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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lurqer who wrote (40433)	3/26/2004 1:54:16 AM
From: lurqer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

A reckoning with terror THEY WERE NOT alone, those families of Sept. 11 victims who cheered when former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke apologized for failing to protect their loved ones. Too many politicians and policy makers seem not to understand that Americans have little patience for the partisan blame game played in Washington. What Clarke said Wednesday to the bipartisan commission on terrorism needed to be said by someone who knew what had gone wrong and had the decency to ask for forgiveness. Indeed, the public testimony the commission has heard and the preliminary staff reports it has issued indicate that all too much did go wrong in the government's efforts to cope with the threat from Osama bin Laden's terrorist network. There were failures to gather sufficient or actionable intelligence, failures to share information that was acquired by one agency or another, and failures to carry out successful retaliatory operations against Al Qaeda and its chieftain. The commission's investigation also cast light on a syndrome that recurs too often in America's two-party system -- the lapse of continuity when an administration of one party replaces a presidential team of the other party. In the case of George Bush succeeding Bill Clinton, the commission discovered not only a fumbled handoff of intelligence but also a reluctance of the newcomers to give credence to lessons learned by their predecessors. Clarke, who had been kept in his national security council post for the sake of continuity, put the problem incisively when he said policy makers in the Bush administration "didn't either believe me that this was an urgent problem or didn't want to act as though there was an urgent problem." In an election year such a statement will inevitably be seen simply as a blow to Bush and a boon for John Kerry's campaign. But it also highlights a structural flaw in what is otherwise a sound adversarial system for selecting America's leaders and hiring new people to manage the federal bureaucracies. Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld represent extreme examples of the syndrome -- they took office with an undisguised zeal to do everything differently from Clinton and his team. But the threat from implacable terrorists was the same in 2001 as it was in 1998, when bin Laden openly called on jihadists to kill American civilians and members of the military everywhere in the world. Today there is no diminution of the threat from terrorists driven by an ideology based upon a warped version of a great religion. It will not be easy to prevent them from murdering more people going about their daily lives. But an indispensable first step in preventing future mass murders must be to understand and acknowledge past failures. boston.com lurqer