Hiding in Plain Sight: Steyn on Radical Islam

Mark Steyn has a couple of nuggets in a piece outlining just how sluggish and lethargic America has become to an enemy vowing to nuke us back to the Stone Age.

While the Jimmy Carter/Billy Jeff crowd chants mantras pushing privacy and preventing profiling. Here's a bit of Steyn:

O'Neill must have felt his world come full circle. Six years earlier (as vividly recounted in Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower) he'd organized the capture in Pakistan of Ramzi Yousef, the man behind the first World Trade Center bombing and a terrorist who'd planned to crash a plane into CIA headquarters.

In the New York Times, Thomas Friedman wrote: "The failure to prevent Sept. 11 was not a failure of intelligence or coordination. It was a failure of imagination." That's not really true. Islamist terrorists had indicated their interest in U.S. landmarks, and were known to have plans to hijack planes to fly into them. But men like John O'Neill could never quite get the full attention of a somnolent federal bureaucracy. The terrorists must have banked on that: After all, they took their pilot-training classes in America, apparently confident that, even if anyone noticed the uptick in Arab enrollments at U.S. flight schools, a squeamish culture of political correctness would ensure nothing was done about it.

Five years on, half America has retreated to the laziest old tropes, filtering the new struggle through the most drearily cobwebbed prisms: All dramatic national events are JFK-type conspiracies, all wars are Vietnam quagmires. Meanwhile, Ramzi Yousef's successors make their ambitions as plain as he did: They want to acquire nuclear technology in order to kill even more of us. And, given that free societies tend naturally toward a Katrina mentality of doing nothing until it happens, one morning we will wake up to another day like the "day that changed everything." Sept. 11 was less "a failure of imagination" than an ability to see that America's enemies were hiding in plain sight.

O'Neill's investigation of the bombing of the Cole was thwarted by a PC Ambassadress, Bobo Bodine, [whom I dated in the mid-seventies] more concerned with local sensitivities than apprehending the plotters, who were still inside the Republic of Yemen.

Again and again, the CIA was thwarted by the Clintonista WH, and last night the chief Bin Laden chaser Paul Scheuer at the CIA insisted on FOX-NEWS that Bin Laden was falcon-hunting at the same site for three days while Richard C. Clarke was dithering and ultimately vetoing a cruise missile attack. The veto came because there were senior Emirate officials with Osama and an attack might harm UAE relations [there was a big F-16 deal in the offing and General Dynamics is a big Dem Party contributor]. Clarke has been trying to blame George Tenet for years, but Scheuer insists that it was Clarke [and thus Clinton] who nixed killing ObL. Can you imagine Billy Jeff wringing his hands over the issue between BJs?

And the CIA and FBI were withholding info from each other because of turf battles, including intell on future 9/11 participants.

And Janet Reno/Jamie Gorelick did their best/worst to hamper law enforcement from national security by hyper-lawyering any interagency cooperation through legalistic "firewalls." Able Danger was buffaloed by DoD lawyers into suppressing info on Mohammed Atta. And of course, Albright must inform her Paki counterpart that cruise missiles are coming over the country to Afghanistan, again violating operational security. And giving ObL enough time to scamper to safety. Doesn't that superannuated bimbo know how porous and infiltrated Pak intell is by AQ sympathizers? Probably not.

The Northern Front soon-to-be-martyred leader Mahsoud was correct to ask "Are there no men in Washington?" "Are they all cowards?" In the cases of Clarke, Berger and Clinton, yes and yes.

What is clear in hindsight is that hierarchies of approval to gain clearances on operations effectively destroy operational effectiveness.

And when you make a trade lawyer like Sandy Berger into NSC Chair, disaster is sure to ensue.

There's an old saying in the business world, if you want a deal to work, don't bring in the lawyers until all the parts are agreed on.

Because lawyers kill deals, and in the over-lawyered super-legalistic Clinton Administration, 2996 innocent New Yorkers in the WTC.

I'd love to see the documents Sandy Berger was caught stealing in the National Archives. His fingerprints are all over the Clinton FAILED FOREIGN POLICY and he sure wanted to remove the original documents with his marginal notations.

Berger is only marginally dumber than Reno or Gorelick or Clinton himself, a legal beagle san pareil. And now Berger is a convicted felon. But of course, that won't stop him from getting a job in the next Dem administration.