9-11 REPORT
Fred Kaplan has a good quickie analysis of the Congressional report on 9-11. The most telling finding–one of little surprise to those of us who pay attention to bureaucratic politics–was that the interagency process and lack of attention to non-core functions within the intelligence agencies was a huge problem.
It should be emphasized, however, that nothing here is evidence that the 9-11 attacks would have been thwarted by more efficient bureaucracy. But major reform has been a long time coming.
I read through the findings and this is the sentence that stuck out for me:
The United States persisted in observing the rule of law and accepted norms of international behavior, but Bin Ladin and al-Qa’ida recognized no rules and thrived in the safe haven provided by Afghanistan
I think we should have a “fill in the redacted material” contest for the report.
My entry: replace every instance of [—] with “Saudi Arabia” and you probably will get a pretty good approximation of the classified version of the report.
—