Legal Commentary

Unintended Consequences And Systemic Failure

By Big Tent Democrat

Glenn Greenwald:

As President Obama said yesterday, the Government -- just as was true for 9/11 -- had gathered more than enough information to have detected this plot, or at least to have kept Abdulmutallab off airplanes and out of the country. Yet our intelligence agencies -- just as was true for 9/11 -- failed to understand what they had in their possession. Why is that? Because they had too much to process, including too much data wholly unrelated to Terrorism. In other words, our panic-driven need to vest the Government with more and more surveillance power every time we get scared again by Terrorists -- in the name of keeping us safe -- has exactly the opposite effect. Numerous pieces of evidence prove that.

(Emphasis supplied.) Instead of wasting time with silly defenses of intelligence agency bureaucrats (see Ackerman, Spencer), centrist Obama bloggers should heed the President's words and understand the system and the people in the system failed. Just as with torture, which does not work, we have created a system less likely to make us safer, not more. This is systemic failure as well as human failure.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on January 06, 2010 (boomark / email).