I think if you consider the root cause of all major disasters you would conclude the that root cause, or at least a significant contributing factor, was administrative incompetence.
The Challenger was lost because NASA administrators did not heed the warnings of the engineers at Thikol who saw significant erosion in the O rings after previous cold weather launches.
In the Columbia disaster, administrators turned down engineer's requests for spy sat images of Columbia to check for potential damage.
The Titanic's captain ignored seven iceberg warnings and continued at full speed instead of slowing as the ship entered the iceberg field.
I could continue, but you get the picture.
Prior to 9/11, FBI field agents in AZ and MN warned that terrorists were attempting to learn how to fly commercial jets at US flight schools. The MN office even had one terrorist in custody... he was reported to the FBI by the flight school operator who figured something was odd about a student who only wanted to steer big jets and had no interest in landings or takeoffs.
We've been told over and over that it was impossible to "connect the dots" prior to 9/11 because various agencies did not communicate. But here we had one desk at the FBI HQ that received info from AZ and MN about terrorists and aircraft, and denied the MN office a warrant on technical grounds. One desk at the FBI.
There are not that many flight schools in the US that train multi-engine large jet pilots. The reports from AZ and MN went to the same desk. Absolutely nothing happened.
Yet, after 9/11 not one person was fired....
It's not political hay, it's putting blame on incompetent bcrats who don't pay attention when the experts in the field wave the red flag.
Now we have a new agency, new methods of tracking and analyzing data. The constitutional issues aside, someone, somewhere is going to have to look at the data and make a recommendation to a supervisor.
The odds are the supervisor, a lifelong bcrat, will screw up because he is preoccupied with getting a plumber to fix the leaking toilet at his house. He'll send the data back for more analysis, and then reject it because of punctuation errors.
Then, when disaster happens that Bcrat will have a dozen excuses as to why he overruled his analysts... and the government will give him a medal and retire him.
Of course, the government will conclude it needs more powers and more agencies to make sure it never happens again...
And the cycle repeats... |
