gobear, you seem to be responding to my last post in a vacuum.
If you read the rest of the thread, you’ll see that I have responded at least once to pretty much every “argument” that’s been raised. I’m just not going to waste any time spiralling around a point that’s already been made and responded to.
I have no obligation to follow every single poster down whatever little redundant backwater tributary they want to try to coax me. If people want to do no more than skim the thread with one half-closed eye and then offer nothing more than redundancy or inanity, more bandwidth to them. Where is it written that I have to charge every red flag that’s waved under my nose?
Tejota, I believe that I have seen an article in the Wall Street Journal refuting the claims of Daschle by another member of the Select Intelligence commitee, but as the WSJ is an online pay service, and I no longer have the paper it was in, I can not give a cite. But his statement that they weren’t is very much disputed.
Which is a little like saying “Those darn doctors couldn’t cure my grandmother’s cancer. What a bunch of murderously negligent assholes.”
It isn’t the government’s job to square the circle either. Criticizing people for not doing the impossible rather misses the point.
Same here. You get used to it after a while.
Debate what? You started by accusing Bush and Co. of not doing something or other to prevent 9/11. You went on to say that nothing could be done anyway, but they should have done a better job of it, or something.
Hindsight is 20/freaking 20. If we had known ahead of time,we could have stopped it - but we didn’t. We were, in other words, in the same situation on 9/10 as we are now - unable to predict the future. Which is why I asked you to fire up your crystal ball.
What we are seeing in the media is a selected subset of the huge and undigestible mass of information that was available somewhere before 9/11. Of course we can see what was coming - now. What good does that do?
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t bitterly regret the attacks on 9/11 (ObL and other terrorists excepted). And I don’t know anyone in the government who doesn’t wish like hell they could have stopped it. Anyone who thinks otherwise is free to post their opinion. I am sure I am not alone in having some thoughts to share with those who think 9/11 was a good thing.
And it is certainly is a good idea to see if there is anything that can be reasonably done to improve our intelligence and counter-terrorism capabilities. But if we, or Congress, or anyone else goes in with the idea that now is a good time to find some scalps to hang on their belts, nothing will be accomplished, and no improvements will be possible. People react defensively, and un-cooperatively, to being called “murderous assholes”, or to being blamed for not being Nostradamus.
Just saying “someone should have done something” does no good, and some harm, unless you can plausibly establish that there was, in fact, “something” that could have been done. I repeat my statements of respect and admiration for those on the board who, although not Bush supporters, are nonetheless people of integrity and honesty, who refrain from condemnation in the absence of evidence.
So, Shodan, I began the debate by expressing an opinion. You have a better way? You seem to imply that I should have offered, in the OP, the hypothesis AND the conclusion. So now I’m confused: how is that a debate?
In the second place, you can only contradict me when you paraphrase me; when you put words in my mouth. I neither said that “nothing could be done” or that “something [with its implication of vaguess] should have been done.”
I have said that more could have been done. Each little government fiefdom had its own tightly guarded little cache of information. If they hadn’t been so secretive–and it turns out, as more information comes to light every day, downright dishonest–and had shared more of this information, I have very little doubt that SOMEONE would have been at LEAST as smart as me and might have seen a pattern emerge; a pattern that might have suggested a course of action; a course of action that might have, as I have said, kept us one step ahead of the terrorists.
And yes, hindsight is 20/20 (can we have a moratorium on the phrase for the rest of this discussion please?). That’s the problem: it wasn’t until this whole situation was far enough in the past for the pattern to fall into place even for someone as nearsighted as me and the rest of the critics. I see that as a real problem: that the professionals in charge of collecting and anaylzing this information are being held, by such as you, to the same low standard of insight into terrorist politics, as hindsighted amateurs like me.
Even really, really smart people - who work in intelligence, and are professionals, and all the other things that make for being held to a higher standard - cannot read the future.
You are basing your opinion of the situation on at least two mistaken notions;
[ul]
[li]That the information available now in the media accurately reflects the situation in the months preceding 9/11, and that the situation would have been clear if anyone were doing their job, and [/li][li]That the government can do anything. Any failure of the federal government must reflect incompetence or malice.[/li][/ul]
Both assumptions are demonstrably false.
As I mentioned earlier, all the documentation you have seen presented was selected after the fact, and was picked out from the mass because the searcher already knew what had happened. If this were not the case, you (and any other reasonably intelligent citizen) could have predicted what happened - and could predict what is going to. Any ideas what that would be?
And the problem (as far as I can tell) is not that the data regarding possible terrorism in the US were not shared. The 20th hijacker, Massouri (sic) was in custody on 9/11. The trouble was to pick out the genuine threats from a mass of conflicting, incomplete, and almost incomprehensible facts, and arrest the right people before the fact, and get the rest of the American populace to believe that you weren’t rounding up all the Middle Eastern types in the US you could think of because you had a hard-on for Islam, or because Ashcroft dislikes the Bill of Rights, but because of a genuine threat. Good luck.
And I see it as realizing that the world is not a safe place, and nothing you or I or the Attorney General can possibly do to change that fact.
The idea that Bush should have been able to read the tea leaves and know ahead of time what every tinpot terrorist in the Middle East is up to, and calling anything else a “low standard of insight”, strikes me as absurd.
Excrement occurs. It always has, and it always will.
We live in an open society. I have no doubt that if we were willing to implement some kind of fairly draconian restraints on travel or immigration or religion or what kind of work people want to engage in, we could cut way back on our domestic terrorism troubles. But I, for one, would not care to live in such a society.
We cannot be both safe and free. If I am to be allowed to join a flight school if I choose to, I have to be willing to accept that other people can do so as well, and some proportion of them are up to no good. If I want to worship as I choose, I have to realize that everyone else does too, even if some of them are crackpots.
The feds are not equipped to guarantee anyone’s safety. That sort of thing falls under the Witness Protection Program. And people tend to drop out of such a program, because of the restraints it puts on how they live their lives.
If you want to be safe, go live in a bubble. But don’t complain if the feds can’t keep everyone’s bubble inflated. It don’t work that way.
Ultimately, Sho, it seems to me that you’re saying nothing could possibly have made any difference: that the more timely coordination and analysis of all relevant intelligence would have benefitted us exactly zilch, and would have given us zero support in our eternal race to stay one step ahead of the terrorists.
First of all–and this is entirely theoretical and exists entirely in the realm of opinion–I disagree with your conclusion. In a situation like this, within the players involved and their respective security clearances, etc., it’s my opinion that there’s no such thing as too much information. (Note I’m not saying all incoming information should have been broadcast on all media for anyone and everyone; only that the agencies and personnel involved could have done a much better job communicating with each other.)
Secondly, beyond my personal disagreement, your assertion is a negative, and therefore cannot be proven, or even tested hypothetically; it’s a dead end even in theory.
I must finally, respectfully, maintain my opinion that better processing of intelligence might very well have helped us stay one step ahead of ObL. But we’ll never know, will we?
Ultimately, my criticism is that this administration has, at least until now, erred on the side of secrecy and poor interdepartmental communication. And my anger comes from my opinion that it was just this culture of secrecy that ObL exploited as part of his plan for 9/11.
It’s been said already, but here goes. I’ve heard nothing to the effect that any agency knew that the planes would be used as missiles, only that they would be hijacked. On 9/10 and before, a hijacking meant “Hands up, this plane is going to Cuba,” not “Kiss your ass goodbye, this plane is going into the Pentagon.” I’m also not sure that anyone knew there would be four hijackings in a hour. So it didn’t occur to anyone that the situation called for the extreme measures that would have been necessary to prevent it.
[The following analysis is taken from the www.Stratfor.com. (Quote is less than 500 words.) My comments in brackets.]
It is difficult to blame Bush for not noticing a vague report on potential hijackings amid the almost limitless stream of other warnings. He cannot be blamed for not seeing the Phoenix FBI field report that never left the FBI. Nor can Clinton be blamed for not reacting to the highly speculative report on the possibility of suicide bombers. Bush has taken a great deal of flak about issuing vague alerts against which no practical action can be taken. What could he possibly have done with the CIA warning?
What Bush can be blamed for is that, over the eight months following one of the worst intelligence failures in U.S. history,* fundamental changes in how the United States carries out its intelligence mission have not even begun. …the failure that led to Sept. 11 was not personal; it was systemic. It flowed directly from the fundamental architecture of American intelligence.
The Central Intelligence Agency, as the name suggests, was founded to centralize the intelligence function of the United States. It was a good idea then and it is a good idea now. Unfortunately, it is an idea that has never been truly implemented and from which, over time, the government has moved intractably away. A centralized intelligence capability is essential if the United States is to have a single, integrated, coherent picture of what is happening in the world. A bureaucratically fragmented intelligence community will generate a fragmented picture of the world. That is currently what we have.**
…
[Some components of the intelligence community: 1) CIA, 2) NSA, NRO, NIMA 3) FBI, 4) Defense Intelligence Agency, DHS]
Given this incredible tangle of capabilities, jurisdictions and competencies, it is a marvel that a finished intelligence product is ever delivered to decision makers. It is unclear whether any of these agencies completely understand their own internal vision, let alone that they are able to transmit a comprehensive picture to the CIA (which is supposed to integrate all this into a coherent world view and serve it up to the president and other senior officials for action).
Which brings us to the deepest and most intractable problem. As STRATFOR has said before, the U.S. intelligence community is obsessed with the collection of data. Apart from the Directorate of Intelligence at the CIA and sections of the DIA, the rest of the U.S. intelligence system is overwhelmingly geared toward the collection, rather than the analysis, of information. The result is inevitable: a huge amount of information is gathered, but it is never turned into intelligence.
*[Tenet, of the CIA, denies there was an intelligence failure. Let’s hope he’s just kidding.]
**[Stratfor neglects to mention the role of the National Security Council.]
[Too bad we didn’t discuss this in Great Debates. I’ve been wondering about what a taxonomy of the War on Terrorism would look like. A good conceptual framework would help us evaluate GWB’s progress with administrative reform.]
Again, and really for the last time (three times around is enough for me):
The defense of non-specificity of the “warnings” isn’t the issue, and won’t wash. This is just defensive obfuscation. What little information there was COULD have been and SHOULD have been better analyzed and synthesized and very probably WOULD have revealed a pattern that suggested specific preventive actions. Yes, all speculation, but that’s why this is a matter of opinion, not fact. My OPINION is that we might have stayed one step ahead of ObL if this administration had erred on the side of better interagency communication rather than on the side of secrecy and complacency.
[ul]“On 9/10 and before, a hijacking meant ‘Hands up, this plane is going to Cuba,’ not ‘Kiss your ass goodbye, this plane is going into the Pentagon.’ I’m also not sure that anyone knew there would be four hijackings in a hour.”[/ul]Bullshit bullshit bullshit. Specificity of foreknowledge is not the issue here, so quit with this already. And the implication–and this is of course very true–is that the attitude of the airlines has been that highjackings were part of the cost of doing business, and as such a perfectly acceptable risk. And again (and for the last time), I suggest that this complacency is exactly what ObL took advantage of on 9/11.
This is course is not the sole responsibility of the current administration, but is the result of a longstanding culture of FAA ineptitude. But the current administration is the one that failed to respond effectively–or at ALL–to the escalating warnings and clues of last summer.
Sorry, but specificity is very much the issue. In fact, it is exactly the issue, since it is only after the fact that we have information specific enough to act on.
Which is basically nothing more than saying “They should have known somehow”. Again, not specific enough to convince me that there was anything reasonably available before the fact to avert it.
And I don’t think it was secrecy or complacency. I think there is just too much information available, and no way to tell what the serious warnings are going to be.
Nope.
I swore I wasn’t going to bring this up again - but who was President when ObL bombed the World Trade Center in 1993? Wasn’t that a warning or a clue that he had it in for the WTC? And why was nothing done?
I can think of a lot of reasons, but I suspect the main one was because there was no sufficient information available to act.
If Clinton knew where ObL was with any kind of clarity, even he would have taken the bastard out. And you don’t know what it cost me to say something positive about Clinton.
How do you know that nothing was done? Clearly the WTC was undamaged for the remainder of the Clinton Admin. And subsequently destroyed after 9 months of Bush. How do you know that Bush didn’t dismantle whatever deterrent Clinton had in place? Not that I really believe that, but it naturally follows from your absurd ‘concurrent-therefore-caused-by’ nonsense, that you keep trying to claim is lissener’s argument.
On the other hand you could address lissener’s actual argument instead of going on about your favorite strawmen.
The criticism of Bush isn’t that he didn’t act on vague reports (your strawman), but that his supposedly hyper-capable, businesslike administration was unable to acquire non-vague reports. (the actual problem).
Furthermore, they were so un-concerned about the lack of specific knowledge about Bin Laden’s intentions, that Bush went on one month vacation during the height of the ‘chatter’ that the intelligence community was intercepting about a about a big terrorist incident being planned.
In July an agent sends a memo theorizing on the purpose of the existance of Middle Eastern students in a flight school in Arizona. Everyone at the FBI says-- Uh, sure, whatever.
In August a flight school in MN reports one of their students as suspicious.
MN FBI agent theorize that MN student could fly a plane into WWC.
The White House is not informed of any of the above. Why would it be? It’s all theory, conjecture and “what ifs”.
After 9/11, every brown paper bag left in a public area ground NYC to a halt. This is not the way to prepare for terrorist attacks either. For a threat to be taken seriously it should be based on some concrete evidence and not some agent’s theory. Right now Ken Williams looks like a friggin’ genius; his co-worker who theorized that the Yakuza could be digging a tunnel under the Pacific to mine Pearl Harbor does not. The day mines are found in Pearl Harbor, that guy will look lke a genius too.
Anyway- I agree with other posters here that it is impossible to create 100% security, and that the 9/11 horrors or another attack could very well slip under the best radar. But I do have to ask why GWB told the intellegence community to back off its investigation of the bin Laden family and Saudi Arabia in general. The antiterrorism effort that had, under Clinton, blocked several attacks was scaled way back, Ashcroft switched the focus of the Justice Department from anti-terrorism to anti-tits (aluminum) and the NSA herself, Condeleeza “Who could have known?” Rice, after having received very detailed briefings on ObL from Sandy Berger, Clinton’s NSA, during the transition, ended up shifting her focus from Al Quaeda to other things (things which don’t fly 767’s into buildings) during the period between the end of the Clinton administration and 9/11. The answer I come up with is that GWB didn’t want to piss off his business partners. The Bushes and the bin Ladens go way back- the bin Ladens financed GWB’s first failed business. GHWB has met with the bin Laden family in Saudi Arabia several times on behalf of the Carlyle Group, which is of course making out like bandits on the market manipulation around the Crusader project. Carlyle folks (James Baker, even) and bin Ladens were meeting on 9/11, in fact. The real truth behind this is that GWB didn’t want a little matter like national security to get in the way of the enrichment of the Bush family and their contributors. JDM
Ahhh, seeing as how I still do not have a wall street journal online subscription I can not use what I remember from an article in that, I did however find another cite.
Ahhh, seeing as how I still do not have a wall street journal online subscription I can not use what I remember from an article in that, I did however find another cite.
Ahhh, seeing as how I still do not have a wall street journal online subscription I can not use what I remember from an article in that, I did however find another cite.