Mar. 29, 2004:  #01  Political Satire/Commentary where satire is always commentary but commentary isn't always satire ™·2004.
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Richard Clarke exhibits half-hindsight vision of what his counter-terrorism plans could have or would have accomplished.·

    Former counter-terrorism expert Richard Clarke exhibits half-hindsight vision of what his counter-terrorism plans could have, or would have, accomplished.  Eschewing binocular hindsight, he predicates his post-resignation claims on monocular hindsight, commonly known as half-hindsight.

    Clarke's "charge" on 60 Minutes that Bush failed to embrace the counter-terrorism tactics he recommended for implementation in early 2001 that "might have prevented 9-11" exemplifies such half-hindsight.   Clarke's self-righteous manner of presentation conveniently omitted what he later admitted under oath before the 9-11 Commission, which admission the media has almost totally ignored-- i.e., that even if Bush were to have fully implemented Clarke's recommendations, it "would not have prevented 9-11."  Rather than focusing on this turnabout extracted from Clarke by one of the Commissioners with the same ease with which a dentist extracts a decayed but impacted wisdom tooth, the media has continued fawning incessantly on the implications of Clarke's original "charge" on 60 Minutes-- i.e., that if Bush were not to have been so indifferent to the dangers of al Qaeda's terrorist capabilities, 9-11 "might have been prevented."  

    Post-9-11 legislation repealing pre-9-11 stovepipe barriers against the FBI and CIA sharing intelligence information has left much of the public unaware that pre-9-11 laws criminalized the breaching of such barriers.  None of Clarke's early-2001 recommendations would have, or could have, eliminated such barrier.  Thus, there was no federal agency lawfully empowered to combine the FBI and CIA databases containing the oceans of "dots," nor was it technologically feasible to do so within a matter of a few months rather than a year or more even if Bush were to have had the legal power to unilaterally repeal the barriers.  Thus, it would have been virtually, if not literally, impossible for agent Crowley's "dots" (i.e., her correct but not probable-cause-supported "hunch" about Moussaoui) and the Phoenix agent's "dots" (i.e, hunches about young men from the Middle East taking flying lessons) in the FBI's ocean of "dots" to be connected to the CIA's ocean of "dots." 

    Similarly, post-9-11 legislation facilitating procedures for analyzing grounds for detention based upon counter-warfare standards rather than law-enforcement standards alone has left much of the public unaware that Crowley's hunches were deemed insufficient to permit her office to gain lawful access to Moussaoui's hard-drive.  Thus, even if the Bush administration were to have pursued appellate relief in an effort to obtain the access sought by Crowley, the judicial process could not have produced a favorable result in time for effective use of the data to prevent 9-11, which occurred a mere two-to-three weeks later.

    Clarke's emphasis on intelligence "spikes" in the summer of 2001 indicating that al Qaeda may have been planning to "hijack airlines" conveniently omits that such "spikes" identified such hijacking as likely to involve using passengers as hostages to bargain for releases of prisoners and/or satisfaction of other political demands.  Even greater intensification of alerts to airlines about such risks could not have done more than increase the chances of success for the 9-11 hijackers because prescribed procedures for pilots and attendants to respond to hijackings emphasized compliance with the hijackers' demands to minimize risks to passengers.

    The post-9-11 environment in which Pakistan collaborated with, rather than resisting, our toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan has left much of the public with the false impression that before 9-11, Pakistan would have permitted, rather than strenuously opposing, cruise-missile flights over Pakistan en route to strike al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan, with whose Taliban government Pakistan was allied, as retaliation based on our beliefs that the bombing of the Cole was the work of al Qaeda.  Given the fact that many months after the infamous video tape of Usama bin Laden bragging about having masterminded 9-11, the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Pakistan (and in many other Muslim countries as well as the "intellectuals" in France) still believed the Mossad, rather than al Qaeda, masterminded 9-11, one could not seriously contend that pre-9-11 the Pakistanis would have accepted as true our evidence that al Qaeda was responsible for bombing the Cole.   Thus, binocular hindsigh-- in contrast to Clarke's monocular, half-hindsight-- makes it self-evident that large-scale cruise-missile attacks on Taliban/al-Qaeda targets in Afghanistan would have sparked enough outrage in the Muslim world (to borrow a phrase from Clarke) to massively increase al Qaeda's recruitment of more fanatics.  

    Since (a) none of the other measures would have prevented the 9-11 hijackers from continuing their plans and (b) cruise-missile bombing of Afghanistan would have intensified their sense of urgency, 9-11 would have occurred, and, in the wake of our having bombed Afghanistan, not only would have been viewed much less sympathetically by most of the world but would have made it dramatically more difficult, if not impossible, for us to procure assistance from Pakistan for toppling the Taliban.  This is the harsh reality that Clarke's self-serving, self-righteous half-hindsight pronouncements, and the media's fawning over them, obscure.

Against Full-Hindsight.

I'm Clarke, and I'm basking in limelight
as Harvard Professor of Hindsight
displaying monocular
'stead of binocular
perception of hist'ry in hindsight.

To prove 9-11 we could've
prevented if Bush only would've,
approved plans I drew,
my half-hindsight view
shows Bush didn't do what he should've.

As long as the media limelight
refracts through monocular hindsight,
the public will choose
my half-hindsight view
for lack of binocular hindsight.

The rewrite of hist'ry I'm touting
is like single-entry accounting
according me credit
without any debits
for half-hindsight theories I'm spouting.

One could take a leap of faith to accept at face value Don Hewett's claim that innocent oversight led to 60 Minutes' failure to disclose that the parent company of CBS, Viacom, also owns the publishing company for Richard Clarke's book, Against All Enemies.  However, one could not assume (at least not without an unforgivable degree of naivety) that 60 Minutes, which touts itself as the premiere investigative-journalism news program, had not learned before producing the interview of Clarke for broadcast on March 21, 2004, that Clarke voted for Gore in 2000 and that for at least the last decade, the only political candidacies to which he contributed were those of Democrats.  Therefore, it's difficult to view 60 Minutes' touting him as a "registered Republican" as anything other than ideological spin by a program masquerading as "investigative journalism." 

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