Who's Next? Everybody Wants Credit

First the Army claims that it had known about al Qaeda operations in the US more than a year before 9/11, but was stopped by legal restrictions from communicating that information [here]. Now the State Department comes out with this.

State Department analysts warned the Clinton administration in July 1996 that Osama bin Laden's move to Afghanistan would give him an even more dangerous haven as he sought to expand radical Islam "well beyond the Middle East," but the government chose not to deter the move, newly declassified documents show.

Read it here.

It seems that everyone even remotely connected with the government knew well in advance that a radical Islamist threat was building or a strike was imminent, but was prevented by restrictive regulations, bureaucratic inertia, or a simple unwillingness to hear bad news from raising an effective alarm.

All this endless backbiting does is to remind us over and over that in some ways the world pre-9/11 was a very different place -- one in which every official action involved almost obsessive regard for the standards of political correctness. But the vicious bureaucratic bickering reminds us that while the world may have changed, Washington hasn't.