Hindsight is [a television newsmagazine I don't want to be sued by]
As if there were any doubt – Colin Powell took the stand today to mount a vigorous defense of the administration’s anti-terrorism policies pre-9/11. That defense? It wouldn’t have made any difference, anyway.
“Anything we might have done against al Qaeda in this period or against Osama bin Laden may or may not have had any influence on these people who were already in this country, already had their instructions, were already burrowed in and were getting ready to commit the crimes that we saw on 9/11,” Powell said.
In all fairness, Powell has a point.
We can’t be certain that 9/11 wouldn’t have happened if we had gone after Osama bin Laden earlier. Just as we can’t be certain that if Rudolf Diesel had been able to sell his new engine in the late 1800’s, we would all have cars that run on vegetable oil today (check question #3) and not be dependent on oil. We can’t even be certain that if some of the 40,000+ people who were wrongly expunged from the Florida voter roles had been able to cast their votes, we would have Al Gore in the White House today.
But we do know now – thanks in part to Clarke – that under Clinton’s watch we were able to keep tabs on known terrorists. We know of at least one instance where one Ahmed Rassem was apprehended with a carload of explosives before he could even get close to his target, LAX.
And we know that during the Clinton administration, most of the terrorists involved in 9/11 were on a terrorist watch-list. These would be the same terrorists who – during the Bush administration – rented apartments, booked flights, and took flying lessons (with a suspicious statement that they “didn’t need to know how to land”) all under their own names – all of which should have at least sent up a warning flag.
Maybe the issue isn’t whether or not taking out Osama would have prevented 9/11. Maybe – just maybe – the issue is that Bush was more concerned with hitting Iraq than with protecting America from terrorist attacks, period. Maybe Powell’s insistence that, “Most of us still thought that the principal threat was outside the country,” rings just a little bit hollow when we had already had one attack on the World Trade Center and had just managed to stop another on Los Angeles International.
Maybe – just maybe – we need the Nuance Brigade.
On an added note, doesn’t anybody else find the detail of Powell’s answers to the 9/11 commission a little… funny? I mean, he basically says, “We didn’t know the exact details of the plan, including the exact date or time of the attacks” – but he fails to recognize that we did know that an attack was planned, and that it involved using hijacked passenger planes “as weapons,” and that we knew the names of most of the terrorists.