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The National Commission on Terrorist Acts Upon the United States ostensibly has been exploring how the deadly Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks could have happened and how they could have been prevented. In light of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's testimony Thursday, I, like so many others, have figured out an easy answer: Get the panel to construct a time machine so that all those geniuses who now believe that Sept. 11 easily could have been averted can wave a magic wand and reinvent the past. That's sort of what is going on anyway. Some commissioners seem to have forgotten what...

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. Their remarks drew sharp disagreement from one of President Bush's closest political advisers, who insisted that the Bush and Clinton administrations had no opportunity to disrupt the Sept. 11 plot. They also offered a preview of the difficult questions likely to confront Condoleezza Rice when she testifies before the panel at a long-awaited public hearing this week. In a joint television interview, the commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor...

he terrorist strikes of Sept. 11, 2001, could have been prevented had the United States government acted sooner to dismantle Al Qaeda and responded more quickly to other terrorist threats, the chairman of the commission investigating the attacks said today, even as the White House sought to dispel the notion that the attacks were avoidable. Advertisement Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the commission and former Republican governor of New Jersey, said that had the United States seized early opportunities to kill Osama bin Laden in the years before Sept. 11, "the whole story would've been different." Mr. Kean's comments on...

Through all of last week's finger-pointing over how "government" failed to prevent 9/11, there was little credible discussion about what would actually have stopped the attacks. If the diplomatic and military actions by both the Bush and Clinton administrations were insufficient, as the commission studying the terrorist attacks concluded, then what would have been sufficient? If Richard Clarke, the fatuous opportunist and former anti-terrorist czar, was so certain that everyone else (except himself, that is) blew it, then what was his plan? When infrequently asked, his answers were incoherent, incomplete, impractical or evasive. For the sake of ending this national...

NEWSWEEK reporting in fresh editions; The 9/11 commission is likely to conclude the attacks could have been prevented by the simple act of sharing information. In Phoenix in July 2001, an FBI agent wrote a memo warning that some young Arabs taking flying lessons might be terrorists. Had that warning made it to Clarke's counterterror shop, airlines might have begun bolting cockpit doors. But the commission doesn't want to make government bureaucrats even more risk-averse by hounding them.

NEWSWEEK reporting in fresh editions; The 9/11 commission is likely to conclude the attacks could have been prevented by the simple act of sharing information.... Had that warning made it to Clarke's counterterror shop, airlines might have begun bolting cockpit doors. But the commission doesn't want to make government bureaucrats even more risk-averse by hounding them.

Memo Says U.S. Was Lax on Iraq; 'No One Was Paying Attention' to Arms [EXCERPT] The Washington Post R. Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post Staff Writer FIRST SECTION; PAGE A1 June 5, 1992, Friday, Final Edition A senior State Department official concluded in a secret memorandum after Iraq invaded Kuwait that "no one was paying attention" to blocking Iraq's purchase of Western equipment for weapons of mass destruction during the previous decade, according to a copy obtained by The Washington Post. [According to Clarke's memo,] "no one was paying attention" to blocking Iraq's purchase of Western equipment for weapons of...

Predicting the future can be tricky. That is because many of us have a hard enough time understanding the present. One hundred years ago this week, the New York Times wrote an end-of-the-year editorial summing up the most important events of 1903. It was a long, rambling essay that took up most of a page and attempted to cover every aspect of life from foreign affairs to industry and the labor movement. One section was titled, "Invention and Discovery." The author meandered for awhile about the discovery that year of radium and its possible benefits to mankind. Then, near the...

On October 9, 2003, the night before Rush Limbaugh came clean on his drug addiction, I posted the following vanity: With my flame retardant suit snugly on, I must ask if anyone else who listened to Rush today noticed that he seemed to be off his game verbally. Slurring words, using the wrong words incorrectly etc... I heard only the last hour of the show today and it seemed (to me) obvious. AND, it sounded much like he did before his hearing loss when he use to comment on people who'd call to complain that he sounded drunk. My wife,...

Sept. 11 could have been prevented only by having a principled foreign policy. The 900-page Congressional report criticizing the operations of the FBI and CIA in the months prior to the September 11 attacks misses the fundamental point. Whatever incompetence on the intelligence agencies' part, what made September 11 possible was a failure, not by our intelligence agencies—but by the accommodating, range-of-the-moment, unprincipled foreign policy that has shaped our government's decisions for decades. September 11 was not the first time America was attacked by Islamic fundamentalists engaged in "holy war" against us. In 1979 theocratic Iran—which has spearheaded the "Islamic...

<p>Thanks to a new Congressional report on 9/11, we now know much more about the terror network behind that attack -- and the intelligence shortcomings that failed to stop it. But even with the benefit of hindsight and an exhaustive, yearlong investigation, huge pieces of the 9/11 puzzle remain missing. Which ought to remind us that Presidents responsible for protecting American life and liberty must often act on imprecise information.</p>

The following are predictions made by politicians and commentators at home and abroad regarding the likely course of the war in Iraq. Some were made before hostilities broke out on March 20 and some around March 30, when the rapid US advance towards Baghdad paused on the Euphrates river.The commentators The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, in The Telegraph Nov 5, 2002: In 1939, we risked our own lives and safety in resisting a tyranny. In this instance, we are more likely to risk the lives of hundreds and thousands in a region that could rapidly spiral down into...

The coming Bush landslide Politics/Elections Front Page Opinion (Published) Keywords: IT WON'T BE A LATE NIGHT ON NOVEMBER 7TH. IT WON'T EVEN BE CLOSE Source: National Review Author: Joel Rosenberg Put a fork in it. Gore's campaign is done. The media's conventional wisdom is wrong. It won't be a late night on November 7th. It won't even be close. The hedging, bobbing, and weaving from the political punditry is mere psychological projection that Gore still has a chance. He doesn't. Swing voters and swing states are beginning to break for Bush. Voter turnout and intensity favor Bush. Internal divisions within...

May 20 — If only the Bush administration had heeded a 1999 Library of Congress report on The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism, the latest terrorist strike against the United States need never have happened. In that report, experts commissioned by the National Intelligence Council outlined “New Forms of Terrorist-Threat Scenarios.” From that discussion and clues in other government reports, the FBI, the CIA, and the White House could have pieced together and averted the deadly plot that has since unfolded.THE PLOT to which I’m referring, of course, is last week’s suicide bombing of an U.S. Navy destroyer docked in...