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WRONG 9/11 QUESTIONS
READING the 570-page "The 9/11 Commission Report" is like going through a French nouveau-roman. It starts with the promise of uncovering an ingenious plot but offers nothing but re-heated platitudes served with a pseudo-philosophical garnish. The commissioners tell us that they had three aims: * To offer "the most complete narrative" of the 9/11 events. But that, in fact, is the task of historians and may not be possible for years, if not decades to come. What the report offers is a collage of numerous articles and books that have already covered the "event" side of the 9/11 event. One more narrative adds little that is useful.
* To assemble as many personal testimonies as possible of the survivors of the attacks and their families. This, though, a laudable effort, is of little help in identifying the ideology and the machine that produced the killers in the first place.
* To offer recommendations about ways and means of preventing similar attacks. Normally, this should have been the "meat" of the report. It is not. It is, in fact, its Achilles heel. The reasons are not hard to imagine. The commissioners have a politico-technocratic mindset. They are the products of a political culture that assumes that all problems have technical and bureaucratic solutions. Such solutions are standard: create a new layer of bureaucracy, and spend some more money. But that is certainly not going to put the fear of God in Osama bin Laden and his like.
| Ordnance is much more direct and to the point... |
The commission itself was a typical product of such a way of thinking. So it is not surprising that it came up with only two new proposals: one is to create a Cabinet post dealing with intelligence, a twin for the existing Homeland Security tsar.
| No doubt he gets lonely, with no one to argue with... |
Posted by: tipper 2004-07-26 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=39043 |
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