This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, September 13th, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What were Osama bin Laden's goals?

How did the United States play into those goals?

And why are we just now learning many of the lessons that we should have learned from September

11th, 2001?

Malu innocent, a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute's officer thoughts.

September 11, 2001 really came out of nowhere from the perspective of most Americans, but U.S.

intelligence gathere is in the United States and in other countries an event like this was not terribly

unexpected.

Right.

Many Americans were sort of in the dark about why the United States was attacked on September

11th.

There were a string of pre-9-11 intelligence failures.

Unfortunately, a lot of them were dealing with the lack of sort of bureaucratic

collaboration between various agencies, whether that was the DOJ and FBI and the DOD, the CIA.

But, you know, we did have a number of attacks throughout the 1990s, and many of these

attacks began shortly after the Persian Gulf War of 1990, 1991.

That was really sort of the rallying cry for Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden's sort of affiliate groups around the world.

We saw a string of attacks beginning with the first attack on the World Trade Center in

1993, the attacks on the U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, the attack on the U.S.

colon 2000, and as confirmed by, you know, various U.S. government reports, by the 9-11 Commission by the Defense Intelligence Agency.

...