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Sun. Aug 04, 2002

Policy Sausage

Policy Sausage – Otto Von Bismark once said, "If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made." After reading this article in Time, ”The Secret History,” I think you can say the same thing about America’s policies against terrorism.

"Since the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen on Oct. 12, 2000 – an attack that left 17 Americans dead – he had been working on an aggressive plan to take the fight to al-Qaeda. The result was a strategy paper that he had presented to Berger and the other national security ”principals” on Dec. 20. But Berger and the principals decided to shelve the plan and let the next Administration take it up. With less than a month left in office, they did not think it appropriate to launch a major initiative against Osama bin Laden [...] The proposals Clarke developed in the winter of 2000-01 were not given another hearing by top decision makers until late April, and then spent another four months making their laborious way through the bureaucracy before they were readied for approval by President Bush

The winter proposals became a victim of the transition process, turf wars and time spent on the pet policies of new top officials [...] In the words of a senior Bush Administration official, the proposals amounted to ’everything we’ve done since 9/11.’ [...] And in a bureaucratic squabble that would be farfetched on The West Wing, nobody in Washington could decide whether a Predator drone-an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and the best possible source of real intelligence on what was happening in the terror camps-should be sent to fly over Afghanistan. So the Predator sat idle from October 2000 until after Sept. 11. No single person was responsible for all this. But ’Washington’ – that organic compound of officials and politicians, in uniform and out, with faces both familiar and unknown – failed horribly."

We’ve all heard the blame heaped on the FBI for not ”connecting the dots,” but again and again, I get furious that when the FBI did ask for help, knowing they were undermanned in fighting terrorism, Ashcroft and the Justice Department slapped them down. Repeatedly.

"Heeding the pleas from the FBI’s New York City office, where Mawn and O’Neill were desperate for new linguists and analysts, acting FBI director Pickard asked the Justice Department for some $50 million for the bureau’s counterterrorism program. He was turned down. In August, a bureau source says, he appealed to Attorney General Ashcroft. The reply was a flat no."