3 ms·

You do realize regardless of resources they had at their disposal, the reason 9/11 happened was because of inter-agency competition and the lack of knowledge sh

You do realize regardless of resources they had at their disposal, the reason 9/11 happened was because of inter-agency competition and the lack of knowledge sharing between said agencies? This is the primary reason the Department of Homeland Security was created in the first place.

jessaustin 7y ago
I'm not nearly as certain as you seem to be, about any of the claims you make here. I remember the debate about creating "Homeland Security". (Starting with the neo-Nazi name...) No one with any management experience, including Bush the Lesser, thought it was a good idea. Organizations that have lost their way due to bureaucratic bullshit are not made more effective by more layers of bureaucratic bullshit. Congress was convinced, however, and W's handlers didn't want to "waste" political capital preventing an obvious disaster. Before this debacle, FEMA had been an effective organization (that incidentally had nothing to do with "security"), largely due to its relative independence from the rest of the executive branch. After this debacle, Hurricane Katrina happened. Everybody agreed to blame the hapless "heck of a job" guy because they hoped we stupid voters would forget when they torpedoed the agency two years before the storm. Why are we supposed to believe that "inter-agency competition" was the cause of 9/11? The guy who did it, ObL, claimed it was in response to USA military presence on the Peninsula. Why don't we blame that? If we don't blame our stupid military decisions, why not blame the intelligence community for not noticing potential consequences of those stupid decisions, a single decade after they didn't predict the most important thing that ever happened with respect to their "mission"? The unsupervised services are just like the military, in this respect: WWII was a long time ago, and they've never once been judged on their performance since that time. (JFK tried to hold them to a standard, but not for long...) All they have to do is spend money, and at that they excel. 9/11 itself helped them spend a great deal more than they ever had before. Anyway, even the goofs at NSA could have figured it out in time, if they hadn't just axed ThinThread in favor of Trailblazer. That was a human lapse in judgment that could have taken place at any bureaucratic level. When they make a similar mistake in the next decade, the interference of "Homeland Security" won't have done a thing to prevent it.

jessaustin 7y ago

I'm not nearly as certain as you seem to be, about any of the claims you make here. I remember the debate about creating "Homeland Security". (Starting with the neo-Nazi name...) No one with any management experience, including Bush the Lesser, thought it was a good idea. Organizations that have lost their way due to bureaucratic bullshit are not made more effective by more layers of bureaucratic bullshit. Congress was convinced, however, and W's handlers didn't want to "waste" political capital preventing an obvious disaster. Before this debacle, FEMA had been an effective organization (that incidentally had nothing to do with "security"), largely due to its relative independence from the rest of the executive branch. After this debacle, Hurricane Katrina happened. Everybody agreed to blame the hapless "heck of a job" guy because they hoped we stupid voters would forget when they torpedoed the agency two years before the storm. Why are we supposed to believe that "inter-agency competition" was the cause of 9/11? The guy who did it, ObL, claimed it was in response to USA military presence on the Peninsula. Why don't we blame that? If we don't blame our stupid military decisions, why not blame the intelligence community for not noticing potential consequences of those stupid decisions, a single decade after they didn't predict the most important thing that ever happened with respect to their "mission"? The unsupervised services are just like the military, in this respect: WWII was a long time ago, and they've never once been judged on their performance since that time. (JFK tried to hold them to a standard, but not for long...) All they have to do is spend money, and at that they excel. 9/11 itself helped them spend a great deal more than they ever had before. Anyway, even the goofs at NSA could have figured it out in time, if they hadn't just axed ThinThread in favor of Trailblazer. That was a human lapse in judgment that could have taken place at any bureaucratic level. When they make a similar mistake in the next decade, the interference of "Homeland Security" won't have done a thing to prevent it.