Dowd: Color Them Fatalistic Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit [Maureen Dowd has long had it in for the Bush Gang, but even Tom Friedman, rightish apologist for Israel and the war on "terror," has had it with the hysterical scrambling of the liar and coward in Residence at the White House. He even seems to have recalled the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. See second item below.] The New York Times - May 22, 2002 http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/22/opinion/22DOWD.html COLOR THEM FATALISTIC by Maureen Dowd WASHINGTON--I have no faith in the ability of the U.S. government to keep out terrorists. But I have absolute faith in the ability of New York co-op boards to keep out terrorists. The F.B.I. has warned apartment managers in New York that the evildoers might try to get a place, furnish it with explosives and blow up the building. But first the Qaeda rats would have to find an empty, affordable apartment. Then they'd have to get past the withering front line of real estate agents. Finally, they'd have to penetrate the maximum security defenses of Manhattan co-op boards. There's screening and then there's screening. The enemy vermin can dupe the I.N.S. to get student visas, but wait until the East Side co-op president starts grilling them about where they went to school, what eating clubs they were in, which dancing class they attended, and whether they would bother the neighbors with any impolite crashes or unesthetic bangs. If Henry van der Luyden of the Ardsthorpe had interrogated Mohamed Atta, that creep would have been screaming for mercy. Beyond the co-op boards, however, we're on our apocalyptic own. Robert Mueller calls suicide attacks "inevitable." Dick Cheney says another terrorism episode is "not a matter of if, but when." Donald Rumsfeld warns that the terrorists "inevitably will get their hands on" nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. "They jerk us around, try to jerk us around, and test us," the defense secretary told senators yesterday. "We are going to be living in a period of limited or no warning because of the asymmetrical advantages of the attacker as opposed to the defender." Mayor Michael Bloomberg says it's impossible to guard against all the different ways terrorists can do damage in New York. Instead, he says, we should just live our lives. All this fatalism from our leaders and we're still only on a yellow alert?!?! Yellow in the Tom Ridge color scheme means the risk of an attack is significant. As opposed to an orange alert, which means high, or red alert, which signals severe danger. There is a red alert going on now, but it's only in Karl Rove's office. (There is a severe risk of political damage to the Bush administration.) That's why the Bushies are trying to terrify us. They desperately want to change the subject from the stunning lapses of their ostensibly expert foreign policy team ? and they cynically want to make it sound as if nothing they do or don't do really matters in the end. Mr. Ridge offers five colors to warn against infiltrations. (This being Washington, officials hotly debated including white in the terror pinwheel, but decided against it, perhaps fearing it would look like a white flag.) I think it would be far more useful, however, if we had a wheel with five colors to warn against incompetence. Holy heather: At this level, John Ashcroft stays so busy whiting out lines of the Constitution, diluting Justice's civil rights division, lionizing the Second Amendment and robing naked statues that he forgets to give the president a detailed F.B.I. memo describing the time and place of the next terrorist attack. Squeal teal: At this level, George Tenet, a rare Clinton holdover, so assiduously ingratiates himself with the president (he named the C.I.A. building after Poppy and keeps him in the loop) and has his minions spin the blame toward the F.B.I. that he can't manage to find even an hour to figure out how to infiltrate Al Qaeda. Top-secret taupe: The president and vice president keep secret all the data that Americans need, on the spurious assumption that They Know Best (The Bush family motto). The Bushies become so obsessed with drawing attention to Bill Clinton's failure to eliminate Osama that they have no energy to eliminate Osama. Bureaucratic balsam: Tom Ridge works so hard trying to prove his relevance that he becomes unable to do his irrelevant job, which is teaming with Norm Mineta to hire more of the highly trained airport professionals who drag 85-year-old dowagers and eight-month-old infants out of the security lines and make them remove their orthopedics and booties. Visas-for-everyone violet: I.N.S. employees continue to show up for work, exponentially ratcheting up the risks to the American public. * * * The New York Times - May 22, 2002 http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/22/opinion/22FRIE.html COOL IT! by Thomas L. Friedman Ah, excuse me, but could we all just calm down here? What started as a story about how the Bush team handled unspecific warnings about possible terrorist attacks in the U.S. before 9/11 has now prompted the Bushies not only to defend themselves from charges of irresponsibility -- which they are entitled to do -- but to go on a Chicken Little warnings binge that another attack is imminent, inevitable and around the corner, but we can't tell you when, where or how. Look, in the wake of 9/11, I would never rule out any kind of attack. That would be foolhardy. But I'm no more interested in indicting the Bush team for failing to respond to an unspecific warning about a possible terrorist attack before 9/11 than I'm interested in having the vice president and F.B.I. director warn us about the certainty of an unspecified attack sometime in the future. What are we supposed to do with this information? Never go into another apartment building, because reports suggest an Al Qaeda cell may rent an apartment just to blow up the whole structure? Don't go outside? Don't go near national monuments? Pat the belly of every pregnant woman to check if she's a suicide bomber? Who wants to live that way? Let's make a deal: We won't criticize the administration for not anticipating 9/11 if it won't terrorize the country by now predicting every possible nightmare scenario, but no specific ones, post-9/11. Not only are these "warnings" just unnerving the public when people were finally starting to calm down, but they are also obscuring something very important: We are winning this war. No, it's not over. And yes, I too will say for the record that sometime, somewhere, there will be another attack. But in the meantime we've actually accomplished a lot. If Osama bin Laden is alive, a big if, his ability to direct acts of terrorism against U.S. targets has been disrupted. It is doubtful that he would dare even use a telephone. That is important, because bin Laden and his top deputies were a unique and very smart, creative and daring group of terrorists, who do not come along every day. And whether they are all dead or deep in hiding, there is no indication they are in business right now. Yes, probably less professional cells still exist and can still wreak havoc. But when you decapitate an organization like Al Qaeda, and disrupt its money flow, you've done a lot. And when you oust the Taliban in Afghanistan and take away the one true safe harbor for bin Laden -- for training and operations -- you've also done a lot. We have put in place reasonable precautions at airports; we have instituted better coordination between the F.B.I., C.I.A. and I.N.S.; we are tracking foreign students more closely; and we and our allies have detained thousands of suspects. The fact that there has been no other major incident since 9/11 is surely not because the terrorists have abandoned their intentions. It is because we have hampered their capabilities. That is a good thing. But the very nature of this war against small groups and individuals bent on terrorism is that you can never win it definitively. It will be with us forever. But we can limit the number of attacks -- and keep terrorist cells on the run and disrupted enough to reduce their capabilities -- if our public officials responsible for this war are not spending all day looking in their rear-view mirrors or mindlessly terrorizing the public with unspecified, cover-your-behind warnings about future terrorism. This is absolutely not an argument for a free pass for the Bush team. Given the stories about intelligence failures that have come out already, we clearly need a special commission, led by professionals, not politicians, that looks into the decadelong history of our handling of Al Qaeda and explores why we did not have better intelligence, why the dots were not connected and how to improve in the future. But the other thing we need to do is grow up. If we're going to maintain an open society, all we can do is take all reasonable precautions and then suck it up and learn to live with a higher level of risk. That is our fate, so let's not drive ourselves crazy. I don't know about you, but my Memorial Day weekend plans are set: golf Saturday, bike trip Sunday, barbecue Monday. If the F.B.I. director wants to interrupt my weekend with a specific warning, I'll be all ears; otherwise, pipe down and chill out. Remember it's supposed to be Al Qaeda that's running scared, not us. Copyright (c) 2002 The New York Times Company. ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytmed-05.23.02-01:23:07-24573