How safe is America?

January 5, 2010 at 2:25 P.M. "Error" inserted in this previously posted essay has now been corrected. Let's see if they keep up their old tricks.

"Why Didn't They See It?," (Editorial) in The New York Times, January 2, 2010, at p. A20.
Mark Mazzetti, "U.S. Saw Path to Qaeda Chiefs Before Bombing," in The New York Times, January 6, 2010, at p. A1. ("Irony?")

What is "seeing"? How do you "see" someone apart from cultural assumptions? Are you confident that you have truly "seen" any woman? ("'The French Lieutenant's Woman': A Movie Review.")

"It will take some time before all the facts about the Christmas Day terrorism plot are known and analyzed. One thing is already clear: The government has to urgently improve [sic.] its ability to use the reams of intelligence it receives every day on suspected terrorists and plots. That was supposed to have been addressed after the infamous 'failure to connect the dots' before the 9/11 attacks. The echoes of the earlier disaster in this near-disaster are chilling."

The analytical and reductivist styles of thought rewarded in American academia and government, in the legal profession and among members of the military may be exactly the wrong approach to organizing massive amounts of disconnected data into meaningful narrative patterns. ("Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom" versus "Richard A. Posner on Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility.")

The information that we receive is 1) incomplete; and 2) part of a narrative or several narratives that we must "discover" and fit together to create the full picture of reality "on the ground"; hence, 3) the data is always seeking to tell us a story, to REVEAL a pattern, not to be reduced to a familiar and preexisting set of categories and myths. (See Dennis Quaid's performance in "Vantage Point.")

Middlebrow government functionaries will inevitably seek to reduce what is novel and complex to what is familiar and understandable by them. This is to make ourselves stupid regardless of how much information we possess. ("Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "New Jersey's Mafia Culture in Law and Politics.")

We must be open to the facts "speaking" to us, as if we were experiencing a work of art, whenever we encounter a situation to be investigated or person to be known. Hidden in intelligence data is a figure -- like an unfinished sculpture by Michelangelo -- that we must extract from the debris or inessential matter. There is often a great deal of inessential matter, much of it deliberately thrust into the pile of facts to distract or deceive us. As a friend once explained to me, "always watch out that they don't put some bullshit in the game."

We need to know what does the information mean? Not can we get more details that are unrelated to the accumulated details already compiled by different government agencies seeking to protect their respective territories. ("Ass cover.") More details may help; they may also hinder this process of discerning meanings. Crucial is to develop a theoretical or narrative prism through which to view the "story" as it unfolds. Each nugget of information is a piece of the puzzle we are trying to solve. However, the ultimate goal is to discover the image that is the puzzle in its totality. (An "error" was inserted in this essay that had been left alone for while. I have now corrected it.)

"According to the Times, a preliminary review ordered by President Obama has found that because of human error, the agencies were still looking at discrete pieces of the puzzle without adequately checking other available data bases -- and, in some cases, were not sharing what they knew. The State Department says that it relayed the father's warnings to the National Counterrorism Center. C.I.A. officials in Nigeria prepared a separate report on Mr. Abdulmutallab that was sent to the C.I.A. headquarters but not to other agencies. At this point, we don't know who was told of the N.S.A. intercepts."

The logical conclusions concerning incompetence are obvious not only to us, but also to the world (this discovery may have been the goal of the operation for the terrorists), equally obvious is the daily reality of censorship and torture of which I have spoken in these blogs:

"Either the National Counterrorism Center didn't get all of the information it was supposed to get -- or [like the OAE in NJ!] it failed to do its job, which is to correlate data so that any pattern emerges. No doubt sorting through heaps of information and determining what is urgent or even worthy of follow-up is daunting. Still, it is incredible, and frightening, [sic.] that the government cannot do at least as good a job at swiftly updating and correlating information as Google."

No pattern simply "emerges" from data. Detecting a pattern is about constructing as we perceive. This process of "detection" is an aesthetic as well as scientific or logical process. What is the most elegant explanation that accounts for the data? There is nothing outside the text, including the interpreter. Hence, an observer distortion must always be taken into consideration in discerning meanings. ("Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author" and "Donald Davidson's Anomalous Monism.")

What narrative "fits" the facts? What alternatives also "fit" the facts? What do we consider a fact? What theoretical assumptions are we making? Consciously? Unconsciously? What false "fact" is assumed by everybody looking at this information? What is needed, usually, is not more details or pre-tested answers, but new questions to which suggestive or creative answers may be found in the already available information. Interpretations change what and how we see meanings in the information that is always before our eyes. (The book and movie "Enigma" focus on the analogous methods used by the British to break German codes in World War, II.)

Please review the quotes attributed to James Baldwin in "America's Holocaust."
I strongly "suggest" that the authorities reconsider the father's so-called decision to report his son's prospective attack against the United States of America. This "fact" is seemingly taken for granted, accepted at face value, by all speakers (including Thomas Kean who chaired the 9/11 Commission), but it seems to lack versimilitude or plausibility given the cultural context. It doesn't "feel" right in the cultural thematics of the situation.

"What is needed now is what was needed after 9/11: a clearheaded, nonpoliticized assessment of what went wrong [stonewalling is not the answer, Mr. Rabner and Ms. Milgram,] and nonhysterical remedies that work this time. The United States cannot be enclosed in an impermeable bubble. But Mr. Abdulmutallab never should have been allowed on board that plane."