--- John Garcia <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:That is exactly where the focus has been. Read some of the staff reports. Also, for the most part, the commissioners have been non partisan in assessing what went wrong. And make no mistake my friends, the US government at almost every level bears some responsibility for the events of Sept 11, 2001, as does the media and the citizenry. Almost no one, with the exception of a very few career civil servants crying in the wind, paid attention to the threat that Al Queda posed to this country.
john
That's not really fair...quite a few people _outside_ the government were saying things. The US government failed, catastrophically. What made Clarke's "apology" so galling was that what he was _really_ saying was "everyone else was wrong, and I was right, on everything, for my entire life, without exception." He wasn't really apologizing at all.
I would agree with you about the commissioners in general, with the striking exception of Ben Veniste, who really does appear to be a hack, more interested in scoring political points than anything to do with terrorism. It appears to be rebounding on him, but we shall see.
You're right, Gautam, I'm not being fair. I just looked up AP's list of the top news stories of the year 2000, and the Cole bombing made number 3. The election was number 1, and the Elian Gonzalez story was number 2. 17 dead sailors don't generate as much press as one Cuban kid, but I might be a bit prejudiced having served in the Navy myself.
Why Ben-Veniste is on the commission continues to be a mystery to me.
Al Queda bears the blame for the Embassy bombings, the Cole bombing, the attacks on our soldiers in Somalia in 1998, and the Twin Towers attack. However, our government over at least the last 10 years bears some responsibility, if for nothing else our weak responses to what were de facto and possibly de jure acts of war on the United States.
I believe that the work done by the Commission's staff and more responsible Commissioners will prove beneficial.
john
_______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
