IF YOU REELECT BUSH, YOU DESERVE WHATEVER THE HELL YOU GET

Many others have made this point, but it's worth making any number of times: the central problem in combatting genuine terrorist threats to us does not lie in the fact that the government does not have enough power. No, the real problem lies in the fact that the government was, and appears to continue to be, remarkably incompetent and inept in using the power it already has -- and the power it had long before 9/11.

Here are two stories from today alone that demonstrate this point yet again, in considerable detail. First, here is an LA Times story on some of the failures leading to 9/11:

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, plot, obtained a visa to come to the United States just weeks before the attacks despite being under a federal terrorism indictment, a report by the federal commission investigating the attacks revealed Monday.

And as many as eight of the hijackers entered the country with doctored passports that contained" clues to their association with Al Qaeda" that should have been caught by immigration authorities, commission investigators said.

The newly disclosed findings challenge previous claims by top CIA and FBI officials that the hijackers' records and paperwork were so clean that they could not have aroused suspicion.

The commission also heard testimony from a U.S. customs agent who blocked the entry of a Saudi citizen investigators now believe may have been the intended 20th hijacker.

Authorities later learned that Mohamed Atta, the leader of the Al Qaeda cells that executed the Sept. 11 attacks, was at an Orlando, Fla., airport that same day — possibly waiting to meet up with the Saudi man, Mohammed Al-Qahtani, who is now in U.S.custody.

The disclosures were included in the first set of staff reports to be issued by the commission since it opened its inquiry last year, and came during a daylong hearing devoted to immigration and intelligence-related failures by government agencies.

Government witnesses described on Monday reforms that they said have shored up serious shortcomings in border security systems, visa screenings and information-sharing among agencies responsible for generating watch lists of suspected terrorists.

But commissioners and investigators on the panel voiced concern that certain agencies have not come to grips with the magnitude of the problems that allowed Al Qaeda operatives to slip past security systems and checks.

"We are not sure that these problems have been addressed," said Philip Zelikow, executive director of the commission, referring to failures to put Al Qaeda operatives on federal watch lists."We are not sure they are even adequately acknowledged as a problem." ...

Ginsburg cited a series of other security breakdowns that had not been previously disclosed. She said investigators now believe eight hijackers entered the country on passports that had been doctored"in ways that have been associated with Al Qaeda."

She did not elaborate on those methods, citing security concerns. But she said investigators have been able to examine four of the hijackers' passports that were either recovered from crash sites or found in luggage, and that digital copies of other passports were recovered in"post-9/11 operations." She challenged CIA Director George J. Tenet's description of 17 of the 19 hijackers as arriving in the country" clean" of activities or paperwork that would have aroused suspicion, and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III's claim that"each of the hijackers … came easily and lawfully from abroad."

"We believe the information we have provided today gives the commission the opportunity to reevaluate those statements," Ginsburg said.

And here is a Washington Post story, about the broader failures with regard to the Iraq war:

Your liberal wimps and weenies have been whining for months that the Bush administration was so busy scaring the country into war with Iraq that it failed to plan for what to do after the war. That's baloney, veteran journalist James Fallows writes in a detailed 17-page Atlantic Monthly article titled"Blind Into Baghdad."

Actually, Fallows shows, many government agencies -- the Army, the CIA, and the State Department among others -- did lots of planning for postwar Iraq. But the Bush administration ignored their planning, fired planners who disagreed with it and, in several instances, barred Pentagon officials from attending meetings with planners suspected of harboring thoughts not approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

And guess what? The planners turned out to be right -- and the Bushies wrong -- about key issues such as how many troops were needed for the occupation, what dangers those troops would face and how much the whole bloody mess would cost.

Fallows -- author of several books, including"National Defense" -- won a National Magazine Award last year for an Atlantic article on Iraq. He deserves more honors for this exhaustively researched piece. But let the reader beware: Although Fallows is a sober, just-the-facts-ma'am reporter, reading this piece may leave you sputtering with rage at the arrogance and lethal folly of our leaders.

The article lists several notable examples of this failure of leadership, including this:

Prewar reports by the Future of Iraq project, by the Army War College and by the Center for Strategic and International Studies all warned against disbanding the Iraqi army, which could, the War College predicted,"lead to the destruction of one of the only forces for unity within the society."

But last May, shortly after the war ended, Paul Bremer, Bush's man in Iraq, ignored that advice and sent the Iraqi soldiers home. That was a" catastrophic error," Fallows writes, because"it created an instant enemy class: hundreds of thousands of men who still had their weapons but no longer had a paycheck or a place to go each day."

Some of those men are using those weapons to kill Americans today.

And some of those men might have killed the now-dead American servicemen whose letters home are included at the end of the story.

In view of this overwhelming record of failure and incompetence, one of the most amazing -- and damning -- facts with regard to the degree of seriousness brought to the"war on terror" by this administration is that, to this day, not one single person of any importance has been fired, or even severely disciplined. It's as if they think they can demonstrate monumental incompetence at literally everything, even those things that might well imperil many American lives (as well as the lives of people of other nations), and that no one will ever hold them accountable.

And they might well be right. I expect that Bush will probably be reelected in the fall, as things appear now. In that event, those Americans who do reelect him will eminently deserve whatever they get. (And I include in my judgment those additional factors I discussed here.)

Unfortunately, some of the rest of us won't deserve it, and neither will the rest of the world.

(Cross-posted at The Light of Reason.)