September 11 Terrorist Attacks and Americans’ Preparedness for Disaster Essay The September 11, 2001 terrorist strikes on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center were arguably the heaviest attacks on the U.S. soil since the Pearl Harbor attack by the Japanese in 1941. The attacks, masterminded from one of the poorest countries in the world, shook the core of the world richest and most powerful nation. Many Americans still believe that the colossal intelligence machinery failed to intercept the hits, even when it had sufficient evidence that an attack was looming (Betts, 2008). The U. S. intelligence community missed or chose to overlook some of the strongest indicators of the imminent attack. Some of the pilots who launched the attacks trained in the U.S. In June, 2001, a detective observed that flight schools in Arizona were populated by an â€Å"inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest† (Betts, 2008). Having learnt earlier that the Al-Qaeda was planning to launch â€Å"plane operations,† the FBI missed to connect the imminent operations and the suspect flying students (National Commission on Terrorists Attacks Upon the United States, 2004). The former students were part of the 9/11 strike team (Marquise, 2008). One of the plotters of the 9/11 strikes, Ramzi Yousef (a Pakistani) had been arrested in the Philippines where he planned to down 11 airliners in 1995. He escaped and fled to Pakistan. His partner told the police that he planned to ram a plane into the CIA headquarters. Yousef was nephew to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who plotted the plane attacks in the Philippines and later masterminded the 9/11 attacks. The U.S. intelligence was aware of an Al Qaeda operation in the offing after surveilling a meeting of Al-Qaeda bigwigs in Malaysia in January 2000. According to Marquise (2008), the intelligence did not share the information with the law enforcement agencies to tighten surveillance within the US and at the entry points. The US would have pre-empted the attack if it had acted promptly and conclusively on the â€Å"Phoenix memo† which was written by the agent who noted the suspicious persons attending flying lessons in Arizona (Betts, 2008). In the memo, the agent raised concern that Osama bin Laden was likely to be planning an attack. He recommended that the FBI investigate the flight students. Investigators only paid attention to the memo after the attack. The attackers who trained in the US entered the country legally, and were granted tourist visas. Even as they entered the country however, custom officers noted anomalies with their applications but went ahead to allow them in. In June 2001, Saeed al Ghamdi entered the US with only $500, a one-way ticket and no address on the I-94 form. Investigations showed that six of the hijackers had contravened immigration laws during their months of stay yet none had been arrested. The Immigration Department could therefore have averted the attacks had its agents detected the overstays and violations of student status (National Commission on Terrorists Attacks Upon the United States, n.d). There is no evidence of either Washington D.C. or New York having employed a hazard or vulnerability analysis to plan for a disaster of the kind and magnitude of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. While the authorities of both cities were not in a strong position to avert the attacks, their reaction in the time following the strikes was catastrophic. Besides the people who were killed by the crashes, hundreds of responders succumbed to illness as a result of exposure to the atmospheric conditions occasioned by the explosions. The responders worked in an asbestos-contaminated environment yet they worked without respirators (Levin, S. et al., 2004). Residents of Lower Manhattan were assured that the â€Å"air was safe† yet tens of thousands perished after contact with the toxic fumes later (Mason, 2007). New York and Washington D.C authorities were unwilling to admit their unpreparedness and were quick to declare the air and water safe while it was not. References Betts, R. (2008). Two Faces of Intelligence Failure: September 11 and Iraq’s Missing WMD. Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 122, No. 4. Levin, S., Herbert, R., Moline, J., Todd, A., Stevenson, L., Landsbergis, P., Jiang, W., Skloot, G., Baron, S. Enright, P. (2004). Physical Health Status of World Trade Center Rescue and Recovery Workers and Volunteers- New York City, July 2002 – August 2004. Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 292 Issue 15. Marquise, R. (2004). Terrorism Threat Indicators. The Counter Terrorist. Mason, M. (2007). The 9/11 Cover-Up. Discover, Vol. 28, Issue 10. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (2004). The 9/11 Commission Report. New York.