Edward Snowden on 9/11: what the evidence says · JRE #1368
SUBJECT: 9/11
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
the reason that they weren't prevented is what they call stovepiping, right? There was not enough sharing. They needed to break down the walls and the restrictions that were chaining these poor patriots at the NSA and the CIA and the FBI from all working on the same team
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
The 9/11 Commission's 2004 report confirms that inadequate information-sharing among agencies, including legal and bureaucratic barriers between intelligence and law enforcement (the so-called "wall"), was a significant factor: the report explicitly cites the FBI's "limited capacity to share information both internally and externally" and "perceived legal barriers to sharing information," and identifies failure to pool intelligence across the CIA, FBI, State Department, and military as part of a broader "management" failure category. However, the Commission attributed the failure to prevent the attacks to multiple compounding causes, not stovepiping alone, listing failures of imagination, policy, and capabilities as equally or more important, and stated that leaders did not grasp the gravity of the al Qaeda threat before 9/11. The Commission also cautioned that "since the plotters were flexible and resourceful, we cannot know whether any single step or series of steps would have defeated them," which undercuts the claim that better information-sharing alone would have prevented the attacks. Overall: the description of stovepiping as a real, documented institutional failure is accurate, but the claim that this alone means the attacks "could have been prevented" goes beyond what the Commission itself concluded.