Ain’t Hindsight Wonderful?

Sigh. Hard to separate the wheat from the chaff in the after-September 11 chatter. But some comments:

Apparently President Bush got a memo before September 11 saying hijacking of a plane might be possible.

Well, duh. That covers a lot of ground, doesn’t it? Besides, before September 11, everyone knew what a hijacking was. Some discontented national waves a gun or other weapon around the cockpit, orders the pilot to fly somewhere, negotiates a lot. Eventually the hijacker gets what he wants or some sniper takes him out, the crew and passengers are rescued, etc. Few hijackings turned out as badly as what happened on the ship Achille Lauro, where a man in a wheelchair was killed.

That’s why those security barriers in airports were erected in the first place. And recall that, way back when, “harmless” hijackings got so commonplace that comedians made jokes about them--and a movie actually used the event as a capper joke--remember the final scene in The Out-of-Towners?

Doesn’t seem funny now, of course. What person hearing the word “hijacker” pre-9/11 would have envisioned airplanes being used as missiles? Or simple old box cutters being used as weapons? People who work in warehouses and mailrooms and receiving areas see box cutters every day. They’re just there, like the furniture and the phone.

But hey, man, someone should have known.

Then there’s the infamous memo saying that a lot of Arab-looking men were taking flying lessons. Surely someone should have said something!

Exercise here: replace “Arab” with “African-American.” Or “Jewish.” Or “Hispanic.” Now release a memo warning about these people. Can you say ACLU protests? Can you say ethnic anti-defamation group protests? Can you say people picketing the White House/FBI headquarters/their local police stations complaining about racial profiling? So what if a lot of Arab-looking men have been taking flying lessons, they would cry. Don’t they have a right to do anything they wish in this country? Our flying schools are the best! Of course they wish to take lessons here, and they have that right!

But, hey, guys, we should have known!

Do I think our intelligence should have been better? Sure. It can always be better. Face it, intelligence ain’t like you see it in those spy movies. The bad guy does not always reveal the entire plot to the secret agent before he tries to kill him, only to have the agent get away and thwart his scheme. Makes for nice drama but certainly not reality. Intelligence comes in in bits and pieces that someone must make sense of--and then there are various ways to interpret the results, not one black-and-white answer. Do I think government red tape might have held some warnings up? I’m afraid so. I work for the Feds. Rules and regulations, fairness to all and legal wanglings make for a convoluted mess.

But saying “they should have known” is like allowing your kid to have a hot dog and then saying, later, when he’s throwing up, “I should have known not to have let him eat that!” Unless you know the child reacts badly to eating weiners, the outcome could not have been predicted.

Perhaps Frank Borman was right after all? After the Apollo 1 fire, Borman said it wasn’t as much the failure of the system as it was a failure of imagination. Everyone expected a disaster might happen in space. No one imagined the spacecraft might catch fire there on the pad, in a practice run.

No one imagined anyone would be crazy enough to deliberately fly a jet into a skyscraper, either. Unfortunately, now we do.

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 9:24:00 AM

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