If Only

I have a grim suspicion that the subtle qualifier, "if", may be lost in commentary on the news that "Leaders of 9/11 Panel Say Attacks Were Probably Preventable". Here, for example, is the Times lede:

The leaders of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks agreed Sunday that evidence gathered by their panel showed the attacks could probably have been prevented.

Here is one of the quotes that launched a thousand blog posts:

Mr. Hamilton, a former chairman of the House Intelligence and International Relations committees, said, "There are a lot of ifs; you can string together a whole bunch of ifs, and if things had broken right in all kinds of different ways, as the governor has identified, and frankly if you'd had a little luck, it probably could have been prevented." He said the panel would "make a final judgment on that, I believe, when the commission reports."

And the assertive Mr. Kean:

The whole story might have been different," Mr. Kean said on the NBC News program "Meet the Press," outlining a series of intelligence and law enforcement blunders in the months and years before the attacks.

"There are so many threads and so many things, individual things, that happened," he said. "If we had been able to put those people on the watch list of the airlines, the two who were in the country; again, if we'd stopped some of these people at the borders; if we had acted earlier on Al Qaeda when Al Qaeda was smaller and just getting started."

We appreciate the bipartisan spanking offered by Mr. Kean, but note (mostly with relief) that Bill Clinton is not a candidate this time around. As to the specifics he cites, such as FBI errors, it looks like old news. That said, everything old will be new again when the final report is released in July of the (now-endless) campaign.

MORE: From the transcript, a plea for perspective:

MR. RUSSERT: And it should be said, those of us in the media did not focus on al-Qaeda in the summer of 2001. In fact, in the 2000 presidential election, I believe terrorism was mentioned twice in the presidential debates. So everyone had a much different mind-set pre-September 11.

MR. HAMILTON: And it's very important that the commission keep that in mind. That is to say, we have to try to put ourselves into the place of the policy-maker back then facing not one, but dozens of threats at that time, and try to understand whether or not they acted reasonably under those circumstances; not the circumstances now, when we're looking back, and it's so very clear.

We switch from "If" to "As if!".

UPDATE: My nose for news - YES, I saw the bit about the White House vetting the 9/11 Commision final report. No, I did not expect a headline like "White House vetting could delay 9/11 report until after election". What the story steers clear of is this, from the transcript:

MR. RUSSERT: Well, you remember when the congressional joint inquiry report was submitted to the White House in December of 2002, it was not made public until July of '03. If you submit your report in July of 2002, can you guarantee the American people that they will see it and read it before the November election, 2004?

MR. KEAN: I have no guarantees, but everybody is planning on that, including the White House. They've set up a special team under Andy Card which is going to look at the report in an expedited manner and try to get it out just as fast as possible. Nobody has any interest in having the report sitting around Washington during the election period and pieces of it leaking out. Nobody has an interest in this thing coming out in September or October in the middle of the election. So I think it's in the White House's interest, our interest, everybody's interest, to get this out in July, and I believe they will.

Comments

[narciso]

Well if the Bfv not been so handicapped by their misreading of history, vis a vis their handling
of the Hamburg cell, had the Company been able
to have one infiltrator in that same cell. Had
Al Midhar & Al Hazmi's file been distributed to
the FBI and local law enforcement, specially in
the San Diego area. If Ziad Jarrah been similarly
flagged re his sojourn through Dubai. If the FBI
and ATF focused less attention on that extremist
cell in Miami, in the spring of 2000;(my personal
pet pieve) and more of young Arabs, attending flight schools in South Florida with suspect records; had they followed up Atta's and another
florida cell's traffic tickets; Then maybe there
might have been a chance. Most of these steps, could have taken place, even before the influence
of then candidate Bush's stance on 'ethnic profiling' had taken effect

[TM]

My puzzlement is, have any new "if onlies" emerged recently, other than Clarke's "if only I had been running the urgent principal's meeting"?

[The Kid]

Some on the panel believe that 9/11 could have been prevented if the airlines had been warned to bolt the doors in early summer 2001 as a result of the increased chatter on terrorist links.

I don’t think increased physical security on the aircraft would have made a difference. The hijackers’ plan was to quickly seize the aircraft by killing one member of the flight crew (a flight attendant) and using another to communicate to the pilots that one member had been slaughtered and another would be in ten seconds unless the cockpit door was opened immediately.

Back on 9/11/01 any pilot would regard the choice as a no-brainer: lose another crew member or spend some hours cruising around while the hijackers negotiated their demands. The pilots would not have much time to confer with air traffic controllers nor know about the seizure of other aircraft. Undoing the locks and opening the door would seem the reasonable and prudent thing to do.

What we now take for granted was difficult to predict at the time – such a combination of tactics was stunning. 9/11 succeeded because of a daring, bold plan that was executed well.

[Crank]

Personally, I liked this quote from the hearings, excerpted by Krauthammer's latest:

SEN. SLADE GORTON: ``Assuming that the recommendations that you made on January 25th of 2001 ... had all been adopted say on January 26th, year 2001, is there the remotest chance that it would have prevented 9/11?"

CLARKE: ``No."