Larry Johnson is an a**. We all remember his extreme partisan attacks against President Bush during the 2004 campaign. I remember shorty after 9-11 that this idiot was advocating that the US should attack militarily the Lebanese Christians in Lebanon to tell the Muslim world that the war on terror is not against them. Talk about a hateful delsuional kook.
And people wonder why the CIA has been a failure of late:
"Who is Larry Johnson? He's the author of one of the more poorly timed op-eds in history. On July 10, 2001, he wrote in the New York Times under the headline "The Declining Terrorist Threat" that "Americans have little to fear" from terrorism unless they travel or work in a few of the world's hotspots.
He added that "Early signs suggest that the decade beginning in 2000 will continue the downward trend" in terrorist activity. (He co-authored a similar piece for this page in 2000.)
A month earlier, and only three months before 9/11, Mr. Johnson told U.S. News and World Report that "Bin Laden has an international network of contacts, but it's more analogous to the Elvis Presley fan club than a corporation like General Motors."
In the same vein, current senior CIA official Paul Pillar wrote shortly before 9/11 that counterterrorism should not be viewed as a "war" we can hope to win, but more like "the effort by public-health authorities to control communicable diseases" or improve "highway safety."