Neither The Foresight Or Imagination

First of 25 excerpts from The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals by Jane Mayer:

If anyone in America should have been prepared to respond to the attacks of September 11, 2001, it ought to have been Vice President Dick Cheney. For decades before the planes hit the Pentagon and World Trade Center, Cheney had been secretly practicing for doomsday.

. . . From the start of the administration, Cheney had confidently assumed the national security portfolio for a president with virtually no experience in that area. But Al Qaeda's attacks exposed a gaping shortcoming in the Vice President's thinking. The Soviet Union, whose threat had preoccupied Cheney and other doomsday planners in the 1980s, was gone. In its place another, more intangible danger had arisen. No one in the Bush Administration, including Cheney, had had the foresight or imagination to see Bin Laden's plot unfolding.

Copyright 2008 by Jane Mayer. All Rights Reserved