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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (42025)	9/4/2002 10:58:36 PM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 281500

You can fit Said's peace activities into a thimble. This is the guy that was photographed throwing a rock at a Israeli guardpost. The article quotes him telling a Brit audience that he spends his time in Europe because he feels more comfortable there.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (42025)	9/5/2002 2:56:02 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The "Washington Post" has outdown itself today. Here is the third article worth posting. washingtonpost.com Why It Happened By Richard Cohen Thursday, September 5, 2002; Page A31 NEW YORK -- "What should I write about 9/11?" I asked a former New York City official. We were at a Labor Day weekend event and he was munching on a hot dog. He suggested I choose four people, firefighters or police officers, and tell their stories. I guess I had disappointment written all over my face, because the former official -- in office back when the World Trade Center collapsed -- looked down, paused for a moment, and then said, "Write that the government let us down." Then he could not be stopped. He started with the first bombing of the World Trade Center back in 1993 and what was learned about al Qaeda and terrorism then. He went on to the bombing of the USS Cole in the harbor at Aden, Yemen, and how that was for sure an al Qaeda operation. He did not mention the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, a residence for American servicemen, but he did mention the bombing of two American embassies in Africa. Those cost 224 lives. It has been almost a year since Sept. 11, but still the anger was in his voice. The government should have known something was coming, he said. The government should have done something. "I lost a lot of good men," he said. "What people don't know, the best died that day. The best men we had." It is tough even now to talk about that day. Not a day goes by when, somewhere in this city, I do not think of Sept. 11. I'll look out a window and see a plane flying straight over Manhattan and suddenly the whole, awful day comes back in a rush. People talk about "closure" -- a silly, psychobabblish term -- but there is no such thing. The past is immutable. It is permanent. So, it seems, is my anger. At whom should our anger be directed? Well, certainly at the murderers and those who helped them. Kill them. Kill them all. But a piece of the anger -- or maybe just outrage -- has to be reserved for the government, the federal government. It screwed up. It screwed up bad. That was the message of a column I wrote shortly after Sept. 11. I called the terrorist attack a "massive intelligence failure," which it was on its face. Back then, though, we knew little. I pointed out that there had been ample warnings -- including an op-ed article in The Washington Post in which William S. Cohen, then the secretary of defense, had warned of the imminence of a terrorist attack. The secretary of defense, for crying out loud. Almost no one paid any attention. Now we know so much more. We know that the Clinton administration was lethargic in trying to nail Osama bin Laden. It mounted a missile attack on his Afghan compound, but when that failed, nothing much more was done. We also know, though, that government officials were growing increasingly concerned. National security adviser Samuel Berger told his incoming replacement, Condoleezza Rice, that the new Bush administration would spend more time on terrorism and al Qaeda than on any other subject. The new administration dawdled. The FBI had warnings -- tips about shenanigans at flight schools. The memos were filed and forgotten. The CIA was on the case but short on operatives who spoke either Arabic or Pashto. The airlines were asleep. A terrorist had been seized in the Philippines with a laptop stuffed with airline timetables, but no one was putting two and two together. Maybe in another column at another time I will dwell on grief, mourn the dead and salute the heroes. But this one is a reminder that planes crashed into the Pentagon, the World Trade Center and a Pennsylvania field not because the terrorists were so awfully competent but because the government was so awfully incompetent. From the Oval Office on down the line, what should have been done was not. The terrorists succeeded because the government failed. The former city official had one other thing to say. The people who died -- the firemen, the cops, the ordinary office workers -- were often brave. But to label them all "heroes," while sometimes apt, obscures the fact that they were also victims who were ill served by their superiors, their equipment, their government. The tendency now is to play the sad bagpipes and fly the glorious flag and rally around those whose job it was to ensure that nothing like 9/11 ever happened. Yet it did. An accounting has yet to be made.