Connecting the dots is a lousy metaphor says Eugene Robinson and creates “unrealistic expectations”. Nonsense. It’s not that the info on Abdulmutallab was there, but that it was there in such profusion that means the expectation to have found him was not only not unrealistic; it was fully, completely, 100% justified: they shoulda got him, simple as that.
Maureen Dowd is a bona fide member of the liberal MSM (aka a “leftie”), an early Obama supporter, but even she lays into Obama, for being over cool on the issue, for not leading presidentially, instead of continuing to improve his golf. She says there was just so much evidence out there about the undie-bomber that it’s staggering that the dots were not connected.
And I agree.
For heavens sake, when I was Intel assessment in the mid-eighties, we had a far higher proportion of information to computer capacity than there is today. Over half a million “terrorism-related entities” [the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE] list may seem a lot, but it’s nothing for today’s computing power. An Amazon or a Yahoo handle that many in half a day. Amazon’s smart relational software tells me what I bought last time and what “people like you” bought and what I might like to think of buying.
Why can’t there be the algorithm in the government’s computers that popped up something each day, each hour, each minute on the screen of analysts saying “a person like the 9/11 or the 7/11 or Richard Reid, [or whoever], has just appeared: check him out please”. And then the order goes out: don’t give him a visa and if he has one cancel it and if he tries to board a plane, let us know, but don’t let him”.
Counter-terrorism Deputy Head John Brennan has said that the government has more computational power than Facebook. Think of the smart connections Facebook can make. Well then. It must only be the poor record of IT in government service, the poor record of government in coordinating, that would make smart pop-ups like that I suggest above "unrealistic”. Incompetence, indolence, in other words; not the putative “too much info there” to connect the dots.
There may also be another factor: that of concern for litigation. In his book “Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad”, Andrew McCarthy says that the FBI had a mole in al-Qaeda before the 911 attacks. He was giving good, hard, relevant intel well before the bombing of the WTC. But they let him go before the attack because they were concerned about the litigation there might be if it were found out that they had such a mole but had still failed to stop the attack (!!). “Imagine the liability!” was the call. They let the informant go, figuring better to have no asset in place and therefore no way to be blamed, rather than to have an asset in place, miss the bombing and be litigated to penury or jail….
Sad one that and how to handle in the litigious US?.....
