**  As I write this we only know the rough outlines of 
    what has taken place. We do not know exactly who the 
    perpetrators were, though we have heard from Vice 
    President Dick Cheney that there is "no question" that 
    Osama bin Laden had a role. But many groups may   
    have been involved, and we do not know their    
    motivation, or for whom or for what particular 
    objective they worked. 

    **"Don't know" means "don't know" and nothing more.  
    Absent hard information, talking about who it must have 
    been and what we need to do about it is a waste of air 
    and energy. To discern the important facts, we have the 
    Federal Bureau of Investigation as our principal    
    investigative agency, and the Central Intelligence  
    Agency (along with National Security Agency and the 
    Defense Intelligence Agency) as our principal foreign-
    intelligence services. Getting the most important 
    information is their job, not the job of the news 
    media, which will only repeat what they are told.    
    Gathering this information will take time, because  
    we need to get it right. 

    **Terrorism is a political act, performed for political 
    objectives. The general aim of terrorism is to force 
    changes in the targeted society through the shock 
    value of the crime committed. Therefore, if we make 
    radical changes in how our country operates, the    
    bad guys win. We do not want that to happen. Whoever   
    planned this operation is watching us right now, 
   and they are probably having a pretty good laugh. We 
    can't stop that. What we can do is to maintain that 
   which they most hate, which is a free society. We've 
   worked too hard to become what we are, and we can't 
    allow a few savages to change it for us. 
    Next, our job is to take a step back, take a deep 
    breath and get to work finding out who it was, where 
    they are, and what to do about it.

Terrorism is a crime under the civil law when committed by domestic terrorists; it can be an act of war when committed by foreigners.
 For domestic criminals we have the FBI and police. For acts of war 
we have our intelligence community and the military. In either case
 we have well-trained people to do the work. If we let them do their 
job, and give them the support they need, the job will get done as
 reliably as gravity.

The foreign-source option seems the most likely at this time. 
The first line of defense in such a case is the intelligence 
community. The CIA is an agency of about 18,000 employees, 
of whom perhaps 800 are field-intelligence officers -- that
 is, the people who go out on the street and learn what people 
are thinking, not how many tanks they have parked outside 
(we have satellites to photograph those).

I've been saying for a lot of years that this number is 
too small. American society doesn't love its CIA, for 
the same reason that it doesn't always love its cops.
 We too often regard them as a threat to ourselves 
rather than our enemies. Perhaps these incidents 
will make us rethink that.

The best defense against terrorist incidents is 
to prevent them from happening. You do that by 
finding out what a potential enemy is thinking 
before he is able to act. What the field 
intelligence officers do is no different from
 what Special Agent Joe Pistone of the FBI 
did when he infiltrated the mafia under the 
cover name of Donnie Brasco. The purpose of 
these operations is to find out what people
 are thinking and talking about. However good
 your satellites are, they cannot see inside
 a human head. Only people can go and do that.

But America, and especially the American 
news media, does not love the CIA in general
 and the field spooks in particular. 
As recently as two weeks ago, CBS's "60 Minutes"
 regaled us with the hoary old chestnut about 
how the CIA undermined the leftist government 
of Chile three decades ago. The effect of this 
media coverage, always solicitous to leftist 
governments, is to brand the CIA an 
antiprogressive agency that does Bad Things.

In fact, the CIA is a government agency,
 subject to the political whims of whoever 
sits in the White House and Congress. The CIA 
does what the government of which it is a 
part tells it to do. Whatever evil the CIA
 may have done was the result of orders from above.

The Chilean event and others (for example,
 attempts to remove Fidel Castro from the land 
of the living, undertaken during the presidency
 of JFK, rather more rarely reported because
 only good came from Camelot) caused the late 
Liberal Democaratic  Sen. Frank Church to help
 gut the CIA's Directorate of Operations in the
 1970s. What he carelessly left undisturbed
 then fell afoul of the Carter administration's 
hit man, Stansfield Turner. That capability has
 never been replaced.

It is a lamentably common practice in Washington
 and elsewhere to shoot people in the back and 
then complain when they fail to win the race. 
The loss of so many lives in New York and
 Washington is now called an "intelligence failure,"
 mostly by those who crippled the CIA in the first 
place, and by those who celebrated the loss of 
its invaluable capabilities.

What a pity that they cannot stand up like 
adults now and say: "See, we gutted our 
intelligence agencies because we don't much
 like them, and now we can bury thousands 
of American citizens as an indirect result."
 This, of course, will not happen, because 
those who inflict their aesthetic on the rest
 of us are never around to clean up the resulting
 mess, though they seem to enjoy further assaulting
 those whom they crippled to begin with.

Call it the law of unintended consequences.
 The intelligence community was successfully
 assaulted for actions taken under constitutionally
 mandated orders, and with nothing left to replace
 what was smashed, warnings we might have had to 
prevent this horrid event never came. Of course,
 neither I nor anyone else can prove that the
 warnings would have come, and I will not invoke 
the rhetoric of the political left on so sad
 an occasion as this.

But the next time America is in a fight, it
 is well to remember that tying one's own arm
 is unlikely to assist in preserving, protecting
 and defending what is ours.