A Tom Oliphant Boston Globe Column worth reading...Politics & 9/11 Report

[flpoljunkie]

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/08/05/politics_and_the_911_report?mode=PF

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My best understanding of the situation is that you can connect the two streams by inference but not by current evidence. It is just as possible that an attack with totally different targets in being planned.

An even more credibility-bruising event occurred when President Bush pretended to support the 9/11 Commission's most important recommendation to centralize in one office control over the collection and analysis of foreign and domestic intelligence.

In the Rose Garden, Bush claimed to be all for it. Within hours, however, it was clear that he wasn't. It does not take an intelligence professional to understand that a proposed national intelligence director with no authority over money, people, and operations makes figureheads everywhere look omnipotent by comparison.

For the moment, it looks like the same game is being played in Congress. For at least a decade, the forces of the status quo (the Pentagon, which gets 85 percent of the intelligence money that goes to 15 different agencies; and Congress's military committees) have defeated all attempts at reform. The odds favor them again, though my educated guess is that an effort will be made like Bush's in the Rose Garden to make a phony redesign of the status quo look like reform.

So whom to trust in another unsettling period that belies the absurd, political insistence that we are safer? While we wait to see if Bush can lead coherently, the answer is sadly obvious -- the 9/11 Commission members and the organized survivors of the victims of the terrorist attacks who have been filling the national void for too long.

For now, politics continues to pollute everything else.