VICTOR DAVIS HANSON WRITES that after-the-fact questions about 9/11 intelligence failures are to some degree beside the point. He also suggests that we still haven’t learned the necessary lessons:

The 9/11 tragedy was not due simply to bureaucratic inertia or to some sort of oil conspiracy that overlooked criminal behavior of the sheiks of the petroleum states (though all that no doubt played a role), but was far more a dividend of political correctness. If Senator Graham is sincerely worried about our lethal oversights and mistakes, he should examine the orthodoxies and policies that have precluded the according of special scrutiny to radical Islamists in mosques and religious schools across America. Most operated with impunity for decades under the exemptions provided by the false gods of “diversity” and “multiculturalism.”

Had Mr. Atta and his fellow killers been arrested on probable cause, their Islamic haunts raided, and assorted charities and fundraisers shut down on September 10, 2001 — cries of racism, profiling, and McCarthyism would have drowned out the purportedly farfetched excuses that such preemptory FBI raids had in fact saved thousands in Manhattan.

After a long shootout precipitated by American troops who tried to approach a private residence in Mosul, the sons of Saddam were killed in a deadly firefight. Several of our own troops were wounded. Almost immediately, columnists and congressmen — Mr. Rangel was especially visible in this regard — implied that we had engaged in targeted assassinations. Indeed, we had apparently not even made an attempt to provide due process!

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