Rice before the Commission

I watched Rice speak to the 9-11 commission this morning, and I think she did pretty well. Aside from the usual suspects trying to get Rice to play gotcha with them, it was pretty routine. What is disappointing is the way this puts everyone on the defensive so that no one is willing to admit that they made mistakes.

There is a great scene in Pearl Harbor where Dan Ackroyd as Captain Thurman, a cryptographer, tells a senior naval officer that he doesn't know what the Japanese fleet is up to. He suspects an attack on Pearl, because its the worst thing that could happen. He has no evidence for it. He pays attention to every itch, goosebump, or spine tinge, as well as troop movements and more conventional analytical tools. There are two points here. One is that its hard to predict the future. The second is that there is plenty of noise out there. The senior admiral was unwilling to mobilize the fleet because of a spine tingle. If we acted like every peice of intelligence traffic suggested a Pearl Harbor or a 9-11 we'd be constantly on edge, and we'd ultimatly fall prey to the "boy who cried wolf".

Consider in the past two years how many complained about the up and down colored alerts. Now that we are privy as a public to the general anticipation of threat, certainly we must realize that every warning does not foretell another 9-11. So why assume that Condi Rice and the rest should have assumed otherwise prior to 9-11?

Further, lets assume that they did. Let's assume that they were especially vigilant in these regards. What would Main Street have thought when the administration's Leftist opponants claimed that these alerts were intended to scare the public, to create a rally around the flag effect, or if we had gone so far as some suggested in the commission to attack Afghanistan, that we invented a foriegn war to distract the public from the "stolen election".

So, not only is it unrealistic that we should have drawn the right conclusions from all the data available, ignored the dead ends and connected the dots between the data actually related to the 9-11 conspiracy, but that even if we had, it would have been impossible to do anything about it because without the planes actually striking the buildings, the country would not have accepted the actions neccesary to do much of anything to stop it, or would have regarded the capture of the conspirators as exagerated.

From IMDB's list of quotes:
Admiral Chester W. Nimitz: So, sir, you would have us mobilize the entire fleet, at the cost of millions of dollars, based on this 'spine-tingling' feeling of yours?
Captain Thurman: No, sir. I understand my job is to gather and interpret material. Making difficult decisions based on incomplete information from my limited decoding ability is your job, sir.

Preperations for 9-11 would have impacted the civilian world much more than mobilizing the fleet. So the costs would have been more than just financial, they would have been far more broad.