“I should add for completeness:

Nov. 25, 1941 - Stimson diary notes "the question was how we should maneuver the Japanese into the position of firing the first shot without too much danger to ourselves."

Dec. 3, 1941 - FBI phone tap on Japanese consulate reveals code burning plans.

Dec. 6, 1941 9:30 p.m. - FDR reads 13-part 900-series Magic intercept: "this means war"

December 7, 1941, 7:02am - Opana Radar Station privates Joseph Lockhard & George Elliott sight Japanese planes 132 mi. northeast of Hawaii.

7:55am - 1st wave of 183 Japanese planes led by Fuchida attack Pearl Harbor. 9:00am - 2nd wave of 167 Japanese planes led by Shimazaki attack Pearl Harbor.
9:45am - of 96 ships in harbor, 18 sunk (Arizona, Oklahoma) or seriously damaged. Of 394 aircraft at Hickam, Wheeler, Bellows airfields, 188 destroyed & 159 damaged. 2403 U.S. military killed (1102 in Arizona) & 1178 wounded.”

“this commision is a joke. the hearing are a joke. gotcha politics are a joke. clarke is a joke. liberals are a joke.

no one's laughing....

it's all about the bush jihad. sad but true. jihad the past, jihad the present, jihad the future. jihad anything bush. no humanity, no rules, no integrity...just jihad”

“Bush should be impeached for taking us to war based on lies.

How many are now dead because of his lies?”

“Bet you thought every dollar of the Clinton probe was worthwhile, eh, Strat?”

“tilt, what lies? was bush the only one who believed these things you say are lies?

gimme a lie man, quit being a lapdog and gimme one example.

tree, no ...welll...yes...whitewater was a total scam and resulted in 17 CONVICTIONS , including our govenor...convictions means laws were broken and they got caught. right? right. monicagate? that was bu11sh1t, i agree on that part.”

“You understand, I hope, why I said that. Your post kinda opened you up for it...”

“No one could have predicted the attacks, especially with the cutbacks in intelligence that occured in the 90s, and the reliance almost solely on sigint instead of humint. The way things were, nothing probably could have been done to prevent the attacks. Nothing like it had ever happened before in CONUS. I'm sure had Clinton or Bush either one had any forewarning, they would have done everything in their power to stop the attacks. As blinded by your hatred of Bush as some of you simpletons are, it is ridiculous to blame the Bush administration for not stopping the attacks or for trying to cover anything up in regards to advance knowledge. It was an attack on our country that anyone would have prevented if given half the chance.”

“StickManWalking, you said it better than I could have.”

“Stick, I take it that you also think Ashcroft was 'over the top' in his testimony?”

“Were are y'all hiking this weekend?


I'm gonna spend it smelling those beeeeuuutitiful Springtime smells at one of Michigan gems, the Jordan River Pathway.”

“Harriman, NY, baby!”

“Cool! Where is that at, TB?”

“How many have to die in a trumped-up war before the Bush-loving simpletons catch on?”

“Q, it's about an hour north of New York City. Beautiful state park. We are going to sing atop Tom Jones' Mountain...

Got Scorchy, Maple and Twinks...”

“Oh, this must be the "Trio of Redheads Trip" I heard so much about.....:O”

“Youssah!”

“Dang, dang and DANG!!!

I'm going to miss the Rouge Trois again!!!!”

“

The Lessons of 9/11

In a scathing essay, a former national-security chief writes that the cost of 9/11 has been billions of dollars spent, an unneeded war, and thousands of lives lost.

by Richard A. Clarke | September 7, 2011


The events of that day were so jarring that they are recorded in our memories as if they had taken place last week. But it has been a long decade, one in which we have made as many mistakes as we have had successes. Now, and not after we suffer another major terrorist attack, is good time to pause, look back, learn lessons, and begin to chart a path away from the past.

Looking back, we may see things that we do not want to revisit just yet, controversies that we wish to leave behind. For us to learn as a nation, however, for us to hand down to future generations what they need to know, we must be clear about what happened. We were attacked by a handful of people from a relatively small organization of fanatics who had tapped into the frustrations of a sizable minority of those who shared their ethnicity and religion. Our nation was stunned and wanted to unify in response. That desire for unity kept too many voices silent when they should have been contributing to a public debate about how to react. Wretched excesses were proposed and barely opposed. We invaded a country, Iraq, that had nothing to do with the attack on us, but had everything to do with the preconceived plans of a cabal in and out of our government. In the process, we killed 100,000, wounded many times more, and threw millions out of their homes. More Americans suffered violent deaths in Iraq than did on 9/11, and multiples more were scarred for life. Americans, including our troops, were lied to about Iraq’s role in 9/11 and some marched to their death motivated by those lies.

Constitutional protections that generations of Americans had struggled to achieve for our own people were eroded in the name of the new cause. Human-rights standards that America had stood for around the world were casually discarded in our treatment of others. The government ran roughshod over sacrosanct civil liberties and disregarded treaty obligations and international law. The CIA established a network of “black” detention centers, and used “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding. Politicians used 9/11 and the new wars that resulted as a wedge issue to win elections and discredit opponents. Not since the phrase “wave the bloody shirt” was coined in the elections after the Civil War had office-seekers so blatantly tried to gain from Americans’ deaths.

Money was thrown at the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, and a new Orwellian sounding “homeland” bureaucracy. Large parts of CIA doubled in size and then spawned private-sector, for-profit replicas. With little real analysis as to need or effectiveness, and with a spending-binge mentality, we bought a homeland-intelligence-industrial complex that hides its overwhelming size behind secret budgets and corporate balance sheets. No one would question money allegedly to be used to fight those who had attacked us, nor have the courage to challenge the profits rolling out to the contractors. The spending came not only without new financial sacrifices, it came with tax cuts. The irony of this is that one of the stated goals of Al Qaeda is to lead the United States to death through a thousand cuts. In this strategy they have not been entirely unsuccessful. While we have severely disrupted their operational capability, the costs of our military engagements over the past decade have contributed immensely to our current financial malaise. Estimates of the total costs of the Iraq War vary. While the Pentagon has directly spent nearly $760 billion on the engagement, indirect costs push some estimates as high as $3 trillion. Researchers at Brown University recently estimated the costs of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and our aid to the Pakistani military total between $3.2 and $4 trillion.

For most of the decade, our reaction to the attack strengthened the attackers. Our unprovoked destruction of an Arab nation, our degradation of prisoners, our torturing of suspects, and perceived xenophobia and religious prejudice drove millions away from our cause and many into the ranks of our attackers. Only slowly did the repeated heinous acts of our enemy, their killing of their coreligionists, begin to undermine their support. Only with a new president did the focus of our effort swing from Iraq to a well-thought-out effort to destroy the organization that had actually attacked America on 9/11. Had we not invaded Iraq, had the last two years of wearing down of Al Qaeda been done instead, we could have reduced that threat to a marginalized nub five years ago. Those are the facts that should not be obscured by our desire to heal.

Learning lessons from those unassailable facts is even harder than looking them square in the eye again. One tough but necessary thing to admit is that for a long time we actually played into the hands of our opponents, doing precisely what they had wanted us to do, responding in the ways they had sought to provoke, damaging our economy and alienating much of the Middle East. Preserving and strengthening our critical thinking as a nation is even more necessary at a time when our emotions and primitive instincts would otherwise dominate. Recognizing that even in times of national crisis, the idea that questioning the wisdom of our government or its leaders is not unpatriotic should be an obvious conclusion from this decade. The corollary of that should be that patriotism does not include seeking to use national-security disasters and large-scale death as a basis for partisan political profit. For that to happen in the future, we need not only learned leaders but those with the courage to risk their own reputations by explaining complications, rather than oversimplifying and needlessly risking the lives of our troops.

For most of the decade our reaction to the attack strengthened the attackers.

Listening through the din to the voices of Cassandras, like the experts who warned about what an invasion of Iraq would bring, is a need that leaps out from recent years. Those who predict disasters will not always be right, but they should be heard and given the consideration that their experience merits and their analyses tested.

Knowing what our core values are and cleaving to them, even in times of testing, must be a lesson when we see the results of situational ethics and temporary, expedient treatment of basic rights. America should not again panic and overreact to terrorist attacks against this country.

Charting a path away from the past requires that we act on the perspective that this passage of time has bequeathed us. Terrorism is a continuing security issue going forward, and another series of attacks could happen, but terrorism is not an existential threat to the United States unless it were to involve nuclear attacks. The current terrorist threat does not justify the immense size of the homeland and intelligence spending. Nor does it justify a huge standing military force. The damage done to our country by our broken primary- and secondary-educational systems, climate change, our crumbling infrastructure, our inadequate research efforts and our lack of protection of intellectual property far exceeds anything that terrorism is likely to do to us in the next decade.

We, as a nation, must cease to be merely reactive and set about the achievement of goals that we dictate. Reversing the destabilizing trend of greater income inequality, improving the skill sets of our workforce, driving research that creates new industries, and elevating the political dialogue in our nation might be a good starting list. What better memorial could there be to the patriots who gave their lives for this country in this last decade than to build in their name an even more perfect union.



Assertions and opinions in this article are solely those of the above-mentioned author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Middle East Institute, which expressly does not take positions on Middle East policy.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/09/07/richard-a-clarke-what-we-ve-learned-from-9-11.html”

“He's right about a lot, but not the Iraq war, and not the reason AQ/jihadism was destroyed and disgraced, and not climate change.”

“Not one more penny!”

“While my view is closer to Clarke's, here is an interesting and thoughtful counter:

9/11 AND THE SUCCESSFUL WAR
By George Friedman, September 6, 2011

It has been 10 years since 9/11, and all of us who write about such things for a living are writing about it. That causes me to be wary. I prefer being the lonely voice, but the fact is that 9/11 was a defining moment in American history. On Sept. 12, 2001, few would have anticipated the course the resulting war would take -- but then, few knew what to think. The nation was in shock. In retrospect, many speak with great wisdom about what should have been thought about 9/11 at the time and what should have been done in its aftermath. I am always interested in looking at what people actually said and did at the time.

The country was in shock, and shock was a reasonable response. The country was afraid, and fear was a reasonable response. Ten years later, we are all much wiser and sure that our wisdom was there from the beginning. But the truth is that, in retrospect, we know we would have done things superbly had we the authority. Few of us are being honest with ourselves. We were all shocked and frightened. Our wisdom came much later, when it had little impact. Yes, if we knew then what we know now we would have all bought Google stock. But we didn't know things then that we know now, so it is all rather pointless to lecture those who had decisions to make in the midst of chaos.

Some wars are carefully planned, but even those wars rarely take place as expected. Think of the Germans in World War I, having planned the invasion of France for decades and with meticulous care. Nothing went as planned for either side, and the war did not take a course that was anticipated by anyone. Wars occur at unpredictable times, take unpredictable courses and have unexpected consequences. Who expected the American Civil War to take the course it did? We have been second-guessing Lincoln and Davis, Grant and Lee and all the rest for more than a century.

This particular war -- the one that began on 9/11 and swept into Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries -- is hard to second-guess because there are those who do not think it is a war. Some people, including President George W. Bush, seem to regard it as a criminal conspiracy. When Bush started talking about bringing al Qaeda to justice, he was talking about bringing them before the bar of justice. Imagine trying to arrest British sailors for burning Washington. War is not about bringing people to justice. It is about destroying their ability to wage war. The contemporary confusion between warfare and criminality creates profound confusion about the rules under which you operate. There are the rules of war as set forth in the Geneva Conventions, and there are criminal actions. The former are designed to facilitate the defense of national interests and involve killing people because of the uniform they wear. The latter is about punishing people for prior action. I have never sorted through what it was that the Bush administration thought it was doing.

This entire matter is made more complex by the fact that al Qaeda doesn't wear a uniform. Under the Geneva Conventions, there is no protection for those who do not openly carry weapons or wear uniforms or at least armbands. They are regarded as violating the rules of war. If they are not protected by the rules of war then they must fall under criminal law by default. But criminal law is not really focused on preventing acts so much as it is on punishing them. And as satisfying as it is to capture someone who did something, the real point of the U.S. response to 9/11 was to prevent anyone else from doing something -- killing and capturing people who have not done anything yet but who might.

Coming to Grips

The problem is that international law has simply failed to address the question of how a nation-state deals with forces that wage war through terrorism but are not part of any nation-state. Neither criminal law nor the laws of war apply. One of the real travesties of 9/11 was the manner in which the international legal community -- the United Nations and its legal structures, the professors of international law who discuss such matters and the American legal community -- could not come to grips with the tensions underlying the resulting war. There was an unpleasant and fairly smug view that the United States had violated both the rules of war and domestic legal processes, but very little attempt was made to craft a rule of warfare designed to cope with a group like al Qaeda -- organized, covert, effective -- that attacked a nation-state.

As U.S. President Barack Obama has discovered, the failure of the international legal community to rapidly evolve new rules of war placed him at odds with his erstwhile supporters. The ease with which the international legal community found U.S. decision makers' attempts to craft a lawful and effective path "illegal and immoral" (an oft-repeated cliche of critics of post-9/11 policy) created an insoluble dilemma for the United States. The mission of the U.S. government was to prevent further attacks on the homeland. The Geneva Conventions, for the most part, didn't apply. Criminal law is not about prevention. The inability of the law to deal with reality generated an image of American lawlessness.

Of course, one of the most extraordinary facts of the war that begin on 9/11 was that there have been no more successful major attacks on the United States. Had I been asked on Sept. 11, 2001, about the likelihood of that (in fact, I was asked), my answer would have been that it was part of a series of attacks, and not just the first. This assumption came from a knowledge of al Qaeda's stated strategic intent, the fact that the 9/11 team had operated with highly effective covert techniques based on technical simplicity and organizational effectiveness, and that its command structure seemed to operate with effective command and control. Put simply, the 9/11 team was good and was prepared to go to its certain death to complete the mission. Anyone not frightened by this was out of touch with reality.

Yet there have been no further attacks. This is not, I think, because they did not intend to carry out such attacks. It is because the United States forced the al Qaeda leadership to flee Afghanistan during the early days of the U.S. war, disrupting command and control. It is also because U.S. covert operations on a global scale attacked and disrupted al Qaeda's strength on the ground and penetrated its communications. A significant number of attacks on the United States were planned and prosecuted. They were all disrupted before they could be launched, save for the attempted and failed bombing in Times Square, the famed shoe bomber and, my favorite, the crotch bomber. Al Qaeda has not been capable of mounting effective attacks against the United States (though it has conducted successful attacks in Spain and Britain) because the United States surged its substantial covert capabilities against it.

Obviously, as in all wars, what is now called "collateral damage" occurred (in a more civilized time it would have been called "innocent civilians killed, wounded and detained"). How could it have been otherwise? Just as aircraft dropping bombs don't easily discriminate against targets and artillery sometimes kills innocent people, covert operations can harm the unintended. That is the nature and horror of war. The choice for the United States was to accept the danger of another al Qaeda attack -- an event that I am certain was intended and would have happened without a forceful U.S. response -- or accept innocent casualties elsewhere. The foundation of a polity is that it protects its own at the cost of others. This doctrine might be troubling, but few of us in World War II felt that protecting Americans by bombing German and Japanese cities was a bad idea. If this troubles us, the history of warfare should trouble us. And if the history of warfare troubles us, we should bear in mind that we are all its heirs and beneficiaries, particularly in the United States.

The first mission of the war that followed 9/11 was to prevent any further attacks. That mission was accomplished. That is a fact often forgotten. [continued after the jump]

Of course, there are those who believe that 9/11 was a conspiracy carried out by the CIA in order to justify interference in our liberty. But an organization as capable as they believe the CIA is would not need a justification to abridge liberty. That was a lot of work to justify something, and the truly powerful don't need to justify anything. Nor do they need to leave people who are revealing the truth alive. It is striking that the "doubters" believe 9/11 was created in order to crush American freedoms but that the conspirators are so incompetent they cannot shut down those who have discovered the conspiracy and are telling the world about it. Personally, if I were interested in global domination triggered by a covert act like 9/11, I would silence those revealing my secret. But then I'm not that good at it, and the doubters all have reasons why they are blogging the truth and are not dead or languishing in a concentration camp.

I take this detour for four reasons. First, doubters should not be ignored but answered. Second, unless they are answered, they will be able to say the CIA (or whomever they think did it) needed one attack to achieve its goals. Third, the issue the doubters raise is not the structural integrity of a building but the underlying intent of the CIA in carrying out the attack. The why is everything to them, and it is important to point out that it is their explanation of motive that makes no sense. Finally, I am engaging the doubters here because I enjoy receiving an abundance of emails containing fascinating accusations and the occasional threat.

Considering the Failures

But to return to the main theme, it is important here to consider not only the successes but also the failures of the war, and here Iraq comes to mind. There is a case to be made that the Iraq campaign was not irrational, but even more interesting, I think, is the fact that no war is without its disastrous misjudgments, even successful wars. In my mind, the U.S. invasion of the Philippines in 1944 was a major mistake. It did little to contribute to the fall of Japan, cost far more than the 4,000 American lives lost in Iraq, and it could have actually delayed the end of the war. It was opposed by senior commanders and was essentially something Gen. Douglas MacArthur insisted on for political reasons. The Battle of the Somme in World War I cost 600,000 British and French casualties, with 60,000 in one day. Their total gain during the battle was perhaps six miles. And in the American Civil War, the federal drive into Virginia turned into a disaster.

Every successful war is built around a series of defeats and miscalculations. The perfect war is built around deeply flawed and unnecessary campaigns. My own personal selections are not as important as the principle that all successful wars contain massive mistakes. If we simply write off Iraq as one of these, that in itself does not change the fact that the American homeland was not attacked again. Did Iraq contribute to that? This is a question that warrants a long discussion. But conceding that it had no effect simply makes the post-9/11 war normal and, in that normality, tragic.

What has not been normal has been the length of the war. Heavy fighting continues in Afghanistan, Iraq is not quite done and new theaters for covert operations are constantly opening and closing. It is the first U.S. campaign -- Afghanistan -- that actually poses the most vexing problem, one that is simple to express: When is the war over? That, of course, depends on the goal. What is the United States trying to achieve there?

The initial goal of the invasion was to dislodge al Qaeda, overthrow the government that had supported it and defeat the Taliban. The first two goals were accomplished quickly. The third goal has not been accomplished to this day, nor is it likely that the United States will ever accomplish it. Other powers have tried to subdue Afghanistan, but few have succeeded. The Taliban are optimized for the battlefield they fight on, have superior intelligence and have penetrated and are able to subvert government institutions, including the Afghan military. They have the implicit support of elements in a neighboring major nation -- Pakistan -- that are well beyond American means to intimidate. The United States has no port from which to supply its forces except the one controlled by Pakistan and only complex and difficult supply routes through other countries.

On the other hand, the Taliban cannot defeat the United States, which can stay in Afghanistan indefinitely. But the major U.S. mission in Afghanistan is concluded. Al Qaeda has not used Afghanistan as a primary base since 2002. Al Qaeda in Pakistan, according to the United States, has been crippled. The Taliban, products of Afghanistan for the most part, have no international ambitions. Al Qaeda has relocated to other countries like Yemen and Somalia.

Given this, continued combat in Afghanistan cannot be linked to al Qaeda. It could be said that the reason to go to war in Afghanistan was to prevent al Qaeda's return. But the fact is that it doesn't need Afghanistan, and if it did return to Afghanistan, it would be no more dangerous to the United States than it currently is with its bases elsewhere.

In wars, and especially in counterinsurgencies, the mission tends to creep upward. In Afghanistan, the goal is now the transformation of Afghan society into one that is democratic, no longer corrupt by American standards and able to defend itself against the Taliban. This goal does not seem attainable given the relative forces and interests in the country.

Therefore, this war will go on until the United States decides to end it or there is a political evolution in Kabul in which the government orders us out. The point is that the goal has become disengaged from the original intent and is unattainable. Unlike other wars, counterinsurgencies rarely end in victory. They usually end when the foreign forces decide to leave.

There is talk of a long war against radical Islam. It had better not be. The Islamic world is more than a billion people and radical Islam is embedded in many places. The idea that the United States has the power to wage an interminable war in the Islamic world is fantasy. This is not a matter of ideology or willpower or any other measures. It is a matter of available forces, competing international interests and American interests.

Ultimately, there are three lessons of the last decade that I think are important. The first is the tremendous success the United States has had in achieving its primary goal -- blocking attacks on the homeland. The second is that campaigns of dubious worth are inevitable in war, and particularly in one as ambiguous as this war has been. Finally, all wars end, and the idea of an interminable war dominating American foreign policy and pushing all other considerations to the side is not what is going to happen. The United States must have a sense of proportion, of what can be done, what is worth doing and what is too dangerous to do. An unlimited strategic commitment is the definitive opposite of strategy.

The United States has done as well as can be expected. Over the coming years there will be other terrorist attacks. As it wages war in response, the United States will be condemned for violating international laws that are insensate to reality. At this point, for all its mistakes and errors -- common to all wars -- the United States has achieved its primary mission. There have been no more concerted terrorist attacks against the United States. Now it is time to resume history.

This report may be forwarded or republished on your website with attribution to www.stratfor.com. Copyright 2011 STRATFOR.”