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That said I find the attempts to discredit testimony less helpful to the process than trying to point out who actually failed.
Clarke himself accepted the failure himself and hoped for forgiveness in his opening statements. So far no one else has extended the same courtesy, that I know of.
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Actually, I think both are useless. Neither does what needs to be done -- understand how to fix the problem. I do not care to point the finger and ruin someone's life when the events we would be hodling them accountable for not predicting are so ludicrous. I also think that Clarke's boo-hooing admission and apology is a political tactic and a waste of my frikkin time. Fix the problem, don't boo-hoo over.
Besides, most of my thoughts have proven true in what I've read so far:
Reading Tenet's testimony, he pointed to mistakes that you make when caught in the moment. Running from crisis to crisis without taking time to do systematic approach planning or re-visit and analyze the response to the past crises.
Armitage quoted Mark Twain's line that if you are on the right track but not going fast enough, you can still get run over.
Albright's main point was that prior to 9/11 the political will of the people was not present to support the overhaul of our system that we are currently doing -- nor any sort of anti-terrorism military efforts abroad.
Sandy Berger said the CIA was given free reign by Clinton to address terrorism issues.
Powell stated the Clinton admin took briefing papers from the previous admin and tried to maintain CONTINUITY in its terrorism efforts (remember -- no political will to actually CHANGE those efforts).
With Clark's conclusions ---
Crap. [img]graemlins/awcrap.gif[/img] Workus Interuptus. I'll have to get to him a bit later.