by John Bottoms

Stories of government foreknowledge of the 9-11 attacks have been coming fast and furious this past week.  In 20/20 hindsight, as the kernels of truth are now separated from the massive info-noise generated by the U.S. intelligence machine, we can easily piece together a warning of Middle Eastern terrorists planning to hijack airplanes and fly them into prized American targets in New York and Washington D.C.  Was the government negligent not to “connect the dots” and prevent the attack?  Yes and no.

The problem of foiling terrorist attacks boils down to collecting raw intelligence data, recognizing the relevant patterns in a mass of seemingly chaotic information, and finally taking appropriate action.  The government seems to have done a good job on the first, pretty much botched the second, and was completely useless on the third.

Such is the nature of a centralized bureaucracy.  Their extensive resources often include many talented individuals competently performing tasks of limited scope, such as the Phoenix field agent who warned of “flight school terrorists” last summer.  But their petty jealousies and power fiefdoms preclude the cooperation and sharing of information necessary to connect the dots.  In a “zero-sum” office, the ambitious prey on the weak and undermine the strong, and a sort of back-stabbing, cover-your-ass attitude prevails.  Naturally, bureaucracies can only react, and are unable to proactively avoid looming crises.  Their only real skill is manipulating real or imagined threats to grow themselves.  Politicians and bureaucrats also have no personal incentive to prevent such attacks, since as long as they can avoid being scapegoated, their status is only enhanced by crises.  So far, the 9-11 attacks have produced no scapegoats, but has greatly enhanced their status and power.

Now, we're told that the FBI and CIA are sharing information, and the Office of Homeland Security is coordinating investigations and integrating information.  This improved cooperation and free flow of information might do some good as long as the big money keeps flowing, but the natural tendencies of bureaucracies will shortly reassert themselves as America moves on to the next inevitable crisis.

But at the same time, control of terrorist cases is being centralized in Washington rather than in FBI field offices throughout the country.  This increasing centralization of analysis and decision-making may prevent intuitive field agents from processing enough information to recognize patterns, like the Phoenix-based agent mentioned above.

The problem is that the government is the only game in town, and We the People continue to trust and encourage them despite all the evidence that they're dangerous and untrustworthy.  A decentralized, free market approach to security would do a better job.  Markets are organized to integrate a mass of chaotic information and take appropriate action, precisely because they are driven by the profit motive and operate on a grass-roots, decentralized level.  It's not that individuals operating in markets are inherently smarter, more honest or harder-working than their bureaucratic counterparts, but they’re as ubiquitous as germs and rewarded by success.  This is the “natural order” which modern social planners consider unscientific; but the daily failures of central planning demonstrate its scientific unsoundness.

If the threat of attacks on a free society became apparent, airlines and other companies at risk would hire investigators.  Their incentive would be to publicize and share their important findings with other companies and the general public, since preventing the attacks is their only goal.  There would be a strong financial disincentive to follow the bureaucratic approach of jealously guarding information.  With an abundance of raw information available, both professional and “freelance” analysts would try their hand at connecting the dots.

Out of hundreds of seemingly contradictory and disconnected online memos and reports, I might be the one to come up with a well-researched theory that a group of Middle Eastern men were planning to hijack and fly some large, lightly populated, well-fueled jetliners into important buildings in New York and Washington on a clear, calm morning in the autumn of 2001.  If I sent my report to lots of important people, or if they read it on my blog, some may take me seriously, and maybe even hire me as a security consultant.  There could be hundreds of such people over the whole world competing to connect the dots in the most convincingly way.  Companies with the best threat assessment and security policies would avoid or stop attacks, while others who succumb to attacks may be forced out of business under negligence lawsuits and customer boycotts.

But Americans today can no more envision security in a free society than Soviet Russians, who stood on long bread lines at government food coops, could have conceived of the highly complex American free market system of farmers, wholesalers, retailers, and capital markets all cooperating to create bounty, quality, variety and low prices.  The “natural order” of markets is a mystery to those who've never seen them, or to Americans who live with them every day but have never been taught their significance by an education establishment wedded to state socialism.  American “liberals” in particular don't believe that people are sufficiently moral or rational to organize themselves peacefully for success.  Since reality demonstrates daily the failure of coercive government, they are caught in a downward spiral of cynicism and despair.

So, was the government negligent not to “connect the dots” and prevent the attack?  No, because the members of the Bush administration were probably not individually at fault;  yes, because they perpetuate a monopoly of bureaucratic control that can’t see the forest for the trees.

Americans are stuck in a groove of their own making, unable to see possibilities outside the narrow ones allowed by their self-imposed blinders, and unwilling to change despite the growing evidence of national failure.  I guess we’ll have to wait patiently for the wake-up call.