Dreaming or scheming?

Lord knows, it’s not out of indifference to 9/11. It’s because I made up my mind about that event a long time ago: It was not a failure of intelligence, it was a failure of imagination. We could have had perfect intelligence on all the key pieces of 9/11, but the fact is we lacked — for the very best of reasons — people with evil enough imaginations to put those pieces together and realize that 19 young men were going to hijack four airplanes for suicide attacks against our national symbols and kill as many innocent civilians as they could, for no stated reason at all.

Within hours after the World Trade Center towers crumbled, Bush and Clinton partisans began blaming each other for the failure to stop Al Qaeda, and have been doing so ever since in any venue they can find.

The record is actually surprisingly clear, that there was a series of moments stretching back from Sept. 11 across at least eight years when more aggressive actions might have produced a different outcome that crisp, blue morning. For example:

In 1997 a commission led by Vice President Al Gore recommended steps to tighten airline security, including tougher screening of passengers and stronger locks on cockpit doors. Civil libertarians and the airline industry resisted.

Osama bin Laden, while hardly a household name, was well known as a threat. (Indeed, this newspaper ran a front-page series about him just as the Bush administration was entering office.)

The World Trade Center was already clearly marked as a target, from the bombing in 1993, and the idea to use planes as missiles was known from a disrupted plot to bring down the Eiffel Tower.

RICE’S CLAIMS ABOUT AFGHANISTAN IN QUESTION: Rice last night claimed that “The president focused our energies and our attention” on Afghanistan after 9/11 – but even that claim was refuted by a new USA Today story which notes that as early as 2002, special forces were “pulled out of the hunt for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan to prepare for Iraq” while the White House “took CIA specialists away from the Afghanistan effort” for Iraq. Now, two years later, the U.S. is being forced to send in reinforcements, as the United Nations warns that Afghanistan “is in danger of reverting to a terrorist breeding ground.” For more on Rice’s interview last night, see this American Progress backgrounder.

Rights workers blame the phenomenon, at least in part, on the blighting of educated women’s hopes for a freer life after the Taliban. Significantly, several of the victims in Herat were teachers and nurses. Others were former refugees, who had grown accustomed to the relative freedom of life in Iran. Mallali had completed high school in Kabul and Iran. She was brought to despair after being forced to skivvy for her husband’s entire family. “She was educated and sensitive,” says her father. “She found it hard to live like a slave.”

Afghanistan’s new constitution affords equal rights to men and women. The warlords, however, do not seem to have noticed. Ismail Khan, the ruler of Herat, has expressed concern over the fiery suicides in his fief. He recently visited survivors in the city’s hospital and commissioned a series of television programmes that seek to dissuade would-be self-immolators. In the meantime, women in Herat are still barred from riding taxis unaccompanied, or from learning to drive.

Imagine: an American journalist using his cover for the most prominent paper in the country to inform on and demonize select political critics of the government! The Godfather had his “newspaper friends” on the payroll, and the IRS has theirs: David Cay Johnston.

David Cay Johnston, a celebrated New York Times reporter, reveals in his recent book, Perfectly Legal, his history of acting as a government informant against political dissenters on behalf of his best government sources. Criticized by many for his lack of journalistic integrity, Johnston’s revelations in his book still shock the conscience. Johnston’s informing and propaganda at the behest of favored insiders induced audits, secret surveillance, and criminal prosecutions of select political targets.