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Wasn't that the base human instinct,
the same revenge factor that was played on so deftly by President George
W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to "justify" invading Afghanistan--and
then Iraq--right after 9/11?
From Coleen Rowley:
Launching PR "wars" on terrorism, drugs, crime, poverty, etc. misleads the average person into believing that these ills can be totally conquered or eliminated. In reality, even if the experts were so enlightened/lucky as to make no mistakes and do everything right, it's only possible to reduce the frequency of such adverse things.
It IS possible to make terrorist plots less likely to succeed, but it is NOT possible to prevent them all.
It is much harder for counter-terrorist experts to prevent terrorist plots when, under the law of unintended consequences, U.S. foreign policy contributes to a marked increase in the number of potential terrorists--as it undoubtedly has. The level of terrorism in the world has increased dramatically since 9-11. So a starting place would be to find out where we are now, as compared to 2001, and to evaluate whether U.S. policies might--just possibly might--account for most of the increase.
The unrealistic expectation of "winning" a "war" against terrorism--that is, preventing all terrorist acts--merely opens the door to crazy"destroy-the-village-to-save-it" kinds of actions that result in squaring the error. Such actions radicalize greater and greater numbers of people and create still more "terrorists."
Fear-based expectations also open the door to:
(1) Reckless "pre-emptive" actions based on mere guesswork, hunches, or prior agendas;
(2) A penchant for fusing agencies, creating multi-agency "centers," and re-naming bureaucracies--all without much thought to finding out what went awry, who was responsible, holding people accountable, and fixing problems; and
(3) A surge in the fast growing "Surveillance-Security Complex," a highly lucrative business now rivaling the Military Industrial Complex itself.
"Total Information Awareness"-type programs are a sales gimmick that brings dividends only to the contractor-creators. Projects involving billions of pieces of private communications and other data that are vacuumed up and put into newly created, massive databases of individuals are a fool's errand. No matter how sophisticated or exotic, they are not likely to succeed in helping find needles in haystacks that are constantly being fed more hay. Not this decade, anyway.
Keystone Cops and Barney Fife responses are not funny in real life. One only laughs at such travesty for psychological release. The reality is that, in real life, these truly counter-productive responses--creatures of arrogance, ignorance, and excessive fear--are no laughing matter.
No meaningful fixes are possible without accountability for mistakes or wrongdoing.
Equally important, those witnessing innocent mistakes and worse problems must be able to avail themselves of some kind of job protection, should they summon enough courage to blow the whistle. Sadly, no "whistleblower protection" now exists.
Thus there is no antidote to the secrecy and job-jeopardy regularly invoked to muzzle employees who witness fraud, waste, abuse, and illegal acts. In recent years these have included heinous behavior like torture, kidnapping, and illegal eavesdropping, as well as untold amounts of misfeasance and other malfeasance that create serious threats and risks to public safety.
Ray McGovern and Coleen Rowley are members of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
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