...in communications, and decision making, we got all the intelligence we were going to get before September 11th. We had the messages, including the one that said that it was going down. People had found out about the people taking flying lessons. We had intelligence saying bin Laden was going to fly planes into buildings. We knew the German cell was gone (we didn't know what the German cell was). We knew bin Laden had taken out Massoud.

We had a president who was uninterested, and a vice president and defense department focussed on Iraq.

We had a National Security Adviser who thought that all big threats had to come from countries.

We had an FBI bureaucracy in Washington that was risk averse on surveilling people taking flying lessons.

We had way too few translators for arabic (still do).

We had a dysfunctional belief that we could negotiate with "moderate Taliban" rather than backing their opposition.

Those were the things that "kept us" from stopping September 11th, to the extent that we could have stopped it. Its quite possible if all those had been corrected, we still wouldn't have stopped it, because everything looks easier facing the past.

But nowhere, in any of the justifications for all this surveillance, have I seen anyone that can show me that what was missing from the picture on September 10th was more intelligence -- except possibly the I.Q. variety.

Sorry.

Holly, she's not a "token competent" middle-aged female cubicle slave in organization chart subdivision #112, she's a butterfly, flapping her wings over the NSA's virtual Phillipines.

I think a reasonable counter-factual could be proposed that nuking Russia before they got the A-Bomb would have avoided the Korean War, Cold War, Vietnam War, other genocides AND 9/11.

Now we really are talking butterflies and hurricanes. What does this "counter-factual" even mean? Nuke what in Russia? Big place, you can't nuke all of it. Stop the whole cold war? When? What about China? What genocides? How would they be stopped? 9/11? A result of Soviet nuclear acquisition? Does that mean all this could have been averted by ditching David Greenglass? Wouldn't that have been a little more efficient? We were allowed to surveil him, he was working on a classified program.

I'm sure you can arrange a scenario in which all of this happens this way. You would need to prove that it was the only outcome to have a case. I don't think you can even prove it is the most likely. We don't kill millions of people on "reasonable counterfactuals." It's even bad for bidness.

although I speak several languages and have my doctorate in Russian history.

Which is why, Jake, just like Condi, you believe that figuring out exactly which nation-state to smash, and smashing it, will solve all the world's problems. As we've seen, though, her resultant tin ear on non-state actors was a contributing factor to September 11th.

It's been 62 years since General Patton wanted to go on into the Soviet Union. Would it have been a different 62 years if he had? Undoubtably. Instead of the 62 years of wars, genocides, and terrorists we had, we would have had 62 years of a different set of wars, genocides, and terrorists, most likely. Why is it that people who get fixated on counterfactuals like what if Patton had invaded Russia, and Who Lost Our China, and all the other reductionist views of history assume that all the bad things would have gone away and been replaced by good things, and all the good things would have happened anyway?

Would we be blogging if the Cold War hadn't caused ARPA? How do you know it wasn't Hedy Lamar's fault for inventing spread spectrum and causing the cell phone? Maybe if she'd pulled her teeth earlier, she would have gone into acting before she could seal the fate of the twin towers.

And yet you think we should just hand you permission to nuke or surveil, because you can compose counterfactuals? Isn't that the problem right now, that the PNAC counterfactuals weren't correct and we invaded?

Arvin I can probably get more depressing than that if you get me on global warming, but that was a real thud in the pit of my stomach. I really wish I could find something wrong with your argument. It really makes me want to cry.

I was reacting to his assessment of the situation, that they have destroyed or tried to destroy all the "public" in our world, which seems pretty accurate. It can't be undone in a day, but sometimes it seems like we'll be lucky to undo it at all. And that is what is so sad.

I'm trying to decide whether I should spend the next couple of days publicizing information and filing a patent because something I told someone might get snapped up for commercial use and taken out of the public domain if I don't. But all I really wanted to do was get someone excited about the subject matter.

Why does every damn thing have to be about money and power, power and money, all the time?

Makes me think of bebop-o's image of the neocons doing the Satyricon scene.