CLIFF MAY: Latest Notes and Comments

Link: Clifford May: Notes & Comments.

STUPID INTELLIGENCE: Do you happen to recall the July 10th, 2001 New York Times op-ed by Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA and State Department counter-terrorism specialist (now one of those campaigning against Karl Rove)?

In it, Johnson wrote what many of his colleagues in the intelligence bureaucracy believed that "Americans have little to fear" from terrorism.

Fears about terrorism, he added, were only being stirred up by "24-hour broadcast news operations too eager to find a dramatic story," by "pundits who repeat myths while ignoring clear empirical data," as well as politicians who "warn constituents of dire threats and then appropriate money for redundant military installations and new government investigators and agents."

Well, it now turns out that, "Three weeks before the London bombings of July 7, Britain's Joint Terrorist Analysis Center advised policymakers that 'at present there is not a group with both the current intent and the capability to attack the UK.'"