April 14, 2004
9/11 And the Need to Prove Policing Can Stop Terrorism
Now that I have my angry post out of the way I want to talk about 9/11 and policing.
The US is a country with one of the largest unsecured borders in the world. It is also one of the most open large societies in the world.
This has many advantages: an economy so excellent that people are willing to immigrate to become what counts as poor here, an intellectual culture so vibrant that we make an outsized number of the world's scientific discoveries, the freedom to move about a huge and varied land mass for almost any reason imaginable. But terrorism exploits this openness.
Let me first be clear about my understanding of 9/11:
I don't believe it could have been stopped by acceptable levels of increased security. I don't believe it would have been stopped by the current levels of security, and we are willing to put up with far more than we would have before the attack.
I believe it is highly unlikely that it would have been stopped by 'increased intelligence' in any level which we would have found acceptable before 9/11. One of the most intensive intelligence capabilities in the history of the world, employed during the Cold War, still missed Soviet moles in some of our most sensitive branches of government. Long-term undercover agents penetrating our most secretive branches ought to be somewhat easier to detect over decades than the relatively short-term (1-3 years) planning employed by the 9/11 attackers who merely need to get into the country. Yet still there were agents who went undetected for years and years.
But I understand why clinging to the belief that 9/11 'could have been stopped' is so appealing to the Democrats. They are certainly correct that 'if only we had looked at the right things' we could have stopped the attack. But it is quite a bit closer to saying 'if only I had picked the right lottery numbers I would be a millionaire' than they seem to believe. (See an excellent analysis of hindsight and data mining by Jane Galt.) But it is crucial to Democrats that 9/11 ought to have been stoppable by ordinary police work because the policing approach is their preferred method of operation.
We all know that the Middle East has to be reformed. The crucial question is, how much time do we have? Can we wait for it to mostly fix itself, or do we have to be agressive about trying to fix it? If policing is not particularly effective the Middle East needs to be reformed fairly soon, because we cannot count on policing to stop every terrorist attack (or for the sake of argument nearly every terrorist attack). If we can count on policing to stop almost all terror attacks, we can take our time and wait a couple of decades or a century for the Middle East to (hopefully) sort itself out.
If policing cannot stop most well-planned terrorist attacks, we are led to a more aggressive and overtly interventionalist stance. It might not be precisely what the neo-cons are suggesting, but it would be closer to that than the relatively hands-off approach which most on the left claim to prefer (usually because we don't want to be seen as hegemonic or imperial).
The policing question also applies to appeals about international 'cooperation'. Large international bodies are slow to react, slow to change, and slow to accept new realities. And that is slow even compared to governments in general. If policing is very effective against terrorism, we can spend a couple of decades hammering out the international response to it, because very few attacks will be able to get through. Internal policing is also what the international community has expressed the greatest willingness to engage in. They aren't much interested in dealing with the problem at its source in the Middle East. So going with policing doesn't take much political capital, and it lets the international community take as much time as it wants.
This is why it is so important for Democrats to use the 9/11 Commission to explain that BUT FOR mistakes made by the Bush administration, 9/11 could have ALMOST CERTAINLY have been stopped. It isn't just to attack Bush, though they relish that. It is because many of their ideas about international cooperation and soft power are threatened if policing isn't generally sufficient to deal with terrorism.
This is why it is so important for Democrats to use the 9/11 Commission to explain that BUT FOR mistakes made by the Bush administration, 9/11 could have ALMOST CERTAINLY have been stopped
This is another Straw Man. Almost none of us say this.
Yawn.
Posted by: LawnBoy at April 14, 2004 08:48 AMI think policing is a crucial part of it, but only part. We can’t sit by and wait for clues to come to bear. We have to have people tracking them down. If we can take their best and their brightest out of the game 9 of 10 times they try something, it’s going to get very difficult for them to do anything. Military action works at the wrong scale to ever successfully take the full burden of ferreting out the terrorist. We need to employ our investigators and our spies as well as our soldiers.
The way it’s shaping up, it’s apparent that though the Bush administration took the threat abroad somewhat seriously , they greatly underestimate the threat at home. In part it was differences of theories about what the missions of the National Security Advisor and the FBI were. Condi Rice thought that the NSA’s job mainly revolved around foreign threats. John Ashcroft, though, didn’t take that up, and didn’t make it a priority. Ashcroft did not recieve a PDB briefing on relevant issues, unlike his predecessor, and when given Counter-terrorism information in his briefings, he ordered acting director Thomas Pickard to stop doing so after the first couple of times.
Bush and his people believed the system worked, that if there was information, it would percolate up. Their vision of it was all too ideal. Additionally, the 70 investigations alleged to be going on in the FBI were pretty much bunk, because they counted each FBI agent in counting investigations, meaning that investigations featuring a nice number of agents were counted many times over. It’s sad that they’re resorting to that kind of sophistry in order to defend themselves.
Posted by: Stephen Daugherty at April 14, 2004 09:43 AMYou’re right LawnBoy. Another case of conservative “incestuous amplification”. That “serve them legal papers” BS was created by the conservative media and keeps going round and round between FOX, Rush, the conservative rags and blogs, and back again, totally unsullied by the hand of a Democrat.
But look at the situation from their point of view (a liberal trait that drives them nuts). Their Party did not think terrorism was a credible threat. Facing that fact after 9/11 is bound to make them overly sensitive to any criticism, and overly eager to change the subject and pass any blame that might exist.
The conservatives (Ashcroft being the latest example) have blamed the Clinton administration for doing so many things that happened on their watch, that I’m not sure Bush & Co. have actually done anything. At one point, Bush even said that the invasion of Iraq was just a continuation of Clinton’s Iraq policy.
One issue lost in this debate, again and again. The terrorists had goals in mind when they committed the horrors of 9/11. One goal of all terrorism is to terrorize. That is to make people so afraid that they will change the way they do things out of fear. Al-Queda studied the U.S. Ob Laden studied how we do things, what our values are and where our weaknesses are. It is clear to me that also one of the goals of terrorists is to evoke an immediate, overwhelming, and defensive reaction that the terrorists can point to and say, “See what they did, what they are doing, they (the U.S. in this case) are the bad guys.”
Our President seems to be helping al Queda and Osama bin Laden in their goals. He is changing the laws regarding American citizen rights, diminishing them in fact, in the name of protecting our nation. He has so overreacted with his invasion of Iraq without any conclusive evidence of his claims for invading, that indeed, President Bush is aiding the terrorists in pointing to Bush and saying (credibly to 100’s of thousands of Muslims in the Middle East) he is the bad guy. He lies to get what he wants. He tells the world to go to hell when he wants to occupy a Muslim nation with his Christian Army. He (Bush) punishes his own allies if they won’t go along with his madness, the terrorists say.
The U.S. needs a leader capable of recognizing what the enemies goals are and willing to avoid becoming complicit in their achieving those goals. Is Kerry the man? I don’t know. I do know Bush is NOT the man. He means well, but, has fallen into playing this war by the terrorists rules and unwittingly assisting them in achieving their goals.
Posted by: David R Remer at April 14, 2004 10:52 AM“This is another Straw Man. Almost none of us say this.”
You clearly have not been reading the mainstream press interpretations of the PDB memo and their treatment of Clarke.
Furthermore I read very little of the ‘conservative’ media so unless they are beaming thoughts into my head this isn’t the result of the ‘echo chamber’.
Posted by: Sebastian Holsclaw at April 14, 2004 11:17 AMSebastian, I think that in part, we want to puncture the bubble the Bush administration has created around itself, concerning responsibility for it’s policy mistakes.
Here it is, a year after we invaded, and still the administration will not admit that its invasion, if not faulty in cause, is at least faulty in it’s execution. Let’s leave aside the missing WMDs, and the almost complete absence of al-Quaeda, and focus on the military aspects of this.
Our information on the response of the Shia’s in the south, of what we could expect from the population was just plain wrong. The presence of the Fedayeen paramilitary soldiers was nowhere to be found in those intelligence reports.
We gave the Iraqi people the wrong impression by trying to advertise ourselves as if we weren’t going to inflict collateral casualties. Because of that, from the start, such casualties have ended up grist for the mill of our opposition.
We went in understrength in terms of the occupation. We cordon ourselves off in bases on the outskirts of town, while militias have the run of the streets, often killing and injuring innocent people. We are unable to be a pacifying presence, to patrol and to act as we need to to put down the insurgency.
Our funding for reconstruction has been uneven, our inclusion of Iraqi businesses in that reconstruction non-existent. The Iraqis left unemployed are taking up a profession quite popular in the modern middle east amongst the down and out: joining a militia.
In short, the way this administration has prosecuted this war has ensured the existence of the quagmire, and made it very doubtful that we will be able to get out of it any time soon.
Posted by: Stephen Daugherty at April 14, 2004 02:30 PMSebastion, I think you have made some valid points.
As I have stated before I am not entirely opposed to the removal of Sadam. He was a horrific tyrant playing on the Muslim inferiority complexes.
What I am disturbed by, is the tunnel vision appraoch to the middle east problem. Iraq was not really at the core or our problems with the middleeast except for the problems created by the embargo and no fly zones that we were enforcing.
Pakistan, Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia are at the core of our problems in the middle east, combine with our sometimes blind support of Israel. I am not advocating their invasion. Musharaf can be an Allie.
We have ignored the problems in Pakistan and Afghanistan to our detriment. We abandoned these countries after creating instabilities during the Cold War in conjunction with the Soviets. There are similar problems brewing in the other ‘Stans in the area now also.
The attempt to force an American version of democracy is unworkable. The continued use of force and exclusion to ensure a pro Ameerican regime that benefits U.S. corporations, in the guise of stabilizing Iraq, is counterproductive and is creating a suspicious mainstream.
population.
Sadly, I am not convinced our stragegies have changed enough to change the outcomes. Policing will not solve our problems. Colonialization won’t either.
Posted by: greg at April 14, 2004 03:55 PM“except for the problems created by the embargo and no fly zones that we were enforcing.”
Mighty big exception. Go to Memri.org and read their archives from the late 1990s. Those two issues are some of the biggest complaints that the Arabs had about us at the time. Oh, that and the fact that we won’t let them kill every Jew that they can get their hands on.
My bad.
Posted by: Sebastian Holsclaw at April 14, 2004 05:19 PMThis is another Straw Man. Almost none of us say this.
That is exactly what they are saying, Christopher. You have been slightly less strident in your posts, but why did the press and liberals venerate Richard Clarke for saying Clinton could have prevented it but Bush refused to? It is the definition of negligence. If Bush could have, and should have prevented 9/11, as so many are now crowing (for instance the NJ widows) then Bush is negligent.
I think Sebastian is right on with this post. On the one hand Bush is blamed for not preventing something he had little intelligence for, and on the other hand he is castigated for acting on mountains of intelligence and twelve years of provocation.
“Rice is hiding something by not going under oath… Bush won’t dare to appear under oath…” etc.
…we want to puncture the bubble the Bush administration has created around itself, concerning responsibility for its policy mistakes.
Right, the blame must be put on Bush for 911 so that his policies in the war on terror are discredited.
Our President seems to be helping al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden in their goals. He is changing the laws regarding American citizen rights, diminishing them in fact, in the name of protecting our nation.
What the liberal ‘policing’ view is lacking is a clear enumeration of human nature. The FBI was refused a search warrant for Zacarias Moussaoui. Later it turned out he had information about the attack on his computer. Doesn’t that speak volumes about the policing policy?
A dispute between FBI agents in the field and supervisors meant that no search warrant was immediately obtained to search his computer, the commission said.And it was not until after the attack that the FBI learnt that an imprisoned terrorist told agents he could have recognized Moussaoui from Afghan training camps run by Al-Qaeda.
The commission also said the FBI had asked the British for help in identifying Moussaoui.
‘The case, though handled expeditiously at the American end, was not handled by the British as a priority amid a large number of other terrorist-related inquiries,’ it said.
The commission said that ‘a maximum US effort to investigate Moussaoui could conceivably have unearthed his connections’ to the plotters.
If policing is enough we certainly need more leeway to get at the information needed which will tell us what we need to know to thwart another attack.
But that is not what liberals are saying. They lay the blame on the top administration officials for not micromanaging these investigations. Why? Sebastians premise perfectly explains why.
Posted by: Eric Simonson at April 14, 2004 10:19 PMForgot the URL for that quote… Moussaoui search warrant
Posted by: Eric Simonson at April 14, 2004 10:21 PMEric, give me the facts that refute Clarke, or else stop calling him a liar. Same goes for any one of us.
To call somebody a liar is to allege that they knowingly say something that isn’t true. It is very frustrating, and sometimes positively annoying to have somebody habitually use that label, when you know the facts, and believe them to be the truth.
For example, I have read from multiple sources across the political spectrum that Bush has effectively structured his administration to where only a few people have open access to him, and the majority of those few people are rather partisan. Those people do not think to contradict him, and most of them hold rigid beliefs themselves. Therefore, it is reasonable to believe that he doesn’t have a very balanced view of the merits of his opposition’s case, and so often responds inappropriately. The Bush white House has also taken great pains to basically Saran Wrap the White House, prevent leaks, to hide much of the administration does. And they are not just doing this for national security secrets, they are doing it for the day to day operations of the Government, in many cases. So the bubble keeps things in, as well as other things out.
The fact is, even your fellow Republicans are finding fault with the Bush Administration’s secrecy and isolation concerning these matters. I think this article fromt the Washington Times, this one from USA Today, and and this one from The New Republic should back me up, and illuminate the situation Bush is in.
Your response to my admittedly off the cuff statement of a widely established truth of the Bush administration was to say that I wished to blame Bush for 9/11 to discredit Bush’s war on terror policies.
My response would be Threefold.
First, his policies discredit themselves. Bush says WMDs are in Iraq, that there’s a bunch of Al Quaeda there. When those things fail to turn up, people become skeptical of the claims. Is that not natural?
When the war intensifies after Bush has declared victory, declared an end to major combat, does that not call into question the quality with which he waged the war? What every your part of the Republican party thinks about Bush, I find it very difficult to understand why you won’t stipulate that there are substantive reasons for the doubts that have been cast on Bush’s policies.
Second, Bush’s Aforementioned secrecy has only served to cast the shadow of impropriety over his administration. Because of his secretive attitudes, his unwillingness to share information about the way he has run his government, a number of things have occurred.
- 1) the blank background of information makes all revelations stand out that much more.
2) Bush’s hostility and exclusionary relationship with the press, coupled with his constant pressure on them to lionize him like his party faithful more or less ensures that people will be well motivated to find out what the real story is.
3) This relates to the first point: Bush’s equating of silence with loyalty ensures that just about whoever comes out and talks will not be a person motivated to say nice things about him. The Background of secrecy will mean that a lot of the mitigating information will not recieve focus, because Bush will simply not allow his faithful to defend him on the facts, which he jealously guards.
Third, and most importantly, the absence of the light of truth means that dark speculation has no real restraint. There are indeed people, among them some democrats, who harbor the idea that Bush is to blame for 9/11. Most people take much more moderate positions, though.
However, because of the vacuum of facts that Bush allowed to exist, and still even now permits, it’s much more difficult to win arguments out of hand against those who take extreme positions. If you could cite, truthfully, an array of facts supporting your position, you might not be able to convince the extremist, but you could convince bystanders and put a chill on those moderate partisans who might think to take up the extremist’s rhetoric.
What the liberal ‘policing’ view is lacking is a clear enumeration of human nature. The FBI was refused a search warrant for Zacarias Moussaoui. Later it turned out he had information about the attack on his computer. Doesn’t that speak volumes about the policing policy
Eric, again you paint every democrat as taking a position most democrat don’t. Few in authority in my party seriously think that policing alone will do the job. But it must nonetheless be there because it is our last line of defense. If the terrorists have managed to get into the country, if they have successfully infiltrated our society, then the police, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies will be the people most able to do something about them.
As for the search warrant issue, your own quote contradicts you, apparently. It does not say the search warrant was refused, it says that none was obtained, because of a disputed between field agents and their supervisors. Big difference. One is a judge not finding probable cause. The other is an ill-advised administrative decision concerning asking for one. Loosening the standards of evidence does not necessarily improve the situation. It may have been a case of overly cautious administrators not pushing for things for whatever reason. I think I might look into the circumstances surrounding that and get back to you on that.
As for The PATRIOT act, just because the law allow invasive, secretive legal methods to be used, doesn’t mean it makes us safer. degrading civil liberties may just end up creating a more corrupt, less just legal system. Sure the laws needed to be changed, so that we can confront terrorists better. But I don’t think that’s the way. I recall you saying that liberal policies were made without a clear enumeration of human nature.
Well, let me give it to you like this: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Already, we’ve heard of the Justice department holding classes in how to treat Methamphetamines as “chemical weapons”, and pipe bombs as “WMDs”, as well as prosecuting kids who pull or plan Columbine style school shootings as “terrorists” If the law is that vague in its definitions that it can be so twisted, the meanings of the terms so manipulated, and the Justice department is teaching people to do this, then I think that old adage can be said to be true. We don’t need to trade the tyranny of the terrorists over our lives for that of our own government.
In then end though, that maximum US effort that wasn’t applied, wasn’t applied by Bush’s administration. It’s not a matter of micromanaging, either, because in the end the problem was about one layer of the government being aware of what another layer was doing, and each layer working together optimally.
I don’t have time to address everything right now but I did read the Washigton Times article about Bush dragging it’s feet on the 9/11 commission.
It didn’t seem that damning to me. After all they did in fact give in. The article basically said they were reluctant to declassify material for a public hearing and have intelligence principles testify as well.
That doesn’t seem that secretive to me.
I’ll read more of those article when I have time. April 15 took alot out of me, though luckily not out of my wallet. Tax cuts anyone?
I generally don’t see the secretiveness that you ascribe to Bush, but I’ll admit that’s probably because he says what I want to hear and I agree with many of his policies.
He’s doing everything I want him to, so what could he be hiding?
Posted by: Eric Simonson at April 16, 2004 04:25 AMhttp://www.us-government-torture.com/
This site sheds new light on an old subject
7-14-04
http://www.us-government-torture.com/
Have a nice day to all!
Posted by: walt tribe at July 14, 2004 01:34 PM
