I know that some of you dismiss the New York Times out of hand, but you might want to check out the Book Review section from yesterday's paper. Judge Posner reviewed the 9-11 Commission Report, and I think it was a very good and more importantly, a very necessary, critique.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/bo...29POSNERL.html
He really liked the first part of the report, and he seemed almost amazed at how well it was written:
- the 9/11 commission report is an uncommonly lucid, even riveting, narrative of the attacks, their background and the response to them. . . .
The prose is free from bureaucratese and, for a consensus statement, the report is remarkably forthright. Though there could not have been a single author, the style is uniform. The document is an improbable literary triumph.
Posner critizes, at length, the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. For example:
- And with the aid of hindsight it is easy to identify missed opportunities (though fewer than had been suspected) to have prevented the attacks, and tempting to leap from that observation to the conclusion that the failure to prevent them was the result not of bad luck, the enemy's skill and ingenuity or the difficulty of defending against suicide attacks or protecting an almost infinite array of potential targets, but of systemic failures in the nation's intelligence and security apparatus that can be corrected by changing the apparatus.
That is the leap the commission makes, and it is not sustained by the report's narrative. The narrative points to something different, banal and deeply disturbing: that it is almost impossible to take effective action to prevent something that hasn't occurred previously. Once the 9/11 attacks did occur, measures were taken that have reduced the likelihood of a recurrence. But before the attacks, it was psychologically and politically impossible to take those measures.
Posner stopped reading the report after the narrative section (page 338), and developed his own list of " improvements in our defenses against terrorist groups like Al Qaeda are implied by the commission's investigative findings." They are:
- (1) Major buildings should have detailed evacuation plans and the plans should be communicated to the occupants.
(2) Customs officers should be alert for altered travel documents of Muslims entering the United States; some of the 9/11 hijackers might have been excluded by more careful inspections of their papers. Biometric screening (such as fingerprinting) should be instituted to facilitate the creation of a comprehensive database of suspicious characters. In short, our borders should be made less porous.
(3) Airline passengers and baggage should be screened carefully, cockpit doors secured and override mechanisms installed in airliners to enable a hijacked plane to be controlled from the ground.
(4) Any legal barriers to sharing information between the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. should be eliminated.
(5) More Americans should be trained in Arabic, Farsi and other languages in widespread use in the Muslim world. The commission remarks that in 2002, only six students received undergraduate degrees in Arabic from colleges in the United States.
(6) The thousands of federal agents assigned to the ''war on drugs,'' a war that is not only unwinnable but probably not worth winning, should be reassigned to the war on international terrorism.
(7) The F.B.I. appears from the report to be incompetent to combat terrorism; this is the one area in which a structural reform seems indicated (though not recommended by the commission). The bureau, in excessive reaction to J. Edgar Hoover's freewheeling ways, has become afflicted with a legalistic mind-set that hinders its officials from thinking in preventive rather than prosecutorial terms and predisposes them to devote greater resources to drug and other conventional criminal investigations than to antiterrorist activities. The bureau is habituated to the leisurely time scale of criminal investigations and prosecutions. Information sharing within the F.B.I., let alone with other agencies, is sluggish, in part because the bureau's field offices have excessive autonomy and in part because the agency is mysteriously unable to adopt a modern communications system. The F.B.I. is an excellent police department, but that is all it is. Of all the agencies involved in intelligence and counterterrorism, the F.B.I. comes out worst in the commission's report.
Posner disagrees with the National Intelligence Director (" Efforts to centralize the intelligence function are likely to lengthen the time it takes for intelligence analyses to reach the president, reduce diversity and competition in the gathering and analysis of intelligence data, limit the number of threats given serious consideration and deprive the president of a range of alternative interpretations of ambiguous and incomplete data -- and intelligence data will usually be ambiguous and incomplete"); he thinks that American provinciality is a problem that needs to be overcome; he thinks the MI5 model in the UK may be worth checking out; he thinks that the 9/11 Commission concentrated too much on attacks similar to 9/11 and did not really focus on other methods that terrorists might use; he thinks that we're focused too much on Islamacists; and he thinks that concentrating on likely targets in the US (i.e. New York and D.C) leaves the rest of the population vulnerable.
I think that Posner's main critique, if there is one, is that intelligence should not be centralized: "Diversity of methods, personnel and organizational culture is a strength in a system of national security; it reduces risk and enhances flexibility."
I haven't read the full 9/11 Commission Report, but Posner's review is compelling. I think it's vitally important that a document like the 9/11 Commission Report is challenged and critiqued. Someone like Judge Posner, who is a bit removed from the political fray, seems like a very good candidate indeed. I didn't disagree with any of his points, though like I said, I haven't read the source document.
You might want to check it out.
