NP: John Cage, 4'33"

He's at it again. Yesterday, Vice President Dick Cheney made the claim that, if only we had been able to spy on people without warrant, 9/11 might not have happened. As is customary, Cheney is hiding behind the fact that you can't prove him wrong to make an entirely spurious claim. We don't know for sure that Saddam Hussein and al-Queda are not in cahoots, therefore we must assume they are. We can't prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that Iraq does not have nuclear weapons, therefore we must assume they do. Absence of the negative means the positive, and all that.

This isn't even entirely of that variety. It's simply unprovable, and even if this surveillance gave us some increment of better advantage, I can say with as much confidence that we might not have known what to do with that information, given the intra-agency communication problems flagged by the Post. "Might" is a pretty powerful word, in the sense that it makes weathermen completely infallible. If I say there's a 99% chance of rain, and it doesn't rain, I'm still incontrovertably correct in my statement.

While the media (including said WaPo article) is perhaps slightly less likely to fall for this trick in the post-Katrina environment of finally recognizing the difference between what's actually happening and what the White House says is happening (last throes, anyone?), most of them are probably still are. It's almost hard to blame Cheney, even. If it ain't broke -- or, rather, if it's so hopelessly broke that it's painfully easy to exploit -- why fix it?