"Well, our position, and our chairman has talked about this extensively, is that we had a lot of intelligence prior to 9/11. We knew that two al Qaeda operatives who ultimately participated in the 9/11 disaster were in the United States. We didn't find them"
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The line lands with the bleak candor of someone who knows the most damning indictment is also the most mundane: we knew, and we still missed it. Ben-Veniste, speaking as a lawyer on the 9/11 Commission, isn’t chasing poetry; he’s building a record. The clipped phrasing - “We knew... We didn’t find them” - functions like a courtroom stipulation, a fact pattern stripped of excuses. That’s precisely why it stings. It refuses the comfort of mystery. The failure wasn’t a lack of warning so much as a failure of follow-through.
The specific intent is twofold: to establish that pre-9/11 intelligence existed (countering claims of total surprise) and to shift the argument to institutional performance. “Our chairman has talked about this extensively” is subtle message management: he’s aligning his statement with the Commission’s official narrative and signaling that this is not a rogue opinion but a vetted conclusion.
The subtext is an accusation without theatrics. “We knew” implies actionable knowledge, not rumor. Naming “two al Qaeda operatives” narrows the charge to something almost procedural: names, visas, locations - things governments are supposed to be able to track. “We didn’t find them” is a quiet description of a loud problem: siloed agencies, legal constraints, bureaucratic inertia, and a pre-Patriot Act security apparatus not built for the kind of networked threat al Qaeda represented.
Context matters: post-attack America wanted villains, but commissions are designed to produce mechanisms - how breakdowns happened, where accountability diffuses. Ben-Veniste’s sentence is the Commission’s thesis in miniature: catastrophic outcomes can come from ordinary institutional gaps.
The specific intent is twofold: to establish that pre-9/11 intelligence existed (countering claims of total surprise) and to shift the argument to institutional performance. “Our chairman has talked about this extensively” is subtle message management: he’s aligning his statement with the Commission’s official narrative and signaling that this is not a rogue opinion but a vetted conclusion.
The subtext is an accusation without theatrics. “We knew” implies actionable knowledge, not rumor. Naming “two al Qaeda operatives” narrows the charge to something almost procedural: names, visas, locations - things governments are supposed to be able to track. “We didn’t find them” is a quiet description of a loud problem: siloed agencies, legal constraints, bureaucratic inertia, and a pre-Patriot Act security apparatus not built for the kind of networked threat al Qaeda represented.
Context matters: post-attack America wanted villains, but commissions are designed to produce mechanisms - how breakdowns happened, where accountability diffuses. Ben-Veniste’s sentence is the Commission’s thesis in miniature: catastrophic outcomes can come from ordinary institutional gaps.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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