Explaining the Rice "Blow Off"

Slate summarizes the situation described by Woodward's book, but neither the 9/11 commission nor previous books highlight the meeting--why?

Pages 49–52: On July 10, 2001, George Tenet and his top terrorism expert, Cofer Black, visited Condi Rice and warned that a major terrorist attack was coming. "It's my sixth sense, but I feel it coming," said Tenet. "This could be the big one." They felt like the then-national security adviser blew them off.

Page 79: "Rice could have gotten through to Bush on the bin Laden threat, but she just didn't get there in time, Tenet thought. He felt he had done his job, laid it on the line very directly about the threat, but Rice had not moved quickly. He felt she wasn't organized and didn't push people as he tried to do at the CIA." Rice has said the July meeting was not as dramatic as Tenet remembers. Woodward quotes Cofer Black: "The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head."

I think the answer lies in the workings of humans and bureaucracies. Remember these things:

1. Tenet and Black have been focused on bin Laden for years. Rice has been on the job for less than 6 months. She was the foreign policy guru for a campaign that never mentioned bin Laden.
2. There's no good solution to the bin Laden problem.
3. Tenet and Black have been out of the administration for years, Rice is still in it.
4. People like to make their stories consistent.
   

And a fourth: the old bureaucrat's saying "it's hard to remember your goal was to drain the swamp when you're up to your ass in alligators". New bureaucrats always focus on the goal, old bureaucrats fight the alligators.

So, Tenet and Black rush off to see Rice with a hot potato for which they've no clear solution. But Rice knows her boss isn't good on coming up with solutions, and certainly doesn't want to do anything Clinton did before him. She also knows Dick Clarke and other bureaucrats are trying to put together an overall plan to drain the swamp (which they'll have ready in early September). So, at best she may have sent Tenet to Ashcroft (Freeh has left, I think, and Mueller won't come on board until September). So much for the meeting--just another case where the linkage between career types and political types breaks down during the transition.

How about the new prominence of the meeting? People are loyal to their fellows. Woodward's earlier books and the 9/11 commission were working right after Tenet and Black had retired. I suspect their residual loyalty to the administration meant they didn't highlight the "blowoff". Now, though, it's 2 more years later. Rice is still loyal to the administration but Tenet and Black have had more time to nurse grievances. Rice's story is consistent: because she took no action, she couldn't have been given any information that should have caused her to act. That tends to shift the onus back to the CIA, which rubs T and B the wrong way. So now they start to highlight the urgency of the meeting and the failure of Rice to act. No one says there was a failure of imagination or a lack of capacity to act.

There may not be any lying going on and, absent any tape recording or contemporaneous notes, we may never know the truth.

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Payment Limitation in Georgia

Cox and the Atlanta Journal Constitution have another article on payment limitation .
I had to register to see this article, but not the earlier article.

It's a complex story, with USDA's Inspector General, FSA's county, state, and DC offices, the Senator who leads the Ag Committee, and Justice all playing a role. The bottom line is:

• if there were no payment limitation rules, McNair would be farming the same crops on the same acreage but without the superstructure of paperwork and fake accounting. ("Fake" is pejorative, I know.)
• if his neighbors thought he were cheating on his income taxes they wouldn't be as likely to condone the schemes. But since it's FSA bureaucrats depriving hard working farmers of money, McNair will be at least tolerated by the community.
  
• because McNair and his fellow farmers (on the county committee) are pillars of the community, they pack a lot of political clout. So Congress isn't really serious about enforcing payment limitations (ask Senator Grassley). Can you imagine how dispirited Jim Baxa might feel about the task? (Full disclosure--I used to be his wife's boss.)
  

I hadn't thought about it before, the issue of whether IRS auditors and USDA bureaucrats should coordinate is interesting.

And to be fair to Sen. Chambliss, Clinton's first Secretary of Agriculture had his chief of staff convicted of an offense because of mishandling of payment limitation cases.

Payment Limitations and College Students

Cox News service has a good article on payment limitations in farm programs. A couple of notes--they could have added Queen Elizabeth to the Crown Prince of Lichtenstein in the summary of the background of changes in the mid 80's and it's unclear how much money is "actually left on the table". Ag committees argue that it's effective; cynics disagree.

Foley Hypocrisy

Always love a good serving of hypocrisy but this is overdoing it. Curses on all concerned in this mess.

Farmers and the Future

The Times has an article today on the Kansas farmer who owns the geographic center of the U.S. and his concerns over whether his son will leave the farm. It's nicely written, but with the standard themes. Lebanon, KS has lost 25 percent of its population (now 278 est) in the last 15 years. (Median resident age: 52.4 years; median household income: $23,056 ; median house value: $10,100. )

He farms 3,000 acres, which probably means that there used to be 15-20 families, each with a quarter section, farming where he is now.

Clinton Failed and I Failed

Clinton said he failed to get bin Laden and I failed in the project to get USDA agencies to share data. Here's an excerpt from an article on crop insurance fraud:

In 2003, government investigators found that the Risk Management Agency of the USDA had incomplete information on ownership of 21,000 of the nation's largest farms, so it lost a valuable tool to determine whether farmers falsified production figures to file unwarranted claims.

"It's really a shell game ... to show a loss that probably didn't occur," Bertoni said.

Another branch of the USDA had the ownership information but didn't provide it to the RMA. Up to $74 million in possible false claims resulted.

The difference between Bill and I is that I never headed the project. Well, there are other differences.

What Does The Future Hold?

The Times has an analysis of the new legislation on terrorism which includes these thoughts:

How the measure will look decades hence may depend not just on how it is used but on how the terrorist threat evolves. If a major terrorist plot in the United States is uncovered — and surely if one succeeds — it may vindicate the Congressional decision to give the government more leeway to seize and question those who might know about the next attack.

If the attacks of 2001 recede as a devastating but unique tragedy, the decision to create a new legal framework may seem like overkill. “If there is never another terrorist attack and we never obtain actionable intelligence, this will look like a huge overreaction,” said Gary J. Bass, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton.

The last paragraph is what I'm inclined to think.

Why Catholics in the FBI?

Reading Mr. Wright's "Looming Tower" on the rise of al-Qaeda. It's good. One interesting side note is John O'Neill, the retired FBI agent who died on 9/11 who was quite a character. Wright mentions that Italians and Irish predominated in the ranks of the FBI. I wonder why and when? Was it from the beginning or was it after J. Edgar?

Perhaps it was a generational thing: the sons of policemen who went to college wanted to follow in the steps of their fathers and do law enforcement. Perhaps it was a prejudice thing in that early graduates of Catholic law schools (Fordham, Notre Dame?) found it easier to get admitted to the FBI than to existing WASP law firms?

Why Is a Fighter Pilot Like a Farmer?

This piece in the Times on how the fighter community beat Rummy to get more F-22's (at $350mill a crack) prompts me to compare pilots and farmers:

• Both are robed in the rags of former romantic glory: fighter pilots as the gallant solo aces of one on one combat; farmers as the gallant son of the soil fighting nature.
• Both have strong, bipartisan lobbies on the Hill
  
• Both get taxpayer money for programs of dubious value (a jet designed to outclass the Soviet jets; direct subsidy programs that do little for conservation or production adjustment)
• Both are wedded to past methods that are fast losing potency (I predict the manned fighter jet will be successfully challenged by pilotless drones; individual farmers are being replaced by contract farmers (as in poultry and hogs).