We're Not Winning the War On Terrorism
One year later, things aren't much better.
By Jesse Walker
reasonOnline
September 11, 2002
reason.com
<<...Protecting the Homefront
If the situation abroad is troubling, the situation at home—i.e., where the aforementioned English-speaking resident of North America doesn't have to rely on other people for all his information—is downright disturbing. When Cheney, Mueller, and the others declared that further terrorist attacks were inevitable, they may have been exaggerating—perhaps Al Qaeda will get its hands on a weapon of mass destruction, and perhaps it won't. But they were basically right.
This is not because the terrorists are especially wily fellows. (We are speaking, after all, of a group whose recruits apparently thought it wise, while preparing to hijack four airplanes, to brag about their plans to some lapdancers in a Florida strip bar.) It is because, on almost every level, the "security" measures passed in the last year have been, at best, time-wasting jokes—and at worst, dangerous diversions.
The proposed reorganization of American intelligence has floundered in bureaucratic warfare, with entrenched agencies more interested in protecting turf than protecting American lives. Part of me can't blame them for this—after all, they're merely emulating the behavior on display at the top. The Bush administration's ass-covering response to questions about its failure to foresee the attacks are matched only by the behavior of Democrats so bent on scoring political points that they won't extend their investigations to the Clinton years. A healthy institution learns from its errors; an unhealthy one hushes them up.
The worst offender is probably the FBI, a bureau so wary of embarrassment yet immune to shame that its best agents have found themselves going to the media rather than their superiors with news of how leads that might have stopped 9/11 were not pursued.
But a special honorable mention should be granted to the new Department of Homeland Security, which immediately attempted to exempt itself from whistleblower protections. It's hardly unusual for a bureaucracy to put its own health above its stated mission, but it's rare for one to indicate its priorities so early in its life...>> |
