Rice to Talk
For someone who can't talk about 9-11, Condoleeza Rice has certainly been talking a lot to the press about why she can't talk about 9-11 even though she would really love to talk about 9-11, and, oh by the way, that Richard Clarke guy is a lying sack of crap. Now there's word that she will, after all, be testifying under oath to the commission investigating the attacks.

----------Mike Thompson, Detroit Daily News

Clarke's testimony last week about how the Administration was obsessing on Iraq certainly seems true when one considers the fervor with which Bush went after Saddam. Even now, the President denies that the hunt for bin Laden was put on the backburner while preparing to invade Iraq. Now comes word that members of a special forces unit with expertise in the middle east were pulled out of Afghanistan in 2002 in order to concentrate on Iraq.

Even so, could the 9-11 attacks have been prevented? I seriously doubt it. As former Defense Secretary William Cohen put it, neither the American public nor world opinion would have stood for a US attack on Afghanistan prior to that day.

Taking that a step further, Americans really didn't care about terrorism. Yes, it was a terrible thing, but it wasn't something that ever happened right here on American soil. Terrorism was always something that happened somewhere else, perhaps in Africa, or some godforsaken harbor in a country no one had ever heard of. And the targets were always something representative of the US government itself, or our military. But right here in our backyards? Purely civilian targets?

Nah. Never.

And can you imagine what would have happened if Bush had announced early on the morning of 9-11 that all flights within the United States were being grounded because of a possible terrorist attack. People would not have stood for it, and would have branded him as a wacko trying to legitimize his controversial win less than a year before.

Okay, so some may still want to make that argument, but that's not my point.

And look at the public's reaction to three previous terror threats here at home. First, of course, was the '93 attack on the World Trade Center. That case had been closed & the perpetrators were rotting in jail. People had all but forgotten about it.

The second, perhaps more scary incident, was in 1995 when another Islamic group in New York had plotted to blow up a bridge, two tunnels, and the United Nations. By all rights, that should have been a huge story, but for the most part it ended being buried in the back pages of newspapers.

And finally there was the so-called millenium bombing attempt in December of 1999. That was only foiled because of an alert customs agent at the Canadian border. Again, that's a story that received scant coverage even after the suspect was tied to terror training camps in Afghanistan.