We Americans expect the "intelligence" community to protect us from surprise attack, but we're putting way too much faith in intelligence. The best intelligence agencies (ours and the British) in the world can't assemble data, and make accurate predictions, about when, where, and by whom, the next "guerilla" raid will kill some of us. Why? Because there are too many "unlikely" targets, literally thousands of them in this country, and because all our energy seems to be focused on protecting the "likely" targets. You see, only our future attacker knows the place, time, and how, he's going to kill us. And, the more "unlikely" the target, the more likely the success of such "unlikely" gambles. Flying airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were examples of successful "unlikely to succeed" attacks. There was always the possibility that an airplane might be used as a missile against us, but the intelligence community had thousands of other possibilities to consider. And anyway, even after the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, left wing politicians in New York and Michigan (centers of large Muslim voter-subversives) were more interested in the "privacy rights" (votes at any cost) of the Islamic sympathizers living in New York and Michigan than in doing what should have been done, i.e., using every counter espionage tool at our disposal to "neutralize" the cells that aided and abetted the group that eventually killed so many of us.

Pearl Harbor used to be the picture that flashed before our minds whenever we heard the utterance, "surprise attack." Now, it's more likely to be 9/11. Today, we're not going to rehash the debate about why we were surprised at Pearl Harbor, beyond quoting, briefly, from the most scholarly study of that painful fiasco, a book that was first published more than 40 years ago. "Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision," by Roberta Wohlstetter, is considered by most professional historians as the best of the lot, including those of conspiracy theorists. Wohlstetter tells us that we had plenty of warning signs of an impending attack in 1941, mainly because we had secretly cracked the Japanese code ("MAGIC") that the Japs used to communicate with their embassies. She writes: "We failed to anticipate Pearl Harbor not for want of the relevant materials, but because of a plethora [an overflowing abundance, kk] of irrelevant ones . . . The signals that the local commanders later argued were muffled and fraught with uncertainty are the ones they viewed before the event. The signals that seem to stand out and scream of the impending catastrophe are the ones learned about only after the event, when they appear stripped of other possible meanings." Just as in 9/11, the warning signals were not effectively "pooled," and no one in government had the full picture. The decrypted [decoded, solved and translated, kk] MAGIC code was highly sensitive. If the Japs had discovered that their code had been broken, they would have changed it. And only a handful of our officials, who had the time and the background to make sense of what they were reading, ever got to read the MAGIC decodes. Just as in 9/11 and today, to understand why Japan might decide to attack Pearl Harbor, when its military leaders knew they could not win a war with us, would have required our intelligence officers, and the admirals and generals who were their bosses, to understand an alien culture's capacity, and their leaders' personal political motives, for starting a war that they "knew" they could not win. We underestimated Islam's aim of world domination, heeding the major tenet of their faith, and Islam underestimated our will to strike and kill them in "their" homes if they committed an atrocity such as 9/11.

Islamic neo-Nazis had seen how Jimmy Carter and the congress, and the useless United Nations, had failed to react to the Islamic takeover of our embassy in Iran during the Carter administration. They saw with what ease they could hold the staff (more than two hundred of them) of our embassy in Iran hostage for more than 444 days, without any danger to their cities. Thus, the "stage" was set for 9/11 by the Carter administration, and the UN, by their cowardice and pacifism during the Iran debacle. Today, the political left wing still blindly misunderstands the murderous goals, and the old hatred, that Islam has, for centuries, had for both Judaism and Christianity. The left wing continues to think the real danger to our country lies with our willingness, finally, to fight back? Such a suicidal message to the Islamic mass ("America is made up of cowards, who have no stomach for protecting themselves.") is aided by the antiwar propaganda (drummed into the heads of our homegrown TV zombies) of the ACLU. Their propensity to puke up old communist propaganda slogans, that still somehow influence our "stupids," is predictable and unpatriotic. The ACLU continues to support their founder's early Marxism, not because they believe it, but for the money and influence they gain from the political imbeciles and atheists in this country. Russia tried communism for seventy plus years, while murdering millions of their own people, and it didn't work? But, you'll never hear that on CNN, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, and CBS.

The pacifist-leftist-Pelosi-personified-political purgatorial-pit dwellers of the held-hostage Democrat Party believe that Islamic savages are "basically good," and that if we Americans would just be more "peaceful" everything would be all right. The leftist-liberals, and their "press," seem to have been lulled into an Alice in Wonderland humanist dream, in which the ACLU has all the answers? But when it comes to dumb moves and unrealistic expectations, the "right wing," also has its stars.

For example, Senator Susan Collins, the sponsor of the bill that eventually emerged as the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, has been quoted as saying that, "just as the National Security Act of 1947 [which established the CIA, kk] was passed to prevent another Pearl Harbor, the Intelligence Reform Act will help us prevent another 9/11." Yikes! Senator Collins, 9/11 WAS another Pearl Harbor! Get ready for the next one.

As we have written in this space before, we didn't (don't) need a replacement bureaucracy for the CIA, but we got one anyway. And, guess what? The boss of all the intelligence agencies (John Negroponte, the director of the new National Intelligence Office) has not been able to centralize the control of intelligence. But, he has found time to have been able (just last week) to push out his rival. I refer here to the just "resigned" CIA Director, Porter Goss. Porter Goss was an "old timey" CIA agent, and he was a former politician, with congressional intelligence committee experience. Porter Goss is the kind of house-cleaner that "consensus" bureaucrats hate. By the way, it's the job-security search for the accepted "consensus," and the fear of the maverick (outside the box thinker) CIA agent, that's help damage the effectiveness of the present CIA.

Will "Demos" and "Repubs"(maybe "Repos") ever learn that one doesn't "streamline" the nearly impossible job of intelligence collection and analysis and distribution and prediction of action, by creating another bureaucracy?

Kenneth Kinchen is an independent writer with a background in international business and foreign service contracting.