April 16, 2004

• I'm not shilling for PBS, I swear! But Journey to Planet Earth is excellent too.
• I stumbled across this online and highly recommend it. It's all the more intriguing to see comments by Richard Clarke and background on Tom Picard considering the current hearings.
• homunculus, still a worthwhile read and something that all of us should be aware of (including all the links on Mefi). My take on this is that one of the things that O'Neill was lacking was a sense of intuition in dealing with fellow agents and his superiors. Unfortunately, as those who are too good at their jobs can tell you, those who are not, yet still climbing the ladder, are sensitive to mavericks and egos become quite delicate. A truly unfortunate side-affect that can have catastrophic results. At the same time, regardless of all the things we now know, could we really imagine that something like 9/11 could ever have happened? It is one thing to know and to take appropriate precautions, but what truly could have been done to prevent this? I am in no way a Bush supporter, but the fault doesn't really lay in him. The after-effects do, certainly, and he should be kicked out of office as soon as is humanly possible. I'm just not sure that this could have been averted unless many people had taken a leap of faith very early on and realized that things could get so much worse.
• could we really imagine that something like 9/11 could ever have happened? Using the planes, probably not. But that the people who had killed hundreds in the embassy bombings in Africa were going to try something on the same scale here? Yes, absolutely. These guys knew something was coming too. Even I knew al Qaeda was coming, and I have no national security experience, I'm just a paranoid shmo. It is one thing to know and to take appropriate precautions, but what truly could have been done to prevent this? I still think that if even one of the hijaked planes had an armed air marshall on board, that hijaking could have been prevented and less people would have died.
• More recent comments from Gary Hart in this thread.
• Well, your right, homunculus. I agree about the armed air marshalls but, again, something had to happen in order for this to be put into place. I'd heard of nothing prior to 9/11 that would warrant adopting that policy. Now that we are seeing just how ineffective our security precautions are in airports, I absolutely support doing that. But prior to 9/11, where would you start in terms of being able to predict where 'something' is going to happen. As I understand it, al Qaeda always has multiple terrorist plans going. If one fails, move on to the next. They can hit anywhere, anytime. I do recognize that these guys knew something was coming, but the hijackers where already in the country, and unless you wanted an all out panic, it would have been extremely difficult to warn all areas of security (mass transit, large public venues, capital buildings, etc.). Besides, the U.S. is not a pristine, untouchable country. We just got sucked into the classic "that would never happen to us" way of thinking. Why shouldn't it happen to us. And one more thing, and I know I will probably get an inordinate amount of crapola for saying this; but I wonder if it would have happened if Gore had been in office. I felt a deep sense of fear those last hours of the election and a sense of doom when it turned out the way it did. It seemed to me that I had better start preparing....I wasn't sure for what, though. Please, be kind, I am just speculating and will readily admit to being painfully naive about most things, especially politics.