What the Heck was I Thinking!?

Patterico’s Pontifications has several posts that speak to the same issue I raised in a previous post here - he just does it more thoroughly and better.

Remember all those who complained about Ken Starr’s years-long probe of ex-President Clinton? 

Now, it appears that Salon’s claim that Fitzgerald is not Ken Starr may be true - Ken Starr was investigating actual criminal activity. Patrick Fitzgerald knew he wasn’t practically from the start:
Armitage leak prompts new questions - U.S. Security - MSNBC.com WASHINGTON - For three years, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald knew the answer to one of the biggest questions in Washington: Who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame?

 

Where are those critics of special prosecutors now? 

Ex-president Clinton is trying hard to run from his past performance as President and Commander in chief. Unfortunately, there is too much information nowadays, especially that which is no longer under the control of the actors involved, to cover up all the failures and misguided thinking.

Wizbang Blog points us in this post to a 1997 GAO report (Wizbang comments surround the relevant quote from the the GAO report’s appendix): 

"the unclassified abstract of PDD-39 was to be found. The opening sentence reads “Terrorism is both a threat to our national security as well as a criminal act”. Tying terrorism to crime from the beginning thereby tied the hands of government agencies right from the start, as it compelled warfighting offices to defer to criminal process agencies, and made no provision whatsoever for immediate or effective retaliation on terrorist organizations which attack the United States, its interests, allies, or citizens."

This has been a complaint of mine regarding the Clinton administration’s and Democrats’ positions regarding terrorism all along - wrong model, wrong tools, wrong results. If you look at something the wrong way, you are more likely to attempt to solve either the wrong problem or the right problem with the wrong tool. Naturally, you will get the wrong result. That has been the problem in using the criminal model to address terrorism. Very little in the criminal model speaks to or effectively addresses actual prevention of the "crime." In fact, laws aren’t meant to do that, with the narrow exception of conspiracy laws. That is not a good way to try to combat terrorism.