Diana Dean, an average American going about the ordinary duties of her job, noticed odd behavior in someone coming through customs and, instead of doing the easy thing and letting them pass, decided she’d better search the car. Most people passing through customs are not smugglers or terroritsts, and I’m sure that searching vehicles must sometimes get tedious. The rules and regulations may seem silly at times, but instead of ignoring the rules, Ms. Dean did the job she had been hired for. She wasn’t expecting to find explosives or trying to stop a terrorist attack- she was just trying to do her job and do it well.

Sandy Berger, the head of NSA during the Clinton administration and a foreign policy advisor to presidential candidate John Kerry, was asked to review highly classified material to identify documents needed by the 9-11 commission. Perhaps some of the information in those documents might have been embarrassing to Mr. Berger or to the Clinton administration, and perhaps Mr. Berger didn’t think bending the rules a bit would cause any harm. At any rate, instead of following the rules, Mr. Berger decided to break them, on several occasions. We don’t really know what Mr. Berger was trying to do, but in losing highly classified documents, he has compromised national security.

While Ms. Dean saved thousands by doing the right thing, Mr. Berger has created a nightmare by doing the wrong thing. Each day thousands of customs agents, FBI agents, judges, government officials, baggage handlers, police officers, and assorted citizens make the choice to do the right thing, even when it’s inconvenient or embarrassing. Their choices have kept us safe for almost three years. We should ask no more and expect no less of those who serve at the highest levels of government, past, present or future.

In any endeavor, hard work and dedication usually bring results, but there are always those who will attribute it all to luck, and conclude: so why try? This explains how they can be so unbelievably lax at times.

This reminds me of Roger’s previous comment about being a pessimist: the danger is that it can turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. I tend to think that way about Free Will: there’s no objective or sensible way of determining whether it’s real or an illusion. In either case, the belief in Free Will will tend to motivate one to “get up and do what needs to be done”. So societies like ours which believe in free will are likely to make more progress than Muslim societies which do not. It’s kind of a Pascal’s Wager situation.

The real heroes are usually like this lady. They are just people doing their jobs and often as not getting little or no credit for it.

Many posts and articles on the Berger matter quote Richard Clarke’s verdict that the Millennium plot to bomb LAX was foiled by luck.

That kinda sums it up, doesn’t it? In any endeavor, hard work and dedication usually bring results, but there are always those who will attribute it all to luck, and conclude: so why try? This explains how they can be so unbelievably lax at times. They simply do not see the cause and effect all around them.

…”I think we were mugged by Viacom,” Lehman told NRO in a phone interview on Thursday afternoon. “Because they changed the release date of the book and geared up 60 Minutes to launch his book to time them with his testimony and they edited his book to take out all of the criticisms of Clinton from his [original private] testimony. Because they wanted to make it a jihad against Bush.”

Lehman says that Clarke’s original testimony included “a searing indictment of some Clinton officials and Clinton policies.” That was the Clarke, evenhanded in his criticisms of both the Bush and Clinton administrations, who Lehman and other Republican commissioners expected to show up at the public hearings. It was a surprise “that he would come out against Bush that way.” Republicans were taken aback: “It caught us flat-footed, but not the Democrats.”…

Wonder if some of that “searing indictment” was originally on the missing memos????

Actually, in his book, Clarke doesn’t attribute the foiling of the LA airport bombing and related Millenium attacks to blind luck. As part of his fictional campaign to rehabilitate the Clinton administration record on terrorism, so as to better attack the Bush record, he portrays the LAX outcome as the result of top drawer counter terrorism, masterfully coordinated by himself, of course. This is particularly the case when Clarke is describing the clean-up of terror cells in Montreal and the U.S. after the LA plot was exposed.

I don’t recall much media coverage involving Clarke, particularly during the 9/11 hearings, attributing the foiling of the Millenium plot to luck. It simply didn’t fit the script, which was to trumpet this as a Clintonian success. We saw much the same thing when Clarke regularly reminded the media and the 9/11 commission that “only” 35 Americans had died fom Islamic terrorism on Clinton’s watch. Of course, this ignored the fact that the 1993 WTC bombing death toll would have dwarfed the 9/11 carnage had the tower come down as planned. More “blind luck,” that didn’t fit the Clarke script.

But, the articles I did search made it clear that he was caught due to luck/intuition at the front line level and clearly not to any top-down diligence from Berger and his NSA…

Stan

I can’t think of a better way to say “Welcome to America, you S.O.B.’s”