Part 2 of the ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11, which aired last night, was, if anything, more critical of the Bush administration’s obliviousness to the threat of al Quaeda than it was of the Clinton admin. Yet I hear no complaints about it, nor any threats of censorship.
The film’s critique of the Bush administration is basically that it didn’t get up to speed quickly enough (which is rather to be expected when the enormous White House bureaucracy switches parties) and was too devoted to political correctness prior to 9/11.
Regarding the former, then-National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice comes off as manipulative and unprepared to run a big office. That may be true or it may not be, but it certainly does not suggest that she is responsible for 9/11. Hence: no harm, no foul.
Regarding the Bush administration’s continuation of the previous team’s concern for political correctness, throughout the narrative leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, a concern over "racial profiling" prevents the nation’s defense and policing agencies from picking up and holding obvious terrorists. This was a huge error, of course, and was something many people had warned was posing a serious danger. Now we know.
In a very revealing scene in episode 2, a terrorist who has been taken in for questioning insists that the agency release him, stating, "I have rights!" The agents accept this and ultimately release him. This was a disastrous policy.
Fortunately, the notion that aliens have the same constitutional rights as citizens has been set aside, as it should, in the years since 9/11. I recommended this less than a week after that day, in fact.
The lesson to learn from this aspect of the 9/11 story is clear:
People without moral courage hate to make distinctions.
The making of distinctions is central to human reason and is a good thing that should never be suppressed. In real life, relativism is not an option. And, based as it is on relativism, hard multiculturalism is not an option.
An alien is a person of different status from a citizen, and that is a distinction that society must accept. Certainly vistors to our country should not be mistreated, but holding an obvious terrorist in custody for more than 24 hours is not an atrocity; it is simple common sense.
The other impression one gets from last night’s episode is that the sub-agencies of the Bush administration had more than enough information to suspect that the 9/11 attacks were coming and could have prevented it by grounding all air traffic on that day. That appears to be more than a bit of a stretch, but it makes for compelling TV drama and fulfills the central purpose of a docudrama. That is, as I mentioned yesterday, "to tell a whacking good story through the use of historical events" and thereby afford us insights into human nature and the world around us, in addition to helping us understand the issues surrounding the matter at hand.
The big lesson to learn from The Path to 9/11 and the real life events that inspired it is the need for moral courage. A people without it is a people doomed to destruction.
Of course they had more than enough information to know an attack was coming. They also had more than enough information to know a major terror attack was coming yesterday.
What’s that? There was no major attack yesterday?
Exactly.
A large part of the problem with preventing terror attacks is that a nation with a large intelligence apparatus is being _flooded_ with data about possible upcoming attacks, _constantly_, and most of it is bogus.
Between the misinterpretation of innocent circumstances, the data flowing on folks who _intend_ to commit terrorism but lack the competency to carry through on their plans (the recent London raids appear to have targeted this type), and the disinformation being deliberately planted to cause confusion, intelligence agencies have predicted 20 of the last 2 attacks.
But of course, it’s always possible to look back in the clarity of hindsight, cherry pick the data that happened to point to an attack that really did happen, and say “they should have known…all the data they needed was there”.