GAO and the 1999 Dismissal of the 'Conceivable' Threat

By Harlan Pryce ·

Two years before the towers fell, federal auditors dismissed high-impact attacks as unlikely, prioritizing bookkeeping over the terrifying possibilities of asymmetric war.

The people who died in the ruins of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001 were the casualties of a bureaucratic filter. They were the victims of a government that had spent the late nineties counting its programs instead of calculating its vulnerabilities.

This failure was codified in the summer of 1999. The account of this testimony survives in the archive's curated description rather than the full pages of the report, but the summary provided by the record is sufficient to diagnose the pathology of the era. On June 9, 1999, the U.S. General Accounting Office—the federal agency within the legislative branch that provides auditing and investigative services for Congress—delivered testimony to a congressional committee, which are the legislative sub-organizations that monitor government operations and identify issues for review. The subject was the "growth in federal programs" dedicated to combating terrorism.

The Domestic Pivot

According to the record, the federal government's posture in 1999 was a reaction to two specific scars. The bombing of the World Trade Center, the Manhattan complex that suffered a truck bombing in 1993, and the 1995 attack in Oklahoma City, the Oklahoma state capital where a federal building was leveled by a truck bomb, had "increased concerns about domestic terrorism."

The record establishes that these events triggered a fundamental shift in priority. Federal efforts, which the record says had been "primarily concerned about ‘international terrorism and airline hijacking,'" were refocused inward. The public record confirms that the 1993 and 1995 bombings redirected the national security apparatus toward the threat of the homegrown insurgent and the domestic cell.

The line here is a straight one, and it is a dangerous one. By treating the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City as a new epoch of domestic risk, the federal government did not simply add domestic threats to its ledger; it subtracted international ones. The focus shifted from the hijacker in the cockpit to the bomb in the parking lot. The irony is that the government used the trauma of the 1990s to justify a narrow vision of the future, convincing itself that the nature of the threat had changed, rather than expanded.

Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu

The 'Likely' Filter

Nowhere is the failure of imagination more evident than in the government's handling of mass-casualty weaponry. The record notes that while the threat of a terrorist attack using chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) weapons was growing, the report emphasized a "very critical distinction between what is conceivable or possible and what is likely."

In the cold logic of the GAO, the most "likely" threat facing the U.S. remained conventional explosives and weapons. The record shows that the government was not blind to the possibility of a CBRN event—it was simply unwilling to prioritize it because it did not fit the statistical model of "likelihood."

From the perspective of a war-plans analyst, the distinction between "conceivable" and "likely" is a death trap. Deterrence does not function by preparing for the likely; it functions by making the conceivable impossible. If an adversary knows you are only preparing for the most probable outcome, they will invariably choose the improbable path to achieve a decisive effect. By labeling high-impact, asymmetric threats as merely "conceivable," the GAO provided the government with a mathematical excuse to ignore the very events that would eventually break the system.

The Auditor's Blind Spot

The nature of the agency authoring this report is essential to understanding why the warnings were muffled. The GAO is not an intelligence agency; it is an auditing body. Its mandate is to review the "growth in federal programs," to ensure that funds are being spent according to regulation and that programs are expanding in an orderly fashion.

The record shows the GAO was reviewing "federal preparations to prevent and respond to terrorist attacks." The focus was on the machinery of response—the logistics of the aftermath—rather than the operational efficacy of intelligence gathering. The GAO was checking the plumbing while the house was being wired for demolition.

The pattern suggests a critical disconnect between the legislative oversight of the budget and the operational reality of the threat. The congressional committee received a report on whether the government had the capacity to respond, but not whether the government had the intelligence to prevent. The public record shows the U.S. was preparing for a disaster it could manage, while remaining oblivious to a catastrophe it could not.

The Bureaucratic Shield

If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, the GAO report was not an assessment of risk, but a shield for the bureaucracy. By framing the response around "likely" threats and focusing on the "growth" of programs, the government created a documented trail of perceived diligence. They could point to the report and claim they were monitoring the situation, all while ensuring that the most terrifying possibilities remained in the category of the "conceivable"—and therefore, unfunded and unaddressed.

The desk's reading is that the explicit redirection of resources away from international hijacking and toward domestic bombing created a formal, documented blind spot. This was not a mistake of analysis; it was a triumph of administrative convenience. By narrowing the scope of the threat to what was "likely," the federal government avoided the costly and politically difficult task of reimagining national security for an era of global, asymmetric warfare.

This report was the final seal on a posture of complacency. The focus on "response" and "preparations" indicated a reactive security posture that prioritized disaster management over preemptive intelligence. The GAO and the congressional committee were satisfied that the programs were growing, and in the world of the auditor, growth is often mistaken for progress.

The pattern suggests that if a full release of the underlying data were available, it would show a government that saw the warnings of CBRN and international threats but filtered them out through the sieve of "likelihood" to protect the budget and the status quo. The cost of this filtered reality was paid in full on September 11, 2001. The victims were the price of a bureaucratic distinction that favored the probable over the possible, and the likely over the lethal.

Sources

  1. GAO,Combating Terrorism, Observations on Growth in Federal Programs, June 9, 1999, (Washington, D.C.: U.S. General Accounting Office, 1999). — National Security Archive (GWU)
  2. Document PDF (GAO,Combating Terrorism, Observations on Growth in Federal Programs, June 9, 1999, (Washington, D.C.: U.S. General Accounting Office, 1999).)
  3. Background: Counterterrorism — Wikipedia