Soccer Dad

Not quite an Instalanche

Well it was nice to be mentioned by InstaPundit. Even if he got my first name wrong. I wrote to recommend an article "The Intelligence Mess: How It Happened, What to Do About It" by Andrew McCarthy in the current issue of Commentary. (Either buy it, or download it now during April while it is free.) Andrew McCarthy helped prosecute Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, so he's aware of the various failings of American intelligence agencies. One of his observations is that Congress has placed many limits on domestic intelligence gathering that have ill served the country. McCarthy's article has the advantage of having been written before Richard Clarke testified.
I'd like to point out another article about the failures that allowed Al Qaeda to perpetrate its crimes against America on September 11, 2001.
One is "Terrorism on Trial" by Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson. Pipes and Emerson reviewed much of the material from the 1998 embassy bombing trials and noted the wealth of material about Al Qaeda operations in America. Had the government ordered the FBI to start keeping tabs on the cells already extant at that time in the US it is possible that it would have picked up on the activity of the hijackers. (It's also possible that the hijackers would have operated independently of other Qaeda cells to reduce the possibility of detection.) The prescription that Pipes and Emerson offer was to treat the threat of terrorism as a war. That was something that according to Condoleeza Rice that the Bush administration was working on. When the hijackers struck the plan was implemented. Eight years of Clinton yielded no such determination. A couple of Tomahawks with no followup does not constitute a sustained counterattack. I remain skeptical that President Al Gore would have responded the way the Bush administration did. I trust that John Kerry would be good as his word and start undoing some of the Bush adminstration's efforts.

Posted by SoccerDad at April 8, 2004 11:28 PM