May
28, 2002 1:50
p.m. Undoing
September 11
Maximizing
the odds that it won't happen again.
hose
who would undo September 11 are these days concentrating on delinquencies,
some fanciful, some joltingly real, in our security services. Most critics
are asking for an independent commission to look into the question, What
might have been done to spare us, the living, the shame of it all, and
to have spared them, the dead, the terminal pain?
There is so much murk where security questions are involved we need to
trim down the welter in search of a few givens. Here they are:
1) This
side of the people caught on the l04th floor and their relatives, probably
President Bush suffered the most on September 11. For him the whole world
changed, and he found himself in charge of the world and in the role of
activist commander in chief. What follows is that he could not conceivably
be charged with insensibility to what happened, or indifference to the failures
of the security system.
2) We know that a persevering and acute FBI agent in Arizona, Mr. Kenneth
Williams, pieced together miscellaneous findings and deduced the possibility
of an aircraft seizure in the air by terrorist-minded freshly trained pilots.
He reported his suspicions and they were substantially ignored.
3) We know also that a Middle Easterner taking airplane training in Minnesota
aroused suspicion. The FBI moved in on this visa-delinquent and got hold
of his laptop computer. Enter Demon Bureaucracy. How to get into
a computer owned by a foreigner caught acting suspiciously? The detainee
is a French citizen of Moroccan descent. He is surrounded by the FBI, the
CIA, the police, and 280 million Americans; but his laptop goes untouched.
Why? Because there is no court order to open it up, and the feds are afraid
to ask for a court order. Again, why?
Because, it is surmised, to do so would suggest a lurking xenophobia, inasmuch
as, recently detained, was a Chinese scientist in Los Alamos who wasn't
proved guilty. If on the heels of that inquiry we jumped on an Arab, mightn't
the world think we were persecuting people of yellowish skin?
What we were not doing was finding out what was there to find in
the laptop of the man who, we eventually learned, was the 20th member of
a terrorist team concerting to blow up parts of Manhattan and Washington.
4) The inattention to the intelligent demands of national security in Arizona
and Minnesota justify militant executive and legislative action. If there
are laws on the books that too cutely separate the jurisdictions of domestic-security
and foreign-security interests, the laws should be revised. If legislative
inquiry points up executive sloth or lumpen complacency, then shakeups persuasively
reassuring need to be done.
The
public gets a measure of legitimate satisfaction from hauling public officials
before duly constituted legislative committees and hearing them explain
such anomalies as the inaction in Arizona and Minnesota and to recommend
such corrections in administrative practice as the president has overlooked
or declined to take. The division is on whether the executive should be
required to furnish information deemed necessary, or useful, to adequate
security practices.
That's a very old turf war. FDR leaned on it after Pearl Harbor. Joe McCarthy
and Truman/Eisenhower fought over it. There isn't going to be a constitutional
epiphany coming up, firmly establishing the boundaries of legislative
and executive jurisdiction.
What minor addition to routine security precautions would have kept Kennedy
alive and safe on November 22, 1963? Answer — almost any. The killer
depended on one thousand coincidences working for him, and so did the
killers of September 11. Our job is to maximize the odds against its happening
again, but this can't rule out the guy who happened to black out in Oklahoma
when the barge came upon the pylon of the bridge with the cars passing
over it. More guards on bridges?
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hose
who would undo September 11 are these days concentrating on delinquencies,
some fanciful, some joltingly real, in our security services. Most critics
are asking for an independent commission to look into the question, What
might have been done to spare us, the living, the shame of it all, and
to have spared them, the dead, the terminal pain?
