Exit the Bringonner

WITH NO REASON GIVEN.

In September I'd written about Frances Townsend's ill-advised taunting of Osama bin Laden ("Bringing Them On"). Now Townsend, who is suddenly being called "Fran" by the President and the Post, has taken a walk. Spend more time with family? The Post doesn't know.

Bringing Them On

A LACK OF SENSE IN CALLING BIN LADEN “IMPOTENT.”


It was already tough to believe that White House homeland security adviser Frances Townsend was considered for Alberto Gonzales’ slot at Justice. Despite her lengthy and impressive resume, Townsend’s published remarks never seemed very incisive, and when I saw her speak at a recent open-source intelligence conference in Washington, she largely stuck to thanking attendees for showing up and discussing how exciting the conference would be.

Now, trying to downplay Osama bin Laden’s importance in advance of September 11, Townsend mistakenly described bin Laden as “virtually impotent”:

Appearing on the Fox network on Sunday, the White House homeland security adviser, Frances Townsend, said Bin Laden was now "virtually impotent" to launch an attack.

"This is about the best he can do," Ms Townsend said of Bin Laden. "This is a man on the run, from a cave, who's virtually impotent other than these tapes," she said. She repeated her claim that he was impotent again on CNN later that day.

The provocative characterisation came just days after Bin Laden attracted international attention with the release of a video in which he ridiculed Mr Bush about the Iraq war.

"There's nothing overtly obvious in the tape that would suggest this is a trigger for an attack," Ms Townsend said.

But her characterisation of al-Qaeda as impotent sits uneasily with the findings of the most recent National Security Estimate released in July, which found that the US faced a persistent and evolving terrorist threat, especially from al-Qaeda.

If you don’t know where bin Laden is, and certainly can’t produce him for trial, it doesn’t make sense at any level to characterize him as impotent. As Cascada Observer puts it, “Congratulations to Ms. Townsend for receiving her Ph.D. from the Bring Em' On College of Public Diplomacy.”


(Thanks as always to John Brown's Public Diplomacy Review for putting me on to Cascada Observer.)

Freeway-Collapse "Terrorism"

THAT FIRE AND FREEWAY COLLAPSE COULD BE A LOT WORSE—PSYCHOLOGICALLY.


All that separates the Oakland freeway collapse from terrorism is a claim of responsibility.

If some far-sighted aide had reached Osama bin Laden in his Peshawar apartment and successfully urged him to release a statement about how the tanker-truck fire was part of his Master Plan to bleed the U.S.—direct economic losses from freeway closings are at $6 million/day, never mind the repair costs—the entire United States would be on red alert right now: cops and dogs everywhere, National Guardsmen at the airports, air passengers being fluroscoped.

Better yet: The freeway fire/collapse was an accident, but imagine for a moment that the next such incident is intentional. Create a poisonous cloud by driving a second tanker-truck full of chlorine or anhydrous hydrogen flouride into the fire, add an Osama bin Laden claim of responsibility, and you combine big economic punch with a high body count and extreme terror—all at extremely low cost and risk to al-Qa'ida leadership.

I've previously written about On the Edge of Disaster and want to recommend it again. Stephen Flynn's book gets you thinking about how fragile U.S. infrastructure is, and how terrorists can use that fragility to magnify the effects of system disruptions. And it's got some pretty terrifying scenarios. ...