Act in a way that could prevent the attacks.
What attacks, specifically?
Do you mean what specific actions could they take against non-specific threats?
Yes, precisely. Taking the wrong action can make things worse. Let me expand on that, with examples.
The classic example of an unfortunate response to a non-specific threat is General Short, at Pearl Harbor. On receiving reports that some kind of Japanese attack was likely, he decided that the only possible attack in Hawaii would be sabotage by Japanese spies. He therefore made sure all his fighter planes were lined up close together in neat ranks in the middle of the airfields, where they could be most effectively guarded; if they's been left dispersed around the perimeters they'd have been more vulnerable. So, when the Japanese fighters strafed the airfields, they had a big fat target all nicely lined up for them, and aircraft losses were far more than they would have been if Short had done nothing.
Now, let's see what the alleged Mossad report is claimed to have said.
"terrorists plan to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture."
Where were these aircraft supposed to be hijacked? The warning suggests an international series of attacks, if both America and Israel are to be hit. So let's suppose the aim is to hijack international flights on their way to America and Israel, then crash them into specific targets. How do we defend against this? Well, we could run some exercises to prepare for intercepting incoming hijacked aircraft, we could emphasise radar coverage of the ADIZ (possibly at the expense of domestic coverage, but we've no reason to suspect a domestic threat; we know this is an international plot), and we could brief pilots and controllers to vector fighter aircraft out to sea by default if there's any kind of alert. We could concentrate our intelligence efforts on infiltrating European al-Qaeda cells, because that's where the attacks might be coming from, and we could try and get European airports to increase security.
How much of that would have helped prevent the 9/11 attacks, and how much would actually have made them easier?
And that's without considering the signal-to-noise ratio. We know there were lots of intelligence warnings coming in (as the 9/11 Commission Report makes clear), and these were a few reports among hundreds.
Yes, the Bush administration should have done more, although it's not clear exactly what. It seems clear to me that they lost focus on the terrorist threat, and the USA paid a heavy price. That's nothing to do with inside job theories, though; it's just commonplace incompetence.
Dave
