The President and the 9/11 Commission

Five democrats and five republicans today discussed issues spanning the Clinton and Bush administrations as to how we could be so naive about the threats to our democracy. There were five times as many graduates from Al Quaeda camps as our intelligence academies at the FBI and CIA and yet we still allowed them into our country. In the words of Tennyson's March of the Light Brigade, "Forward, the Light Brigade!/ Was there a man dismayed?/ Not though the soldier knew/ Someone had blundered."

Daniel Patrick Moynihan was so far ahead of his time on so many issues, like international law, and now, it seems, secrecy.

Moynihan wrote a book called Secrecy (please buy this book if you are interested in the 9/11 Commissions inquiry into the breakdown and disconnect between our intelligence organizations). On the CIA and FBI's competition he writes:

"Bureaucratic boundaries have also proliferated, although occasionally they have been surmounted by public servants of rare quality. In the case of the CIA and the FBI in the 1990s, John M. Deutch as director of the CIA, Jamie Gorelick as the deputy attorney general, and Louis J. Freeh as director of the FBI have developed guidelines for sharing intelligence information and thereby have successfully reduced tensions between these two rivals. At the top, at all events. In the vaults and tunnels, however, the secret wars have gone on as before."

Such dark language and so prescient. In Secrecy, Moynihan traces the history of governmental secrecy, a twentieth century innovation, and the results are very, very sad. Let's hope that tonight -- George Bush's 12th q and a with the media, he touches, if only briefly, on this. Okay, now on to the fun stuff.