Slouching Towards 9/11
Of course we still remember the missing, and mourn them, and not even a maudlin, self-aggrandizing media orgy a year later could so deaden our senses that we would forget. But a certain national numbness, or perhaps amnesia, is settling in. If we remember the dead of Sept. 11 vividly, we are gradually losing sight of those who carried out their slaughter. Wasn't our mission to track down Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, dead or alive, before they struck again? We are now gearing up to fight another war that has been grandfathered into the war on terrorism. While it too targets an unambiguous evildoer, it is a different mission that is already obscuring the first and may yet defeat it.

Each week brings new evidence that our original task has largely been left unfulfilled in the wake of our early and successful routing of the Taliban. The Los Angeles Times has reported that the nearly 600 prisoners from 43 countries being held in U.S. military custody at Guantánamo Bay have yielded no senior Qaeda leaders whatsoever. On Wednesday The Washington Post found that two of the most important of those missing leaders are operating at full tilt out of Iran, where they are "directly involved in planning Al Qaeda terrorist operations," despite the Pentagon's announcement that one of them had been killed in Afghanistan in January.

The fact that this unhappy news arrives late and muted can be attributed in part to one other post-9/11 change. The Bush administration, never open to begin with, has now turned secrecy into a crusade so extreme that it is even fighting in court to protect the confidentiality of Bill Clinton's sleazy dealings with Marc Rich. (Why? Perhaps the executive privilege at stake would help hide its Energy Task Force's sleazy dealings with Enron.) There's a legitimate debate whether the defeat of terrorism justifies constitutional shortcuts — and that argument is playing out in court, where there have now been four judgments against the government this year, including a unanimous appellate decision this week. But more and more the argument is academic. The administration's blanket secrecy has less to do with the legitimate good of protecting our security than with the political goal of burying its own failures.

By keeping the names and court proceedings of his detainees under wraps, John Ashcroft could for months cover up his law enforcement minions' inability to apprehend a single terrorist connected to 9/11. The same stunt has been pulled by designating prisoners "enemy combatants" at Guantánamo. Jose Padilla, the "dirty bomber," whose arrest was trumpeted by the attorney general as the breakup of a major terrorist plot, turns out to be a nonentity who may not be charged with anything. But as long as Mr. Padilla is locked away in a legal deep freeze, that embarrassment can be kept on the q.t. In the same spirit, the F.B.I. is now investigating 17 members of the Senate Intelligence Committee for leaks to the press; revealingly, the leaks that angered Dick Cheney and prompted this investigation were not leaks about intelligence per se but leaks about how our government bungled intelligence on this administration's watch just before 9/11.

Now "America's New War," as CNN once branded it, is about to give way to "America's Newer War," and you have to wonder what if anything we have learned. George W. Bush is in a box, and one of his own making. If he does not attack Iraq now, after months of swagger, he will destroy his own credibility and hurt the country's. But if he does, he is in another bind. Even though the administration maintains that it needs neither allies nor Congressional approval, the president still needs the support of the American people unless he wants to mimic another hubristic Texan president who took a backdoor route into pre-emptive warfare.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/31/opinion/31RICH.html