It’s going to be a helluva week in Washington.
WASHINGTON, April 4 The leaders of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks agreed Sunday that evidence gathered by their panel showed the attacks could probably have been prevented.
Their remarks drew sharp disagreement from one of President Bush’s closest political advisers, who insisted that the Bush and Clinton administrations had no opportunity to disrupt the Sept. 11 plot. They also offered a preview of the difficult questions likely to confront Condoleezza Rice when she testifies before the panel at a long-awaited public hearing this week.
…
Also appearing on “Meet the Press,” Karen P. Hughes, one of Mr. Bush’s closest political advisers and an important strategist for his re-election campaign, rejected the suggestion that the attacks could have been prevented.
“I just don’t think, based on everything I know, and I was there, that there was anything that anyone in government could have done to have put together the pieces before the horror of that day,” Ms. Hughes said. “If we could have in either administration, either in the eight years of the Clinton administration or the seven and a half months of the Bush administration, I’m convinced we would have done so.”
While reading that, don’t under any circumstances forget to go check out Phil Carter’s take on Clarke:
As for Mr. Clarke’s argument regarding Iraq, I closed his book without having been persuaded by his argument. He did not marshal enough evidence to persuade me that the Bush Administration had deceived the American public to march towards war, or that it had considered (and disregarded) all of the strategic costs of the war. That’s not to say that these things aren’t true — only that Mr. Clarke’s book didn’t do a good job of making these arguments. Similarly, I was unimpressed by Mr. Clarke’s argument that the war in Iraq has been a distraction from the war on terrorism. With his knowledge of this issue, I expected a detailed breakdown of all the ways that the war in Iraq took away resources, political capital, and focus from the domestic and foreign war on terrorism. I found that argument to be lacking as well. He did not, for example, discuss how intelligence assets devoted to finding Iraqi WMD might have been devoted to finding Al Qaeda personnel and equipment. Nor did look at the resource-allocation problem with his NSC-trained eye, in order to make the argument the billions spent on Iraq might have been otherwise programmed for homeland security.
Damn. Now I have to go read it.
Well, 9/11 could have been prevented.
So could Ghenghis Khan. The Unabomber. Patrick Henry and Benedict Arnold. Socrates. Galileo.
Ain’t hindsight wonderful? Why was nothing done about these disrupters of the peace before they wreaked their havoc?
For all the blame, just what could realistically have been done?
Well, maybe one thing would have helped. Both parties could have refrained from trying to restrict our intelligence from using human intelligence because some of the agents from whom knowledge used to be *spit* bought were not very nice people. Noriega was the tombstone on the grave of getting intel from people who actually knew what was going on, those against paying touted it as proof that the people we dealt with were all so despicable we should be rounding them up rather than paying them.
So despite years of knowing OBL was bad news, we were not supposed to buy underlings and become privy to his plans because they were bad too…
I think Phil is mostly right — Clarke really did more asserting than arguing in the book. But like Phil said, it’s not clear that he’s wrong.
It’s also not clear that he is being anything other than both partisan and money-seeking.
In fact, the evidence seems to be pretty clear that those are his primary motivations right now.
What I deeply object to in all of this is the deliberate, cynical and corrosive effect this has on what should be a critical national debate and dialogue. We face some very difficult tradeoffs, including the tradeoff between civil liberties and attack prevention. Getting that balance right will not be easy. Clark’s recent actions make it much harder, if not impossible to have the discussion we need to have.
“WASHINGTON, April 4 The leaders of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks agreed Sunday that evidence gathered by their panel showed the attacks could probably have been prevented.”
Yeah, so lets elect J.F.K. the 2nd. and he will use the “Way Back Machine” (WBM) and prevent those attacks, which we arrogant, unilateraly Amerikkkkans brought on ourselves!
I remember when Tony Blair said to his own party – “If I had come to you before Sept. 11th with full proof I wouldn’t have been able to get you to do anything.”
I’m quoting from memory, but that’s it in a nutshell. At least Arafat isn’t in the Lincoln bedroom anymore.
The only thing I’d add to the above is that in the US case, our republican form of government is designed specifically to to restrict the government’s ability to forestall problems which to the majority of Americans, do not seem to be problems. In fact, until the Civil War, most Americans didn’t seem to think the Slavery issue worth fighting over. Just like 9/11, Fort Sumter proved the Buchananites wrong, but that was not at all politically clear except in hindsight.
I hope this isn’t too tangential: What drives me nuts about these assertions that “9/11 could have been averted” is that they all seem to take the Al-Qaeda plan as a static chain of events that could be interrupted. There is no reason to believe that an active, fairly canny group could not have adapted it’s plan in the face of interruptions.
Only if we can assert that enough could have been done to entirely overwhelm the planning and execution efforts of a bulk of Al-Qaeda can it be said that a 9/11 attack could have been stopped. As was said above in slightly different words, it’s enitrely possible that “9/11” the specific event could have been prevented, but there is no way to say we wouldn’t be talking today about 6/18, or 11/4, or The Chicago Attacks, or some other title given to a massive strike against our country. As loathe as I am to credit these vile people with intelligence, I can’t avoid the fact that they are/were adept at their disgusting work.
Perhaps I’m missing it while I’ve got my head buried in schoolwork, but I don’t understand why someone doesn’t get up and say “The attack struck on 9/11 was, in it’s own horrific way, the work of a skiled, ‘intelligent’ group bound and determined to hit us. While it is clear that more could have been done by both sides of the political spectrum in the days, months, years preceeding this event to stem the tide of international terror, to say that 9/11 was ‘preventable’ is to misunderstand the fundamental problem. Certainly people considered terrorists might use planes. They also might use radiological weapons, shipping containers, children, pregnant mothers, the mail, and more. In fact, it’s not a question of might, all these tactics and more have been used. And without addressing the source, the structure, and those who give succor to such people, then incidents like 9/11, in a multitude of horrendous permutations, will continue to be a real possibility. If it was not those planes on that day, it could have been commuter trains, or a nightclub, an embassy, or even one of our own naval vessels. Focusing so heavily on the past conduct, looking only for blame rather than lessons, is to suggest that the lives of the people lost that day were an isolated tragedy, rather than part of a progression of loss that we strive to prevent every day. More work could have been done. More work is being done now. As we learn to counter them, they are learning to circumvent us. Making sure we stay in the lead requires building better tools based on hard lessons. Blame for an event that could well have taken any number of faces on any number of days will serve only to divide at a time when unity provides strength.”
The remarkable thing is how little public complaint there is about one point where the Bush administration flatly refuses to plug a security hole, in direct definance of Congress: The ongoing sabotoge of the armed pilots program. Said program is wildly popular with the public, passed Congress on more than one occasion with a huge bipartisan majority, and yet the administration moves heaven and earth to obstruct it.
Perhaps it can’t be used as a campaign issue because the Bush appointee doing the obstructing is a Democrat?
No mention of Raed Hijazi so far.
It is painfully obvious that Clarke and many others in the Clinton administration, including the Clintons’, are well aware of their lack of accomplishment on many, if not all fronts, and are frantically trying to rewrite history to redeem themselves somehow.
As for preventing the specific 9/11 event, my opinion is that there was sufficient evidence that there were people who were planning to take over commercial aircraft and use them as missles. Therefore, a simple change in the instruction set for pilots in hijack situations from ‘give them the plane’, to ‘do not allow the plane to be taken over’ would have made a substantial difference.
Although people would still have lost their lives, the WTC would still be standing, and the innocent passengers would have at least been able to die with a.) the posthumous dignity and recognition of having disrupted the terrorist plan, and b.) having been given a chance to save their own or others lives.
The fact that these people were turned into a defensless audience for this event is what did and still does bother me the most.