Soccer Dad

20000 +

On Monday I hit 20000 on SiteMeter, thanks to all visitors who made it possible. It only took me 4 months to reach this milestone after taking about 1 1/2 years to reach 10000. One problem is that initially I didn't have sitemeter set to register hits on individual entries.

The proximate causes of reaching this milestone were two fortuitous mentions - one in Instapundit and the other in the most recent Carnival of the Capitalists. Thanks for the mentions. So far this is the best week I've ever tracked.

On the matter of Able Danger, well, I've read parts of the books by Rich Lowry ("Legacy"), Richard Miniter ( "Losing Bin Laden" ) and Gerald Posner ( "Why America Slept" ), I'm convinced that the Clinton administration didn't do enough. Other than Richard Clarke (who was stymied at every effort to raise awareness of the terrorist threat) there seems to be no one in the administration who understood the possible threat. Why Clarke turned against the Bush administration is anyone's guess. Was it because he was passed over for a promotion? But it's clear that no one listened to him in the Clinton administration and he was clearly on target then.

Having said that, I don't believe that a Dole administration would have seen the threat of Bin Laden either. Though the 3 books cited above were generally hostile to the Clinton administration, there's little there that suggests that ignorance of the terror threat was unique to those in power at the time. It was just unthinkable.

The one thing that should have been done was to use publicly available information to fight Al Qaeda in the US. The agency responsible for that and that failed was clearly the FBI. Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson pointed out 3 months before 9/11 that there was plenty of information about Al Qaeda operations in the US available from the trial of the embassy bombers. That the FBI almost certainly didn't act upon it is a disgrace. (Just One Minute refers to the article here, I believe on my recommendation.)

Why wasn't the information shared? Rush Limbaugh points to the wall erected between government agencies, erected by 9/11 commissioner Jamie Gorelick. (Andrew McCarthy wrote about it here.)

Why didn't we know in advance about 9/11? My best guess is that there was a failure of imagination. That and too many agencies with too many agendas to look at the whole picture. If the new intelligence oversight agency will look at the big picture, maybe it will solve those problems. If not, it will just be one more bureaucratic layer that prevents us from defending ourselves.