I'm also going to point out that most if not all of the decisions made at the 9.4.1 principals meeting could have and should have been made at the beginning of the administration instead of months later, especially since the bush admin decided counter-terrorism was no longer a focus of the group. There's no excuse for it.
Interagency cooperation often raises controversy over things like personal privacy and freedoms. Look at the complaints when states try to share information.
See, this is the problem. We aren't talking about states in a hypothetical situation, we are talking about the NSC and whether there was active effort to retrieve information, formulate policy and implement that policy. And we don't need to deal with hypotheticals at all since we are talking about people in the real world, events that actually happened and about which there was actual information.
One thing we've often heard through this are comments by people in various agengies saying that they would have done more had they been told by the NSC that they needed to.
I realized I didn't make this clear enough. While you are talking about why you *think* it didn't happen, we are talking about the actual reasons more wasn't done. For example, the issues surrounding the arming the predator had nothing to do with personal freedom. As pointed out by Frontline, the problems in the FBI and with John O'Neill had nothing to do with personal freedom. And as pointed out by Clarke among others...nothing to do with personal freedom.
More meetings would have solved nothing---getting staffs in a room and having them repeat what they been working on is not a solution. Aren't any of you guys in charge of more people and projects than you can keep track of?
Groupthink.
You are assigning needed emphasis out of many things that were just as important at the time. Terrorism was not the animal it is today in our minds, and to attempt to place differently in hindsight is not reasonable. BushCo would have had to (logically) highlight and maximize effort on every pet project, and every precieved threat---which I've said before, would make BushCo look paranoid, to say the least.
Groupthink.
For instance, attempting to break down the barriers between CIA and FBI would have instantly branded BuchCo a bunch of Nazis. Without a major reason this would have been used with damning effect agianst them.
Groupthink.
19 men got on those airplanes, some were on watchlists, some paid cash for first class tickets---none had any problem getting to where they needed to be. No problem getting into the country, no problems using their money channels, no problem getting box cutters on airplanes, no problem going to flight school in a summer with (I remember) many official warnings in the press over airport security. These guys could have been stopped at a number of different levels, but they didn't---it could happen again today if they were careful enough.
You keep saying that word. 'Groupthink'. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Interestingly, the decisions made by the Bush admin post 9/11 display many of the common symptoms of groupthink (rationalizing poor decisions, believing in the group's morality, exercising direct pressure on others, ignoring negative information).
What is more Bush got into office, and tricked his staff, the pentagon, and the CIA into thinking there were grounds to go into Iraq----just to make money.
More meetings would have solved nothing---getting staffs in a room and having them repeat what they been working on is not a solution. Aren't any of you guys in charge of more people and projects than you can keep track of?
These are general problems with having meetings, not absolute rules that predict inevitable failure. It is possible to hold productive meetings. It's not like there weren't any meetings at all being held in the Bush Whitehouse at all -- just none about terrorism. No matter how you try to spin it, Bush made terrorism a LOWER priority than the previous administration, and it seems pretty obvious how an administration sets priorities is going to effect how well it deals with the issues it sets those priorities on.
Is Bush a "great leader", or is he just someone for whom you can come up with a lot of good (or not so good) excuses? All having excuses does for you, at best, is make your behavior or performance excusable, not laudable.
Shouldn't we expect more from real LEADERSHIP than falling into typical organizational traps?
Isn't a good leader, in fact, the type of person who overcomes these things?
We aren't talking about some low-level manager going over weekly production numbers at a hubcap factory... we're talking about the Office of the President of the United States here. I think it's only fair to hold the President and his administration to somewhat higher standards -- you know, the sort of thing Republicans kept saying about Clinton, except they were going on about a whole lot less important stuff than terrorism.
Why 'imagine' anything? We can look at the individual decisions made and the individuals involved.
Quote:
Haven't ANY of you guys here been in a "meetings culture"?
That's my whole work world, so much so that we might as well have committees to decide who has what for lunch.
In the bush admin specific decisions were made and conditions existed that put counter-terrorism out of mind. Rice was more concerned with states. Cheney with Iraq. And the whole defense department was staffed with lunatics, their iraqi conspiracy theories and unrealistic views on everything from intelligence to military planning. Hide behind 'groupthink' and discussions of '2000 people' all you want, but the fact is that we are talking about senior people who made conscious decisions.
Everyone is guilty of Groupthink here----imagine trying to get 2000 people to decide on what to have for lunch.
Haven't ANY of you guys here been in a "meetings culture"?
Also, if more attacks were to happen, BushCo will be blamed for them, even after all of the security measures that have been taken.
What is most telling here is the constant litany that paints BushCo as a group of extremly sinister people, along the lines of master criminals.
Nope. That is absolutely not the litany. Not even close.
The litany is this: the Bush administration failed to put sufficient emphasis on terrorism in general, al Quaeda in particular, in the months leading up to 9/11, apparently because the white house was mostly interested in "star wars", rogue states, and Iraq. There also appears to have been a tendency to down play things that were considered "Clintonian".
This misplaced attention looks like a failure of policy and security in light of the information that has become available that shows that the threat from al Quaeda was at a very high level and that at least the broad outlines of what it might entail were visable.
There is nothing sinister about that, just woefully inadequate. Do you find the litany of woefully inadequate to be "telling"?
What is more Bush got into office, and tricked his staff, the pentagon, and the CIA into thinking there were grounds to go into Iraq----just to make money.
This is not mature reasoning.
Nope. Wrong again, again not even close.
What has been asserted is that Bush chose advisors who had long advocatedy regime change in Iraq as part of a larger stategy for the middle east.
9/11 provided a convenient rational for going ahead with these plans, whether it had much to do with terrorism or not.
Comments
Originally posted by giant
Quote:
Originally posted by Tulkas
Interagency cooperation often raises controversy over things like personal privacy and freedoms. Look at the complaints when states try to share information.
See, this is the problem. We aren't talking about states in a hypothetical situation, we are talking about the NSC and whether there was active effort to retrieve information, formulate policy and implement that policy. And we don't need to deal with hypotheticals at all since we are talking about people in the real world, events that actually happened and about which there was actual information.
One thing we've often heard through this are comments by people in various agengies saying that they would have done more had they been told by the NSC that they needed to.
I realized I didn't make this clear enough. While you are talking about why you *think* it didn't happen, we are talking about the actual reasons more wasn't done. For example, the issues surrounding the arming the predator had nothing to do with personal freedom. As pointed out by Frontline, the problems in the FBI and with John O'Neill had nothing to do with personal freedom. And as pointed out by Clarke among others...nothing to do with personal freedom.
Groupthink.
You are assigning needed emphasis out of many things that were just as important at the time. Terrorism was not the animal it is today in our minds, and to attempt to place differently in hindsight is not reasonable. BushCo would have had to (logically) highlight and maximize effort on every pet project, and every precieved threat---which I've said before, would make BushCo look paranoid, to say the least.
Groupthink.
For instance, attempting to break down the barriers between CIA and FBI would have instantly branded BuchCo a bunch of Nazis. Without a major reason this would have been used with damning effect agianst them.
Groupthink.
19 men got on those airplanes, some were on watchlists, some paid cash for first class tickets---none had any problem getting to where they needed to be. No problem getting into the country, no problems using their money channels, no problem getting box cutters on airplanes, no problem going to flight school in a summer with (I remember) many official warnings in the press over airport security. These guys could have been stopped at a number of different levels, but they didn't---it could happen again today if they were careful enough.
Interestingly, the decisions made by the Bush admin post 9/11 display many of the common symptoms of groupthink (rationalizing poor decisions, believing in the group's morality, exercising direct pressure on others, ignoring negative information).
Haven't ANY of you guys here been in a "meetings culture"?
Also, if more attacks were to happen, BushCo will be blamed for them, even after all of the security measures that have been taken.
What is most telling here is the constant litany that paints BushCo as a group of extremly sinister people, along the lines of master criminals.
What is more Bush got into office, and tricked his staff, the pentagon, and the CIA into thinking there were grounds to go into Iraq----just to make money.
This is not mature reasoning.
Originally posted by dmz
More meetings would have solved nothing---getting staffs in a room and having them repeat what they been working on is not a solution. Aren't any of you guys in charge of more people and projects than you can keep track of?
These are general problems with having meetings, not absolute rules that predict inevitable failure. It is possible to hold productive meetings. It's not like there weren't any meetings at all being held in the Bush Whitehouse at all -- just none about terrorism. No matter how you try to spin it, Bush made terrorism a LOWER priority than the previous administration, and it seems pretty obvious how an administration sets priorities is going to effect how well it deals with the issues it sets those priorities on.
Is Bush a "great leader", or is he just someone for whom you can come up with a lot of good (or not so good) excuses? All having excuses does for you, at best, is make your behavior or performance excusable, not laudable.
Shouldn't we expect more from real LEADERSHIP than falling into typical organizational traps?
Isn't a good leader, in fact, the type of person who overcomes these things?
We aren't talking about some low-level manager going over weekly production numbers at a hubcap factory... we're talking about the Office of the President of the United States here. I think it's only fair to hold the President and his administration to somewhat higher standards -- you know, the sort of thing Republicans kept saying about Clinton, except they were going on about a whole lot less important stuff than terrorism.
Originally posted by dmz
imagine
Why 'imagine' anything? We can look at the individual decisions made and the individuals involved.
Haven't ANY of you guys here been in a "meetings culture"?
That's my whole work world, so much so that we might as well have committees to decide who has what for lunch.
In the bush admin specific decisions were made and conditions existed that put counter-terrorism out of mind. Rice was more concerned with states. Cheney with Iraq. And the whole defense department was staffed with lunatics, their iraqi conspiracy theories and unrealistic views on everything from intelligence to military planning. Hide behind 'groupthink' and discussions of '2000 people' all you want, but the fact is that we are talking about senior people who made conscious decisions.
Originally posted by dmz
What is most telling here is the constant litany that paints BushCo as a group of extremly sinister people, along the lines of master criminals.
Forget about sinister. What about merely competent? What about properly attentive to the right issues? What about setting good priorities?
What about not merely being excusable, but measuring up reasonable standards for the leadership of the world's most powerful nation?
What about living up to their own campaign rhetoric about great, not merely exusable, leardership?
Originally posted by dmz
Everyone is guilty of Groupthink here----imagine trying to get 2000 people to decide on what to have for lunch.
Haven't ANY of you guys here been in a "meetings culture"?
Also, if more attacks were to happen, BushCo will be blamed for them, even after all of the security measures that have been taken.
What is most telling here is the constant litany that paints BushCo as a group of extremly sinister people, along the lines of master criminals.
Nope. That is absolutely not the litany. Not even close.
The litany is this: the Bush administration failed to put sufficient emphasis on terrorism in general, al Quaeda in particular, in the months leading up to 9/11, apparently because the white house was mostly interested in "star wars", rogue states, and Iraq. There also appears to have been a tendency to down play things that were considered "Clintonian".
This misplaced attention looks like a failure of policy and security in light of the information that has become available that shows that the threat from al Quaeda was at a very high level and that at least the broad outlines of what it might entail were visable.
There is nothing sinister about that, just woefully inadequate. Do you find the litany of woefully inadequate to be "telling"?
Originally posted by giant
......but the fact is that we are talking about senior people who made conscious decisions.
Conscious decisions in one paradigm being judged unfairly in another.
I've got to through my hands up here guys, have a Happy Easter!
Originally posted by dmz
What is more Bush got into office, and tricked his staff, the pentagon, and the CIA into thinking there were grounds to go into Iraq----just to make money.
This is not mature reasoning.
Nope. Wrong again, again not even close.
What has been asserted is that Bush chose advisors who had long advocatedy regime change in Iraq as part of a larger stategy for the middle east.
9/11 provided a convenient rational for going ahead with these plans, whether it had much to do with terrorism or not.
Straw man arguments are dumb.
Oh, and then there was his vacation all august.
Originally posted by addabox
What has been asserted is that Bush chose advisors who had long advocatedy regime change in Iraq as part of a larger stategy for the middle east.
9/11 provided a convenient rational for going ahead with these plans, whether it had much to do with terrorism or not.
The best summary of the overall problem to date. Concise, and dead on.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/09/po...rtner=USERLAND
Originally posted by giant
So Clinton testified after Rice. Here's what the commission had to say about it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/09/po...rtner=USERLAND
(begin 'I'm lying' stare) "I did not do...anything...besides...trying to...(bite lower lip)...swat (blink)...that fly, Osama Bin Laden,"
He took out the Tents of Mass Destruction though.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/arc..._04/003653.php
The photos are the best (or worst) part.
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2004_04...49087550821362
Originally posted by giant
And I just noticed a link off of there that tells in detail how the millennium plot was broken up:
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2004_04...49087550821362
Thanks for the link, giant. That's a great site.