THE GHOST LIGHT'S ON, BUT NOBODY'S HOME:

The Jack Welch War Plan (FRANK RICH, September 28, 2002, NY Times)

Even with little White House cooperation in its inquiry, this month's Congressional intelligence hearings presented a chilling portrait of the administration's efforts to cover up its pre-9/11 lassitude about terrorist threats. Exhibit A was Condoleezza Rice's pronouncement from last May: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center . . . that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile." In fact, the committee reported, U.S. intelligence had picked up a dozen plots of a similar sort, over a period from 1994 to pre-9/11 2001, with some of them specifically mentioning the World Trade Center and the White House as potential targets. In the weeks before the attack the C.I.A. learned that in Afghanistan "everyone is talking about an impending attack."

The past cannot be undone, and the intelligence committee found no smoking gun to suggest that the administration could have prevented the horror. But as we ready our own attack on Saddam Hussein, that's not the issue. What we need to know now is if any of these catastrophic failings in preparedness have been corrected in the year-plus since. The Congressional report says that Al Qaeda learns from its mistakes, flexibly adjusting its organization and plans. Do we?

There's a peculiar logic to Mr. Rich's formulation here, which holds that the Bush team, must have known an attack was coming last September, should have warned us, and so we'd have avoided it together. Yet, on the other hand, when these same folks come before us now to warn of Iraq's plans and to ask the nation's help in avoiding the threat Saddam poses, Mr. Rich says they're inveterate liars. The lesson being learned now is that Administration warnings about an al Qaeda attack would have been met with derision by the Times.
Posted by Orrin Judd at September 28, 2002 11:26 AM