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Wednesday, August 17, 2005Here's Maguire, one of many writing about the Able Danger bit: did they know Atta was a bad guy before 9-11?The suggestion here is that our fine government had reason to be checking up on Atta but didn't. Just as it had reason to be checking up on Moussaoi, and didn't. If true, these allegations prove once again the dangerous incompetence of our government, bowing to idiotic bureacratic and politically correct formulations when it should be doing its utmost to protect. I am appalled, I am horrified, I am... faintly relieved. Every time one of these revelations come out, we start asking, "What did the government know and when did it know it?" There's another good question, though: "How much should the government know and how soon should it know it?" Within a few days, I imagine, the same people who fought so vigilantly to defend our library cards from the Patriot Act will be making political hay over our governments failure to round up Mohammed Atta six months before 9/11. It is suggested that this didn't happen because people who spend too much time around lawyers were more worried about lawsuits than the massacre of 3,000 people. And rightly so. In the history of the United States, there are only a handful of occasions (Gettysburg, D-Day, 9/11) where three thousand or more lives were extinguished in minutes to hours. But people get sued every day. Lady Luck may not have smiled on the FBI and friends this time, but if you're playing the odds, theirs was the smart bet. I'm of about six minds on this whole thing. I want to be outraged that our government could have done something and didn't. But I hear so much about things that the government could or should or ought do or have done and it always makes me faintly queasy to hear it suggested that what the government did or didn't do is of paramount value in our lives. From problems in schools to ethics in business to the quality of fruit at the supermarket, there are so many places where active and participating parents, citizens, consumers and business leaders setting a decent example would take us farther than any law our esteemed pols could dream up. And so, hearing about one more thing the government should have taken care of, well, turns me off. I don't have the analogy handy about how free citizens in a free society with free markets will, of their own initiative, fix national security. Flight 93 and the citizen border patrols come to mind, but they don't replace the military. And yes, the government is responsible for keeping us safe from foreign invaders through intelligent border patrol, foreign policy and defense policy. In that regard, I wish, obviously, that the government had done better at what I do consider an essential and worthwhile task as opposed to the 90% of government that is little more than abuse of the commerce and necessary and proper clauses. But, there's an easy way to be more effective in this. If you want government agencies handy to say I told you so every time something bad happens, all you have to do is let Big Brother make us all suspects. If, to the contrary, you want our library cards safe in perpetuity, you can require that none of us be suspects. The intelligent approach is somewhere in the middle. But where? My problem with Able Danger, and frankly with the whole 9/11 investigation upon investigation circus, is that we're starting with the assumption that in some regards our government ought to be infallible. Mistakes happen. Sometimes, they're the sort of mistakes that cost thousands of lives. Just consider the damage done by serving alcohol in places with parking lots for automobiles (click here for numbers). Is the logical remedy really to insist that our government become all-wise, all-seeing, all-knowing? It ain't gonna happen. Because it's comprised of people. People who respond to the incentives present in the climate in which they work. In the late 1990s, America was majorly lawsuit happy. It still is. The people who make judgments about tracking the movements of people within our borders can't help but be aware of this and make decisions that factor the cost and risk of lawsuits into the equation. So yes, everybody, let's have an investigation. Let's find out what happened, whether - and if so where - alleged screw-ups occurred and all the other fun stuff. But drop the mock outrage about the government failing to protect us. Tell me what you would have said in July 2000, if the Able Danger folk, pre-9/11, had picked up Mohammed Atta, bad character, and Abu Arras, rug merchant whose Palestinian cousin was an agitator but who himself turned out to be a nice guy. Would you be celebrating Atta's capture for a crime he hadn't committed, or wondering if he, too, had been made into a bad guy but a racist, anti-Arab FBI the way that poor nice rug merchant had? After we work through the hypocrisies, we'll realize that you can't expect a fifty-year old military investigator to risk his pension in his legally incorrect zeal to protect our scrawny butts. Then we'll realize you can't let 3000 Americans get fried in namby-pamby obsession over everybody's so-called rights. Finally, we'll discover you can't lock up every foreigner who forgets to wear his flag lapel pin because it foments anti-Americanism, discourages the immigration of hardworking and innovative people and costs a lot of money. Where did that last paragraph leave us? Oh, yes. An impasse. An impasse in which we have to accept that a) the government can't know and do everything perfectly and b) we, the voters, have to signal which tradeoffs - and mistakes - we want the government to make by the people we select for higher office. Maguire is right that we should investigate this. But I get the feeling a lot of people are missing the point in calling for investigations. If we want another circus, followed by overreaction, overslackening and then another 9/11, we should stick to the classic Washington model. But if we want to get somewhere, we'll have to realize that this isn't about who was wrong, but about the direction in which our society chose to err, the reason people with authority reacted to the legal-social-political culture the way they did and how we can split the difference in an effort to create a government powerful enough to protect us but not so powerful that we and the world need more than anything else protection from its efforts to keep us safe. If we're really smart, we'll also try to cut the government the same slack we hope for when the cop catches us doing 30 in a school zone. Otherwise, we're all in for a lot of disappointment - and worse - when the government fails to be perfect but makes a royal hash of things in trying to be. 
posted by gbarto at 1:16 PM |
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