Froma Harrop's articleFrustrating federal ID plan invites havoc starts out promisingly, detailing delays in achiueving a ssecure form of identification, presumably for visitors to our Country. it then notes that the CIA seems risk adverse to any form of faiure which might risk their careers, and that such risk aversion is harming its efforts in the war on terror.
They feared the bad things that might have happened had they gotten tough: CIA personnel could have become prisoners of al-Qaida. Congress could have hauled them before committees for helping Northern Alliance leaders involved with the heroin trade in Afghanistan or for abusing al-Qaida prisoners.
But those are risks our protectors are supposed to take. Hurting one's career should be a small price to pay for defending national security. By holding top CIA officials accountable, we add risk to not taking risks, and that's how it should be.
So far so good. But immediately after that she heads off into Cloud Cuckoo land-
Of course, anyone who was gung-ho for destroying al-Qaida had to deal with the crushing laziness of the Bush administration in its first eight months. By the time Bush had arrived in the White House, al-Qaida had already supported the first World Trade Center bombing (1993), a plan to blow up airliners over the Pacific (1995), the bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa (1998), the suicide attack on the USS Cole (2000) and the Millennium Plot to blow up the Los Angeles airport (2000). Yet during that time, the administration did next to nothing about al-Qaida.
Is Harrop blaming the Bush administration for doing nothing in the years 1993-2000- you know the years preceedingt he Bush administration taking office in January 2001?
Charitably one can argue that she means that in the 8 months once he took office but to list the terorirst attacks immediately before saying "Yet during that time" certainly paints a false picture and will have all the readers who can't remember the year Bush took office nodding sagely that he didn't try to stop any of those attacks because he was lazy.
Blaming and criticising Bush for a variety of failings since he's taken office, on many issues is fair game. To confabulate and make a false suggestion that he is responsible for events before he even took office or was crushingly lazy in the first eight months of his term is riddiculous. What exactly did harrop want him to do? Start bombing stuff, try to pass the patroit act before the attacks took place. Good luck with that -- the nation was not ready for any of those actions and you can guess the level of criticism Bush would have faced if he tried.
Yet another potentially good article derailled by the BDS train,
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