Know your enemy
Unknown knowns are quite common. Imagine discovering an old friend, with whom you'd lost touch, at a masquerade. Imagine Reagan's Bind with respect to Iran-Contra, he didn't know what was known in the White House. The discoveries of unknown knowns (certain opportunities that were missed, certain leads that were not followed, certain names that were not cross-checked, etc.) by the commission investigating the 9-11 attacks were quite obviously the most painful to the public, and the most embarrassing for the government and intelligence agencies, and their armies of analysts. Yet no one was fired, it is assumed, for having failed to prevent the attacks. Instead, the government was reorganized and expanded. From the latter, one may conclude that the Bush administration believes that the attacks were rendered unpreventable by a structural feature of the government, inefficiency. Yet everyone already knew that government is often inefficient, and that inefficiency has national security implications. Few people, however, questioned whether expanding government was a prudent way of improving its efficiency. The move admits causality, but affirms non-responsibility. The existence of movies and books containing events like those portrayed in, for instance, Judgment Day further supports the claim that the attacks were unknown knowns. We knew such attacks were possible, we just fantasized, for instance, that only aliens would be capable of accomplishing them. Yet it was precisely "aliens" who carried out the attacks, and "aliens" who were arrested in the wake of the attacks.
�Ipecac Dec.13.03
