Taking Credit for What Doesn’t Happen

You and I should have such an arrangement.

For years, we’ve had to contend with the reason for supporting a national security apparatus based on the fact that “nothing’s happened”—a yardstick that most of us would equate with non-performance.. For that assurance, no proof, no documentation, we willing turn over hundreds of billions of hard-earned tax dollars every year!

In exchange, we get what we deserve: Nothing!


Imagine.

Almost laughable when you think about it.

I could certainly use that kind of logic to support most people who enter my life.

I could certainly support my cleaning gal who consistently misses the top of the refrigerator and never does anything about cleaning up under an appliance. I could use the same argument to justify my maintenance man who fixed the windows by doing nothing to them, regardless of the fact that I paid him in advance. I could say that about the creative entity who claims to be my art director who has been living on his past glory for the last sixteen months. Or the mail deliverer who skips my Time magazine every second week. I could make the same claim about my dry cleaner who returns the stained suits with the same stain month after month and tells me that it’s fixed. Or the plumber who has manged through six years to convince me that the leak under the house has gone away or my mechanic who tells me that the noise I heard is fixed even though I still hear it every time I go over 45 miles an hour.

These are people who all use the same kind of rationale to convince me to part with my hard earned money and argue that I should be pleased with their performance or non-performance.

That may explain nicely why you virtually never hear of the FBI unless it’s a screw up or the FBI operating for the other side in some pitiable scam. Or the fact that they had spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing a computer system that didn’t work. Or missed out entirely on the fact that the 93 attackers on the WTC were also involved in 9/11 but the FBI explained it away saying that they didn’t have any Farsi speakers on staff. That’s I guess as good a reason as any.

Imagine that. The biggest potential source for terrorism, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and we didn’t have a single Farsi speaker on the FBI staff.

Under Freeh, it seemed our esteemed “non-protectors” spent most of the time, investigating Clinton for some violation or other or trying to find evidence. But under the existing guideline, we should take pride in our organization because under the new director, nothing has happened.

I suppose I could celebrate this event by doing nothing.

Under Rice, the justification for not doing anything to prevent 9/11 was the argument that who could imagine terrorists hi-jacking a plane; yet, the same hi-jackers had tried precisely the same thing in South East Asia the year before. She also qualified for a bonus because she didn’t read the Antiterrorist’s Czar’s weekly terrorism report and, consequently, did nothing to support our entrenched program of non-performance.

Moreover, she reinforced her standing for nonperformance when it was revealed that the chief of security in the Philippines had captured the terrorists’ computer and said that all the information our highly vaunted security apparatus needed to know the terrorists’ intentions was available on their captured hard drive of their computer seized in one of the aborted attempts at a hi-jacking.

Being rewarded for accomplishing nothing seems to be the kind of thing that most of us taxpayers have grown used to over the years.

We pay our officials for representing us, not business and they reward us by doing nothing. We pay the Secretary of the Treasury for pursuing crimes. You never hear of anyone, especially from the same party or the White House being punished, but they are still paid. But now, we are pushing the limits by also awarding lifetime security and medals for the same thing.

The head of the CIA is awarded for claiming it’s a “slam dunk” that Iraq has WMD.
What do you know, he gets a medal. We find that the chief of staff is implicated in slamming a top CIA operative and he earns a retirement, a speech from the president; we award the former head man of emergency management, Mr. Brown, for doing nothing by drawing attention to what he hadn’t done; we give a speech, a medal and a fully paid taxpayer retirement to the Secretary of the Army for being wrong about the number of troops needed to stabilize the war in Iraq. We give honors to an Attorney General who tries to get the country’s attorneys to attack innocent democratic officials for violating voting regulations; we recommend Paul Wolfowitz to the President of the World Bank for finding justification for an unjust war and we applaud the president of the United States for telling us five years ago that the war in Iraq is over!...

It seems that the only thing better than doing nothing, is doing something wrong!

It seems under these circumstances that perhaps our security apparatus has not only justified its existence, but deserves a bonus!

Les Aaron