The Village Idiots

With regard to the recent botched terrorist attack, President Obama mentioned that the problem was not that we didn’t have the intelligence, but a failure to understand the intelligence, a failure to connect the dots. I wanted to make several comments about that. When the President says that we had the information that could have stopped the terrorist, he makes it sound like the system failed badly. Indeed, many pundits and politicians I’ve heard reacted with alarm. One writer called for Janet Napolitano’s head. I want to make several comments about this:

1. With regard to terrorism, I suspect that having the information to stop a terrorist attack, will almost never be the problem. The challenge will be identifying the relevant information (separating them from the irrelevant) and sometimes putting them together pieces together. Now some may say that this doesn’t get the US government off the hook; they still failed. Technically that’s correct, but it’s not as big a failure as it seems. In our society, gathering information is no longer the biggest challenge; it’s processing the information (which includes shifting, sorting and prioritizing, etc.) in meaningful ways that’s the biggest challenge–and, so far, my sense is that we haven’t arrived at any reliable and effective solutions.

   Having said, I would say that calling the incident an inexcusable failure depends on the nature of information that they had. There is a difference between tiny clues that require smart people (or computers) to assemble them versus blatant evidence that requires little or no analysis. But even with this type of evidence, one must remember that it exists in sea of irrelevant information, so finding this information can be like trying to find a needle in the haystack.

2. In the first post in the Serious Discussion About Terrorism thread (and the most recent one), I mentioned the importance of not viewing less catastrophic terrorist attacks as a terrible failure of the government. I won’t go over the reasons now, but most of the talk by pundits and politicians do not reflect this view. (David Brooks, on his recent Newshour appearance, is notable exception.) The president doesn’t speak this way, but I give him and other politicians more slack because it is almost politically impossible to do so. Still, many people thinking that the government should prevent every terrorist attack and not doing so is a terrible government failure troubles me. This kind of thinking could lead us to overreact: we may punish politicians and public administrators to our own detriment; we may rashly retaliate for the attacks and we may begin to restrict civil liberties and a way of life we value in the US.

   Instead others (like James Fallows and ) have called for a more rational and mature response to these smaller-scale terrorist attacks. What would a more rational and mature response look like? Citizens would accept that a certain level of smaller scale terrorist attacks may occur and that this is part of the world we live in now.

3. On a side note, part of my interest in this issue relates to my experience with working with communities and organizations to deal with illegal drugs. For me, one fo the biggest problems is communication and coordination between the community and agencies as well as between the agencies themselves. I wonder if overcoming these problems is one fo the major issue in other important challenges.