Ranting to /dev/null

"The Pre-Emption Commission"

The following is the full-text of an article published in today's Wall Street Journal about the hot-off-the-presses report from the 9/11 Commission. The article can be found here, but registration is required, so I've copied it below. For those of you who can't be bothered to read the whole thing, know this: the report praises the Patriot Act as being a necessary adjustment to our legal system if further attacks are to be prevented, states that the nastiness in Iraq and Iran was not nearly as minimal as major media portals would have you believe, and asserts that first-strike tactics are going to be necessary to head off further Islamist murderers.

And for all those of you who think that our government could have prevented 9/11, that pre-emptive foreign policy is evil, and that the Patriot Act is the worst thing ever, I have this to say: Suck it, Trebek. Suck it long, and suck it hard.

The Pre-emption Commission
The virtues of the Patriot Act, among other surprises.

Friday, July 23, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

So the doctrine of pre-emption has its uses, after all. In a world of conflicting intelligence, uncertain consequences and potential foreign opposition, it is still sometimes necessary for America to attack an adversary before it attacks us.

That, reduced to its essence, is the main conclusion of yesterday's 567-page report from the 9/11 Commission. The September 11 attacks may have been a shock, it says, but they never should have come as a surprise. Our government--and the entire political class--knew enough to act against al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, but it did not because of "failures of imagination, policy, capability, and management." Though the bipartisan report can't quite bring itself to use the words, it would seem that the Bush anti-terror doctrine lives.

These columns have been rough on the Commission, especially for the partisanship that has marked its deliberations. But perhaps our pounding helped, because its unanimous final report seems on our first reading to be better than the process that produced it. Its narrative history is especially helpful, filling in much of the record of what the government knew, when it knew it, and what it didn't do about it.

We refer readers specifically to the recitation of non-action that starts on page 11 of the executive summary. Beginning in 1997, the U.S. tried diplomacy to get the Taliban to drop al Qaeda and Pakistan to drop the Taliban, but the efforts failed. We now know that only an ultimatum turned Pakistan, and only military force toppled Mullah Omar.

The report discloses that the CIA failed to infiltrate the terrorist Islamic network with even a single spy. The FBI failed to share crucial information about terrorist suspects. In other words, our security bureaucracies became hidebound and self-protective over the years, and their cultures need a thorough shaking up.

The report is especially damning in its revelations about the law enforcement mindset toward terrorism that prevailed before 9/11. Top CIA analysts--many of whom are now critical of the Bush Administration--thought it was a manageable problem. FBI investigations were "geared toward prosecution," the report notes, and hampered by "perceived legal barriers to sharing information." Part of this was due to the infamous "wall of separation" between intelligence and law enforcement that was reinforced in 1995 by Clinton Deputy Attorney General (and 9/11 Commissioner) Jamie Gorelick. The Patriot Act took down that wall, and the report amounts to a rousing endorsement of that much-maligned legislation.

Notably, the Commission performs a service by defining the threat we now face in refreshing fashion. "The enemy is not just 'terrorism,' " it says. "It is the threat posed specifically by Islamic terrorism." Bush Administration officials say the same thing privately, but they have been reluctant to state this publicly lest they offend the broader body of peaceable Islam. But it is hard to defeat an enemy without defining who it is. And the fact that Islam has a problem with its radical factions is something that Muslims themselves have to face up to.

This failure to speak candidly has ramifications at home, too, specifically in the Transportation Department's continued failure to endorse racial profiling in airport security checks. The policy reduces the government's credibility among ordinary Americans who understand that the policy defies common sense. Commissioner John Lehman noted at one hearing that any airline that set aside more than two Middle Eastern-looking passengers for secondary security clearing at any one time still faces large anti-discrimination fines.

The report also sheds new light on the issue of "state sponsors" of terror, especially Iran and Iraq. The Iran information--including pass-through rights without border stamps for al Qaeda--should give pause to those who think diplomacy alone will mollify the mullahs.

As for Iraq, the final report retreats from its interim judgment that there was no "collaborative relationship." The Commission now says it found no "collaborative operational relationship" to attack the U.S., but it does record extensive and troubling contacts. This includes the news that Richard Clarke, the former NSC aide, himself believed that Iraq had ties to the chemical plant in Sudan that was linked to al Qaeda and bombed by Bill Clinton. The report quotes Mr. Clarke as speculating to a superior about an "Iraq-al Qida [sic] agreement" on the chemical plant. Our readers may recall that Mr. Clarke more recently said there was not a shred of evidence of such ties.

As for the Commission's many proposals, they deserve to be examined, though count us skeptical on the idea of unifying all intelligence agencies under the control of a Cabinet-level intelligence czar. It might change bureaucratic incentives for the better, but it might also create a new and equally dangerous kind of groupthink. At the very least Congress should wait until the intelligence review commission led by former Senator Charles Robb and federal appeals court Judge Laurence Silberman reports next year.

The details, however, should not obscure the Commission's larger message about the dangers of not acting against a looming threat. After a year of recriminations against a President who chose to act against another threat, in Iraq, the report may even do some good.

Posted by ryan at July 23, 2004 12:32 PM | TrackBack