Huh?

CNN for August 6 had this gem.

A drop in so-called "chatter" among suspected terrorists is troubling some counterterrorism officials, who noticed a reduction in intercepted communications before the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, government sources said.

Diminished communication prompted the concern because the counterterror experts don't know why suspected terrorists would be talking less. But they noted that similar reductions have happened several other times during the past few years.

So after a couple of years of being warned about the looming dangers indicated by an increase in chatter, we're now supposed to be looking under our beds for terrorists because of a decrease in chatter, which is worrisome because the same thing happened just before 9/11! even though it's also happened several other times when nothing occurred.

Good grief. This is just getting silly.

I've come to the conclusion that the whole lot of them are clueless ninnies who, like TV news pundits, are more concerned with looking like they know what they're doing than actually knowing. That is, except for those who manipulate the intelligence for their own political ends.

I suspect that if and when another major terrorist attack occurs - and I accept the fact that it might - these boobs will be caught as flatfooted that time as they were the last, discovering only well after the fact that they had much more information pointing to the event than they realized but because their own narrow vision - their own serious lack of imagination - kept them focused on the implications of past targets and methods rather than future ones, they just didn't see it.

I think a better approach would be to gather a group of about two dozen randomly-chosen people - I mean it, just choose them randomly off the street - and sit them down for a couple of hours over pizza and beer to toss around the question "If you were a terrorist group, what do you think you'd do, what action would you take, to hurt the US?" Don't even define "hurt," let them develop their own variants on it. I bet you'd get more imaginative insight into possibilities than have appeared in all the official briefing papers over the last three years.

And a hell of a lot less political exploitation of fear.

Footnote: The same article noted that the information about one of the financial targets that mussed so many official hairlines the other day actually came from before 9/11. The pictures of the Prudential Center in Newark, NJ, had to have been taken before then

because they did not contain surveillance cameras installed on the building's exterior after September 11, 2001....

[Company representative Bob] DeFillippo also said most of the photos appeared to have been taken from a book on the company's history that was published in 2001.

So did the dimwits at the Department of the Security of the Fatherland not even think to do a basic check such as, you know, actually asking the companies about the pictures before splashing the "threat" all over the media? Or did they simply not care?

Incompetence or duplicity. I'm not sure which is worse.