Republicans often like to see issues in black and white with no room for shades of gray. This means that they cannot accommodate luck or happenstance or even nuance in describing why or how something happens. One of the best examples of this myopic vision by Republicans is the way Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham responded to the unfortunate attack on Benghazi, Libya in September 2012. They took an event that literally occurred in the dark and to which there were no clear answers and then made an absolutist interpretation, with a paucity of facts to substantiate it.
Some Republicans have been trying to blame the Obama Administration for the recent Boston Marathon bombings. It’s possible that their accusations of an administration failure in gathering and utilizing intelligence is valid, if and only if, they support the near absolute suppression of our right to privacy. Republicans hate the government doing any kind of snooping, unless it helps them make an argument from which they may gain politically.
Washington Post journalists Greg Miller and Sari Horowitz recently wrote a most revealing article, Boston case highlights limitations of U.S. counterterror network. They outline many of the new steps that U.S. intelligence agencies have taken since 9-11 to coordinate retrieval of and access to information. However, they limit their investigations when the privacy rights of likely innocent citizens are at risk. They are walking a tightwire, and they have to do it very delicately. They state:
It has been more than a decade since the United States began building its massive counterterrorism infrastructure, an apparatus that has been reconfigured several times in recent years after a series of near-miss attacks.
The strike in Boston marked the first time that a terrorist bomb plot slipped past those elaborate defenses and ended in casualties in the United States. Whether that outcome represents an intelligence failure is already the focus of a multi-agency review as well as a heated political debate.
The details that have emerged so far suggest there are still institutional gaps that could be fixed to bolster the nation’s counterterrorism system. But the bombings also exposed a less-reassuring reality: Even when defenses function as designed, they can be undermined by factors beyond their control.
In Boston, some of those factors were as fundamental and elusive as timing and luck.
“When this happens, there’s sort of an automatic response to find a linkage to failure,” said Andrew Liepman, who served as deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center until last year. It’s perfectly reasonable to look into whether there were breakdowns, Liepman said. “But that massive counterterrorism infrastructure works amazingly well to protect the country. We need to get used to the idea that it isn’t foolproof.”
In the case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the obstacles for U.S. authorities ranged from a misspelling on an airplane boarding pass to the apparent refusal of Russian authorities to go beyond their initial tip. Ultimately, however, perhaps the best chance to detect and disrupt the plot fell into a six-month span on the calendar, the near-empty space between when the FBI stopped watching Tsarnaev and when he is alleged to have begun laying the groundwork for the Boston plot.
The details that have emerged so far suggest there are still institutional gaps that could be fixed to bolster the nation’s counterterrorism system. But the bombings also exposed a less-reassuring reality: Even when defenses function as designed, they can be undermined by factors beyond their control.
As Miller and Horowitz say, sometimes it’s luck; sometimes it’s factors beyond intelligence officials’ control. These factors raise their heads as stopgaps when protecting the right to privacy is endangered without sufficient evidence to justify it.
What happened in Boston was terrible. But with three people killed and hundreds injured, it was nowhere near the carnage of 9-11, in which nearly three thousand people were killed and many more thousands injured. It is the only case since 9-11 of American citizens being killed in an act of terrorism that seemingly has foreign connections. We should be most thankful that we went eleven and a half years between such events. The many successes that our intelligence communities have are often invisible and also accomplished under considerable duress. Their work and bravery should not be demeaned by baseless Republican fishing expeditions, whose sole purpose is to place specious blame on the Democratic Party.
It is true that we must be vigilant with how our intelligence agents and policy-makers handle themselves in the fight to control terrorism. There are obviously a myriad of mistakes. The element of bad luck comes in when the universe of government mistakes intersects with the universe of attempted terrorist attacks (see image below). We do our best to minimize those intersections from happening. When they do, it is not an indictment of the whole intelligence network. Rather, it is usually something that fell between the cracks at a most unfortunate time. We need to try to correct this, but also learn to live with it as we do with other misfortunes that are going to happen from time to time regardless of what we do. It’s no time for Republican lame chatter.
