October 13, 2005--No Blame, No Pain

I’m into the Blame Game. And I’m not talking here about Katrina and Brownie or FEMA or the President. I’m into fixing blame for another national tragedy—9/11.

The NY Times reported (see full article below) that those officials who were singled out for “poor performance” by the U.S. Inspector General will not be disciplined by Porter Goss, the current Director of the CIA. Even though his predecessor, George Tenet, was among those cited for “serious shortcomings.” Director Goss has decided--never mind.

Mr. Goss said he has concluded that identifying anyone for disciplinary action “would send the wrong message to our junior officers about taking risks.” Though I personally do not think of the CIA Director as a “junior officer.”

James Pavitt, the CIA’s former Deputy Director for Operations is quoted as saying, “There has been a great deal of accountability; how many times can we go through it again.... We’ve said, yes, mistakes were made, but there was an awful lot that was done that was good.” Indeed, enough already. Can’t we just get over 9/11 and move on?

But why not make a distinction between what was “good” and what were “mistakes” and reward those who did well and hold responsible those who made mistakes that led to 9/11? I would think that the current administration, with its focus on individual responsibility (including for raising oneself from poverty) would be vigorous in its pursuit of holding people to task for even such minor matters as “connecting the dots” that might have prevented September 11th.

This brings me to another situation about which some responsibility might be assigned—both for the good and the mistakes—the War Against Terrorism.

A second report in the Times (also linked below) about the recent Bali suicide bombers is less about them as it is about how the global terrorist threat has morphed into something new. Something that feels quite Republican to me. Terrorism experts are seeing a very different approach to the business of insurgents and suicide bombers. Earlier, much of this was coordinated and financed centrally by Al Qaeda. More recently, such bloody work has become “less sophisticated,” decentralized, and carried out by small ad hoc groups of “jihadists” without previous involvement in organized terrorist groups. Sort of the way most successful new enterprises emerge in so-called free markets.

These new terrorists also tend to be better educated and more “integrated” into the societies in which they live, including one bomber, Azhari Husin, who earned a doctorate from Reading University in England before returning to Malaysia where he became a university professor! Next, he converted to fundamentalist Islam and was among the bombers in the first Bali attack. (We need to check—perhaps he was denied tenure.)

And how does this connect back to my point about responsibility? Simply that most experts on the subject claim that this new approach to terrorism has been catalyzed by America’s involvement in Iraq and elsewhere in the Islamic world. We are incubating a growing pool of men to recruit from, and the better educated among them are spawning this market economy in terrorism.

And who might be responsible for this? I leave it to you to decide. Certainly Porter Goss and his kind are not searching for that answer.