Failure of imagination
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The term failure of imagination has been used to describe part of why intelligence agencies such as the CIA failed to foresee and prevent the events of September 11, 2001. More properly, the term refers to the failure of imagination within the George W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations or within the various agencies of government such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Central Intelligence Agency.
During the summer of 2003, after the now de-classified report about the September 11th attack, many government officials such as Senator Bob Graham began to make criticisms that the September 11th attack might have easily been predicted, if not outright prevented in part or altogether.[citation needed] Following these criticisms, President Bush declassified the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing which indicated that "Bin Laden Determined to Attack United States", and which indicated that hijackings might be one possible mode of attack.
The apparently intentional crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 by its co-pilot on Halloween, 1999, and a similar intentional crash of PSA Flight 1771 by a disgruntled former airline employee on December 7, 1987, offered a precedent in history of persons intentionally crashing airliners. Nonetheless, representatives (Condoleezza Rice?) of the Bush administration in early 2004 stated that "nobody could have imagined that ... hijackers would intentionally crash .... hijackers usually want to live."[citation needed] That is to say that the historic record with respect to widely observed behavioural patterns of criminal and terrorist entities directly contradicts statements about such behaviours made by the National Security Advisor.
It was later found that some US government agencies had been doing much more than imagining it: on 9-11, the CIA and the National Reconnaissance Office were conducting a full-scale exercise studying a scenario remarkably close to the 9-11 events and what to do about it.[1] (dead link); [2] (Web Archive of Previous Link)
