re: the 9/11/2001 Al-Qaeda attack:

Though they could not know it, time was running out. In December 2000, the CIA submitted a new plan in its targeting of al Qaeda "that would have significantly expanded our activities. ... It was too late for the departing Clinton administration to take action on this strategic proposal."

The same report speaks of excellent collaboration between the CIA and FBI on numerous terror cases, but then adds: "A major, ongoing concern is FBI's own internal dissemination system. CIA officers still often find it necessary to hand-deliver messages to the intended recipient within the FBI." And it laments "the loss of potential intelligence opportunities because of deference to law enforcement goals." In other words: at what point do you make an arrest or close down a terror conspiracy?

And in a passage with echoes today, there is a complaint about leaks compromising the Agency's ability to implement what became known as "the Plan" to get bin Laden. "Persistent publicity and leaks of information about our methods in the United States and abroad caused the terrorists to [redacted] emphasize their compartmentation."

therefore: 

Notably, the Inspector General's report included a warning that the long-term discipline needed in analyzing terror groups "can be difficult to maintain in the current atmosphere, which rewards instant results." Some analysts had complained about a "constant state of crisis" that limited their ability to develop in-depth expertise. One analyst "worried that he only had time to answer the mail, and as a result he might miss warning signs of a threat."

Benghazi thinkings

Don't rush to join Benghazi blame game

By Tara Maller, Special to CNN

updated 10:35 AM EDT, Thu October 25, 2012                                                                          

I should disclose my bias up front: I'm a former CIA analyst, and believe there is an innate "inevitability of failure" in intelligence collection and analysis. This doesn't mean we shouldn't hold agencies accountable if reasonable signs were missed in Benghazi, but assessments often take time, evolving as new information and evaluations of the credibility of conflicting reports emerge.                                                             

Instead of trying to turn the Benghazi attack -- and the deaths of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other Americans -- into a partisan blame game, policymakers would be better served by thinking about how to enhance U.S. intelligence capabilities.

In the final days leading up to the election, we must evaluate the performance of intelligence gathering in Benghazi in a fair and objective manner, with every effort to omit our biases and political views.

The intelligence community prides itself on such objectivity in its work and in serving both Democratic and Republican administrations. The public and policymakers should afford analysts the same courtesy by holding their judgments of the intelligence community to the same standard.

I'm 'cracking' a joke, a bad joke. Drug addicts, legion in number, more than the number of victims of 9/11/2001 and 2012, are the ignored evidence of our failed foreign policy. Why don't we clean up our own backyard before cleaning everyone else's, even if their backyards are sitting in oil. Some of our near neighbors have oil, they don't want to attack Israel. What I'm implying is, that in 1953 in Iran, we pretty much set the stage for our Mideast relations, again in 1956, when the U.S. withdrew aid for the Aswan Dam project partially because Egypt had recognized Red China as a nation, although Israel had recognized Red China as early as 1950, and it didn't seem to affect our aid relations with the Israelis. So what's with our arbitrary quixotic foreign policies? We is lookin fer trouble, lookin' fer a fight, at almost every turn. And now we're doing it at home...

http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/09/06/hadden.latin.america.9.11/index.html?is_LR=1

After 9/11, U.S. left Latin America at the altar

By Gerry Hadden, Special to CNN

September 7, 2011 7:19 a.m. EDT

Mexico's Vicente Fox and President Bush greet crowds on September 6, 2001, the high point in relations before the attacks.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Gerry Hadden: Before 9/11, Bush proclaimed Latin America, especially Mexico, a priority
• Days after Vicente Fox visited to acclaim, we turned our backs on our neighbors, he says
• Hadden: Core issues, vows unmet as we waged wars; Latin America deteriorated
• Drug cartels, joblessness, corruption rose in Mexico, he says; aid to nations ended

Editor's note: Gerry Hadden reported from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean for the foreign desk of NPR from 2000 to 2004, and now covers Spain and Europe for Public Radio International's "The World." He is the author of "Never the Hope Itself: Love and Ghosts in Latin America and Haiti."

(CNN) -- I was far away from my native New York when the planes struck on September 11,10 years ago. But I had front-row seats to how those attacks derailed relations between the United States and Latin America.

On September 11, 2001, I was in Bogota, Colombia, to cover a visit that day by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell. Powell was on a junket to shore up the new Plan Colombia, the nascent, multibillion-dollar, U.S.-financed assault on Andean coca mafias. He never showed up.

The Colombians forgave him; Powell's office had, after all, been partially destroyed by a jetliner. But the Colombians were nervous. We've been waiting for this aid for years, they told me as I wandered the streets after the attacks. What if America sets off to catch the terrorists and forgets about us?

Turns out they were right to worry. As the United States turned its sights on Osama bin Laden and, later, the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Latin America fell low on our list of priorities. The consequences have been negative.

Gerry Hadden

At the time of the attacks, I was based out of Mexico City for National Public Radio. I'd arrived in spring 2000 amidst much hullabaloo about an historic shift in U.S.-Latin American relations, especially with regard to Mexico. I believed it all. Most people did. Things looked so promising.

In July 2000, conservative businessman Vicente Fox Quesada was elected president of Mexico, ending 71 years of single-party rule. As a candidate, he'd already gained a popular following in the U.S., in part because he'd abandoned a longstanding Mexican political tradition: blaming the U.S. for all or most of Mexico's problems.

One of the first people to get on the horn to congratulate Fox was Texas governor and U.S. presidential candidate George W. Bush. Months later, of course, Bush became our president.

When the smoke from the September 11 attacks cleared, the cowpoke camaraderie evaporated, too. 
--Gerry Hadden

With both men in office, the two countries set up a top-shelf bilateral commission to tackle the big, nagging issues: curbing illegal immigration via a guest worker program for Mexicans to work in the U.S. legally, improving trade ties, cooperating more fully in the fight against drug traffickers. Heading the U.S. delegation was none other than National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. Across the table, Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda. They met twice, in April and June 2001.

Bush then broke with one of our own presidential traditions, inviting Fox, the Mexican, to be his first head-of-state guest. On the White House lawn on September 6, 2001, Bush called the 21st century the "Century of the Americas." He said the U.S. had no more important friend than Mexico.

The next day, September 7, Fox spoke before a joint session of the U.S. Congress about a new era in relations. He received a standing ovation.

Less than a week later, the U.S. left Mexico, and the rest of Latin America, standing at the altar. Rice and her team never came back to the negotiating table. The notion of a guest-worker program was shelved. Castañeda eventually quit government in frustration. He returned to academia, where dreaming is not only possible but encouraged.

Fox was left without the ace in his Cabinet -- and having to explain to 100 million countrymen what exactly George W. had meant by "Century of the Americas."

George W. Bush reflects on 9/11

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Investigating 9/11

Female cop: I was meant to do this job

Fox would fail at that because it turned out the phrase held no meaning. Bush had made Mexico, and by extension Latin America, his top priority only by default. When the smoke from the September 11 attacks cleared, the cowpoke camaraderie evaporated, too. American attention swung radically to the other side of the world.

For the next three years, this became a disheartening motif of much of my work with NPR: how Latin America was being ignored now that we were waging one, then two, wars on the other side of the world. For reporters on the ground, it was as if Latin America had been cast into some permanent twilight, semi-forgotten even as extraordinary events unfolded. News bureaus began closing up their shops.

Mexico was left to stew in a pressure cooker of rising unemployment and institutional corruption. In Central America, U.S.-led aid and development projects slowed to a snail's pace, as cocaine cartels moved in, relatively undetected. And in Haiti, a democratically elected president was left to fend for himself against a host of enemies more powerful than he.

Mexico is where we lost our biggest opportunity, because that's where the biggest challenges lie. Bush should have engaged closely with Fox from day one and stayed engaged. Fox had a colossal challenge before him: steering his country through its first democratic transition in its 500-year history. This didn't happen. And the political, economic and social inequalities that drive Mexicans north of the border have not been meaningfully addressed by either nation and certainly not by the two working in tandem.

Fox used to say that as long as a Mexican earns $6 a day at home and $60 a day in the U.S., you won't stop illegal immigration. For a while, when Fox was America's political darling, it seemed that American leaders were listening to that logic. And while it was never clear whether Bush could ultimately muster congressional support for a guest worker program, that grand experiment in curbing illegal mass-immigration was never closer.

Then the door closed. The U.S., especially our southern border states, reverted to another strategy after September 11, the same one we see to this day: more walls.

The opinions in this commentary are solely those of Gerry Hadde

We should be ashamed, Obama inherits a disaster and the disaster goes on and on because certain factions want to ensure that the President of the U.S.A remains hogtied by an obstructionist Congress, and  they cackle with glee and opportunism at every untoward event that they try to place at the doorstep of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. We have lost the respect of our allies and our enemies. But they still fear us. What happens if China decides to call in the U.S. debt, due to the taunts and threats from certain candidates? Can we afford more war fronts? We will definitely need to beef up the military if we want fear to be our best ally because our real allies, those with Chinese ties and dependencies will need to take care of their own interests firsts.  Have we forgotten how unpopular the Iraq war was with the rest of the world? Our World Series was never anyone else but the U.S. This is the 21st C. Time to wake up, stop pretending,,,

re: the 9/11/2001 Al-Qaeda attack:

Though they could not know it, time was running out. In December 2000, the CIA submitted a new plan in its targeting of al Qaeda "that would have significantly expanded our activities. ... It was too late for the departing Clinton administration to take action on this strategic proposal."

The same report speaks of excellent collaboration between the CIA and FBI on numerous terror cases, but then adds: "A major, ongoing concern is FBI's own internal dissemination system. CIA officers still often find it necessary to hand-deliver messages to the intended recipient within the FBI." And it laments "the loss of potential intelligence opportunities because of deference to law enforcement goals." In other words: at what point do you make an arrest or close down a terror conspiracy?

And in a passage with echoes today, there is a complaint about leaks compromising the Agency's ability to implement what became known as "the Plan" to get bin Laden. "Persistent publicity and leaks of information about our methods in the United States and abroad caused the terrorists to [redacted] emphasize their compartmentation."

therefore: 

Notably, the Inspector General's report included a warning that the long-term discipline needed in analyzing terror groups "can be difficult to maintain in the current atmosphere, which rewards instant results." Some analysts had complained about a "constant state of crisis" that limited their ability to develop in-depth expertise. One analyst "worried that he only had time to answer the mail, and as a result he might miss warning signs of a threat."

We need to have an economy within the confines of nature. Never ending growth, GDP, just can't happen. I shall look at the 20th C. as our tutorial on limits of what we can do: naively and blindly, as we've done, and keep doing, with fossil fuels, what we can do working with Nature and each other, as Mohammed Yunis does, as in micro loans, recycling, with our eyes open to effect, - how terrible we can be, as in WWI & WWII, how pigheaded, as in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. I wonder if we can see it as a great revelation of how to proceed for the future. We've already tipped the balance in global warming/carbon footprint, so we know that we can't fool, definitely can't fool around with, Mother Nature. It's just self deception. WE are Mother Nature. WE are not separate, and we are no more important than the snail darter we eradicated, the dodo, the passenger pigeon, the Lord God bird, we're just more important to us , but hey, the Horse Nebula doesn't even know we exist. And the Honey Badger don't give a shit...

Amen! to tonight's Game! Now, the debate...? there's no 'amen', nothing really happened. Santorum should brush up on the constitution: there's separation of church and state in this part of the world. And something I'm not getting is: trying to pin loss of jobs on the federal government? Didn't we outsource almost all of our manufacturing ages ago? And that was, is , the private sector who did and do the outsourcing and downsizing to keep the profit margins big enough for the shareholders, (who don't occupy Wall Street), to stay invested.

I was there thinking...

Prior to the 1980s, conservatives were fiscally conservative— that is, they were unwilling to spend more than they took in in taxes. But Reaganomics introduced the idea that virtually any tax cut would so stimulate growth that the government would end up taking in more revenue in the end (the so-called Laffer curve). In fact, the traditional view was correct: if you cut taxes without cutting spending, you end up with a damaging deficit. Thus the Reagan tax cuts of the 1980s produced a big deficit; the Clinton tax increases of the 1990s produced a surplus; and the Bush tax cuts of the early 21st century produced an even larger deficit. The fact that the American economy grew just as fast in the Clinton years as in the Reagan ones somehow didn't shake the conservative faith in tax cuts as the surefire key to growth.

Fukuyama, Francis - Newsweek, Oct.3rd, 2008