Somedays I think the only people dumber than George W. Bush are his liberal critics. This whole row over what Bush was told in his August 6 briefing on terrorism is an excellent example. I’ve seen people making the absurd claim that this vindicates Cynthia McKinney’s absurd claim that the White House might have known about the 9/11 attacks and let them happened anyway. So what did the President know on August 6? Lets turn to that great bastion of conservative media, The New York Times,
For example, the report provided to the president on Aug. 6, which warned him that Mr. bin Laden’s followers might hijack airplanes, was based on 1998 intelligence data drawn from a single British source, government officials said today.
That source said Al Qaeda had an interest in hijacking airplanes in order to obtain hostages who could be used as bargaining chips so the terrorist organization could demand the freedom of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a Muslim cleric who was convicted in 1995 for his role in the failed plot to blow up landmarks in the New York area.
Mr. Bush was told, the officials said, that neither the Central Intelligence Agency nor the Federal Bureau of Investigation had confirmed the information.
Yeah, I guess Bush’s critics are right. Every time the president receives unconfirmed, three year old information from a single source he should probably shut down the entire U.S. air system and start rounding up Arab men for questioning.
Everybody and there brother seems to be turning into Jeanne Dixon these days, sifting through every memo and briefing looking for anything vaguely similar to the events of 9/11 that they can call a hit.
So some FBI agent wrongly thinks Arab men in Phoenix were training for a terrorist activity, and he writes a memo which should have brought the attention of every law enforcement agency in the country. Right, because that was the only memo written about terrorism and investigating every single private flight school was a realistic option.
The weird thing is that most of the people all over this are talking out of both sides of their mouths. On the one hand, they are excoriating the President for his failure to Do More(TM). On the other hand, the sort of things that the President could have done to prevent this are precisely the sorts of things that these selfsame critics oppose on civil liberties grounds.
An obvious, real problem, for example, is that various federal agencies such as the INS, DEA, FBI, CIA and others do not share information with each other very well. This is partly technical (that governemtn computers are decades behind the times is no secret) but it is also partly intentional, growing out of the fear of government agencies compiling and sharing vast amounts of data on citizens.
Many Americans seem to want it both ways. They want their privacy and don’t want their government spying on them, but at the same time they seem to want a guarantee that something like 9/11 won’t happen again. If the CIA and FBI don’t share data and a terrorist attack occurs, then we’ll throw a fit about how our government isn’t doing enough to protect us. If they do share data and some innocent Arab professor ends up having a government file, however, we’ll all complain about the invasion of privacy and the near-police state conditions we live under.
What most people want, I suspect, is a veener of security. I doubt the measures instituted at airports really reduce the risk of another hijacking, but they certainly give an obvious impression that the government is trying to do something. Such security measures are just like the reports that Congress gets together and writes every time gas prices go up by what politicians thinks too much. The reports are bogus and have no impact at all on gas pricing (which usually returns to lower levels by the time the reports are finished), but it allows elected officials to go back to their voters and say, “See, we were doing something — I’ve got this here report about the whole thing.”)
On how to deal with terrorism, I am convinced that Glenn Reynolds has the right approach. Rather than limiting freedoms or trying to reconcile ourselves with the sort of backwards governments and societies that tend to dominate the Arab world, we should be concentrating on simply killing terrorists before they have a chance to launch attacks against the United States.
Of course you’ll never rid the world of terrorists, but we can damn sure kill enough of them that they don’t have a chance at pulling off another 9/11 attack. Target the leaders for assassination, cut off the funding, and punish states that foment terrorism (and by that I don’t mean Iraq but rather countries like our “ally” Saudi Arabia).
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