1 Boring Old Man

One could read the ABC Report cited in my last post in several ways. We had collectively watched the Twin Trade Towers in New York collapse killing 3000 people after they were hit by commercial airplanes hijacked by suicide bombers trained by Osama bin Laden of al Qaeda in Afghanistan. At the time, we didn’t know such things could happen, at least I didn’t. It was called Terrorism. Osama bin Laden and his followers were labelled Terrorists. It was an appropriate name because we were terrified it would happen again. Living in Atlanta Georgia, I felt it. I felt it when I went to the airport. But I felt it other places too. So did you. It was a national trauma. But for a lot of us, it was also a personal trauma.

In the case of September 11th, we didn’t know it was coming. The new Administration of George W. Bush, to be sure, ignored the warning signs. They came with a pre-existing set of ideas. They thought that groups like al Qaeda were pawns of "rogue states" like Iraq, a preconceived notion that they still embrace in spite of evidence to the contrary. We’ve all watched George W. Bush "going blank" after being told of the attack. As much grief as he’s taken for the film of that event as he sat in that kindergarden room, it says nothing about him and volumes about the effect of traumatic experience on the human mind. He was paralyzed.

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective…

I think the–one of the by-products, if you will, of this tragic set of circumstances is that we’ll see a very thorough sort of reassessment of how we operate and the kinds of people we deal with. There’s–if you’re going to deal only with sort of officially approved, certified good guys, you’re not going to find out what the bad guys are doing. You need to be able to penetrate these organizations. You need to have on the payroll some very unsavory characters if, in fact, you’re going to be able to learn all that needs to be learned in order to forestall these kinds of activities. It is a mean, nasty, dangerous dirty business out there, and we have to operate in that arena. I’m convinced we can do it; we can do it successfully. But we need to make certain that we have not tied the hands, if you will, of our intelligence communities in terms of accomplishing their mission…

Then-Attorney General Ashcroft was troubled by the discussions. He agreed with the general policy decision to allow aggressive tactics and had repeatedly advised that they were legal. But he argued that senior White House advisers should not be involved in the grim details of interrogations, sources said. According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly"…

So they went to extraordinary lengths to capture whatever al Qaeda operatives they could find, and did whatever they could think of to extract the desired information in hopes of preventing some future attack [Actually, traumatized people spend their lives trying to "prevent the past" – an obvious impossibility]. In their pursuit of information, the "principals" scrapped our Laws, our Constitution, and the Geneva Conventions.