Foolish priorities...and obvious for decades

9/11 Files Show Warnings Were Urgent and Persistent

By late in the decade, the F.B.I. recognized the need to improve its intelligence collection and analysis, but the report said that Mr. Freeh had difficulty reconciling that with its continuing agenda, including the war on drugs. (italics added - DS)

I'd like to see the exact numbers on manpower, dollars, etc etc devoted to these two wars.

Just to make it crystal clear what I'm saying: the dollars and energy spent on putting pot-smoking teenagers in jail has been extremely foolish, especially if it has meant giving insufficient priority to dealing with terrorism.

Comments

[winifer skattebol]

RE the toking teenagers: I offer my mother's definition of the ACLU as "that organization most directly responsible for the collapse of our criminal justice system."

The whole 9/11 investigation is a farce--like telling the victim of a mugging that he/she should have seen it coming; or the victim of a rape that she was asking for it. Wise commentators like Limbaugh can see through all the blarney.

[winifer skattebol]

New Yorkers FYI:

Please see attached for information on the interdisciplinary forum
"Changed By 9/11? Planning and Design After the WTC" at
Barnard on April 22.

http://mail03.mail.com/getattach/?folder=INBOX&msg_uid=1082245919&filename=ChangedBy911%3F.pdf&partsno=2

[Winifer Skattebol]

Sorry for bad link in last posting. Here is the
text:
CHANGED BY 9/11?

Planning and Design after the WTC

April 22, 6-8 PM, 202 Altschul Hall, Barnard College

Sponsored by the Architecture Department and the Urban Studies Program, Barnard and Columbia Colleges

An interdisciplinary forum, Changed By 9/11? Will address how the design and planning communities have been affected by the destruction of the World Trade Center. The discussion will not focus on the new plans for the WTC, but on the way different urban professionals participated and continue to participate, in the process of defining Lower Manhattan.

Presentations by practitioners who have worked on or around the WTC site will consider how their respective disciplines have adjusted in tandem with the shifting landscape of government agencies, politicala structures, financial institutions and media representation. Given the complex interactions of urban discourse and action, how have the priorities, daily procedures, and long-term operations of the architectura; and urbanist professions been reoriented since 9/11?

VICTOR CHAKRABARTI, Director of the Manhattan Office for thje New York Department of City Planning
MICHAEL FISHMAN, Vice President of Urban Design, Sam Schwartz Company
BRUCE FOWLE, Fox & Fowle architects and co-founder New York New Visions
DR. MINDY FULLILOVE, professor of clinical psychiatry and public health, College of Physicians & Surgeons and Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University;
co-founder of NYC Recovers
RICHARD KENNEDY, Vice-Chair, Community Board 1
FREDERIC SCHWARTZ, Frederic Schwartz Architects and founder of THINK team,
Finalist for the World Trade Center Master Plan

MODERATED by DAVID SMILEY
Architecture and Urban Studies, Bazrnard and Columbia Colleges