| 10 September 2006 The End is Near The President is headed for New York, for the anniversary that hangs in the middle distance of everything. The docudrama that ABC has cooked up about the events that led to the mass murder has caused quite a stir. I was around some of the arguments when they happened- not the sensitive ones in the White House, but the echoes of them in the Pentagon and elsewhere in the executive branch. No one got it. There was some notion that we would bring the miscreants to justice, as we did those who first attacked the World Trade center in 1993. It was part of a compromise between the law enforcement crowd and the spooks and the military, and the chasms between them was institutional, placed there because of abuses in other administrations and other wars. The famous “firewall” between the FBI and the Intelligence Community was there for a reason, and in those days it would have been suicide for any bureaucrat to cross it. There were careers ruined and jail time served over breeches in the wall, and whatever the rules were, a prudent person would take a step back from that just to make sure they didn't get in trouble. Mr. Clinton had a couple chances to get Osama, that is indisputable. The notion that he was a threat goes back to the Reagan Administration. Ollie North was questioned about why he had the security fence built around his house. Osama was the reason, he told Congress, the scariest man you had never heard of. That was the first word about the charismatic Saudi to reach us. But that was before the mass murders on American soil, the mass murders on other people's soil were not enough for a prudent president to sign a “finding” that it was OK to assassinate specific people in the interest of national security. We had been through that already, and that is why the law is the way it was. There was a nicety, a nuance, really, that it was OK to accidentally kill a head of state in the process of some other operation, like the raid on Tripoli that shook up Colonel Qadaffy so thoroughly. The idea of putting an Agency or a Special Operations hit team on someone else's sovereign soil was just not a rational option. Lobbing a few cruise missiles was acceptable, or seemed to be so in cases like the Baby Milk factory in Sudan, but things were a little hazy. It was about nuance and nicety, two concepts that seem quaint today. I remember walking into the office of a friend of mine who was running one of the Congressionally-mandated four-year surveys of the Intelligence Community that August to express my frustration. I showed her my notebook from one of the meetings of her task force. My mind had wondered, and I wrote that something awful was going to happen. Would it be the loss of an American city? Weapons of mass destruction? Something had to be done. The drums were beating, the air was filled static. George Tenent had felt it. He had gone so far as to "declare war” on Osama in 1999. But the resources took time to program, and the time was not right for bold preemptive action. My friend felt it too, in the corner office in the old Headquarters building, floating there above the green trees of Virginia. We all did to some degree. She felt it, too. I think everyone did. But while our synapses were screaming for action, there was no catalyst to enable it. Then it was the day, zero day for everything before and everything after. We all have stories about that, just like my father and mother do about Pearl Harbor. The difference is that in the digital age, it is as if we all lived in Hawaii. I am sorry that ABC did their 9/11 documentary the way they did, assigning personal blame for failing to kill Osama. There is no need for it, and you can understand why people are upset. Hell, I am as guilty as anyone. I knew something was coming, and I should have done something about it. I should have resigned my commission and stood with a placard in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House, telling them that the end was coming, and soon. Do you remember? Before 9/11, it was legal to do that. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |