I watched a bunch of the Rice testimony at the gym this morning; sadly I didn’t hear much of it, since 3 grown adults couldn’t figure out how to turn on the closed-captioning on the TV sets there; we obviously needed a kid to show us how.<\/p>\n
I’ve read a bunch of it, and found it sadly predictable. Both that the partisan ‘blame game’ was really the context of the discussion, and that neither side was willing to take the blame for the true causes of the failure.<\/p>\n
I’ll skip over the whole issue of historicity; that the infallibility of prediction only works in one way – backward.Conservatives are strongly lined up behind the “we never knew!!” and were shocked<\/b>, just shocked<\/b>, to find that the reports that terrorists planned something in the US were true. Of course, Rumsfeld had stopped flying commercial by that point, so someone<\/i> in the security apparat took it seriously.<\/p>\n
The reality is that Bush and his team weren’t looking for this, and so as the pattern emerged, they didn’t see it. It is human nature to look for patterns, and particularly to look for patterns we have already observed. While sitting at the side of the track, I read a wonderful book called ‘Complications<\/a>,’ by surgeon Atul Gawande. In it, he tells the harrowing story of suspecting and then diagnosing flesh-eating streptococcus in a young woman’s leg, and then saving her leg through heroic surgery and treatment.<\/p>\n He suspected it only because he had just participated in another, failed surgery, in which a man infected with this disease died, so he was obsessed by this disease.<\/p>\n But let’s share the blame.<\/p>\n The left and the Democrats are also to blame for 9\/11, and not because it was the culmination of eight years of events under Clinton’s administration (although in the histories, that has to be considered as well).<\/p>\n