by Our Diplomatic Affairs Editor
Twenty-five years after 9/11, America is still opening its intelligence files and confronting an uncomfortable question: what did the state know, what did it misunderstand, and why did warnings fail to prevent catastrophe? Sri Lanka should be asking precisely the same questions about Easter Sunday. Instead, it has often appeared to settle on a far easier narrative — blame intelligence. The newly declassified US President’s Daily Brief material makes that narrative increasingly difficult to sustain. The documents do not show that the CIA predicted 9/11. They show something more complicated: intelligence agencies repeatedly identified Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda as a grave and persistent threat, reported possible attacks inside the United States, examined the possibility of aircraft hijacking and tracked the organisation’s networks, while simultaneously warning that some information was unreliable or impossible to corroborate. In other words, intelligence was doing what intelligence does: collecting fragments, assessing them, warning decision-makers and living with uncertainty. The catastrophe came partly from the failure to turn those fragments into a sufficiently precise understanding of what was coming.
The quotations in the newly released material are extraordinary. A September 1998 PDB reported that Bin Laden’s preferred option was to strike the United States on American soil; a source also claimed that a group might “fly explosive-packed airplane into US city”. But the same assessment acknowledged “no conclusive information” about future attack plans. In December 1998, intelligence reported that Bin Laden was preparing attacks against Americans, including a possible hijacking to secure the release of imprisoned extremists. Another PDB said some members had received hijacking training. In August 1999, the assessment was that Bin Laden was still planning attacks “in Washington and overseas”. By December 2000, Al Qaeda was described as determined to carry out “spectacular terrorist attacks against the US”. Then came the 6 August 2001 presidential briefing, whose title remains chilling: “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” Yet even that document carried the warning that intelligence officials “have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting”. This is the crucial lesson. The United States had warnings, but warnings were not the same as foreknowledge. Intelligence officers did not possess a completed map of 11 September. They possessed pieces of a puzzle whose final picture they could not see.
That distinction matters enormously for Sri Lanka. The Easter Sunday attacks were not an intelligence vacuum. Information about Zahran Hashim and his associates, extremist activity and potential threats existed before 21 April 2019. If intelligence officers collected such information, assessed it and passed warnings through the appropriate channels, then describing the entire catastrophe simply as an “intelligence failure” is not an explanation. It is the beginning of an investigation. The real questions are what happened after the information entered the state apparatus: who received it, who assessed it, who was responsible for acting on it, what did criminal investigators know, what investigations were opened or abandoned, what suspects had already come under scrutiny, and whether investigators were permitted to follow the evidence wherever it led. Intelligence gathering and criminal investigation are different functions. A failure in one does not automatically establish failure in the other.
Yet Sri Lanka’s post-Easter politics produced an extraordinary asymmetry. Intelligence officers were not merely criticised. Some were arrested, prosecuted or detained under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, while serious questions have been raised about whether particular cases were supported by sufficient evidence. Meanwhile, investigators and officials connected with the security and investigative machinery operating around the period of the attacks were, after years of controversy and public condemnation, reinstated or promoted. If an intelligence officer can lose liberty under a notorious counter-terrorism law without a properly established evidentiary case, while officials whose performance is questioned in relation to the period surrounding the attacks can later receive reinstatement or promotion, then the obvious question is unavoidable: what standard of justice is being applied? This is not an argument that intelligence officers should be beyond scrutiny. They should be investigated rigorously when there is evidence of wrongdoing. It is an argument that the same evidentiary standard must apply to everyone.
The contradiction becomes even more disturbing when conspiracy enters the discussion. The Catholic Church, led by Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, became one of the most powerful voices demanding answers after Easter Sunday. That demand was legitimate. The victims and their families were entitled to the truth, and no institution should be shielded from scrutiny. But demands for accountability became intertwined with claims of a wider conspiracy. The former Attorney General Dappula de Livera, a person who had access to investigation material by virtue of his office, publicly declared that there had been a “grand conspiracy”. Such a statement from a former Attorney General cannot simply be dismissed; nor can it be treated as established fact because the person making it once occupied the country’s highest prosecutorial office. It raises a much more basic question: where is the evidence? If the claim was based on intelligence, investigative material, financial records, communications or witness testimony, those foundations should be capable of being identified and tested. If the evidence does not establish the allegation, then the allegation remains an allegation.
This is where the Sri Lankan narrative risks becoming self-defeating. The messenger can be arrested, detained, prosecuted, transferred, publicly condemned and, in some cases, forced to defend his professional reputation for years. Yet those making the most explosive claims about hidden conspiracies have not always faced an equivalent public demand to substantiate them. The result is a dangerous inversion of accountability: the person who carries the warning becomes the suspect, while the person who announces the conspiracy becomes the narrator. That is not necessarily justice. It can become politics masquerading as investigation. And when conspiracy theories acquire institutional, religious or political authority, they can crowd out the much harder work of reconstructing the actual terrorist organisation — its ideology, recruitment, financing, facilitators, communications, weapons, training and connections.
The American experience should be a warning against precisely this temptation. The declassified PDB review does not absolve American intelligence. It exposes failures of interpretation, coordination and imagination. But it also refuses to turn every uncertain intelligence report into fact. It records information about Bin Laden’s interest in unconventional weapons, for example, while repeatedly noting doubts about sources and capabilities. It examines the Taliban’s refusal to surrender Bin Laden, Pakistan’s relationship with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, the USS Cole bombing and the rapidly intensifying threat reports of 2001. The objective is not to manufacture a conspiracy but to reconstruct what was known and what was not known. That is why the files remain valuable 25 years later.
Sri Lanka needs the same discipline. If an intelligence officer committed a crime, produce the evidence and prosecute the crime. If a criminal investigator obstructed an investigation, establish it and prosecute that offence. If a politician interfered, document the interference. If a conspiracy existed, identify its participants, mechanism and evidence. But if an alleged conspiracy rests primarily on political suspicion, institutional failure or repeated assertions, then it must not be promoted from allegation to historical fact simply through repetition. And if intelligence officers were prosecuted or detained without sufficient evidence, that too must be examined as part of the Easter Sunday story.
The deepest irony is that Sri Lanka may have spent years asking whether intelligence failed when the more important question was what the rest of the state did with the intelligence it received. The American files show that even the world’s most powerful intelligence apparatus could not convert years of warnings into prevention. But America is now reconstructing that failure rather than pretending that one institution or one group of officers provides the whole explanation. Sri Lanka should do the same.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, Washington is still asking what the warnings meant. Seven years after Easter Sunday, Sri Lanka should be asking what happened to its warnings — and why some people who carried them were punished while those who alleged conspiracies were not always required to prove them. The question is no longer simply who failed to prevent Easter Sunday. It is whether Sri Lanka’s pursuit of accountability after Easter Sunday itself became selective. If this is justice, one question remains impossible to avoid: why does the evidentiary standard appear to change depending on who is being accused?
