The greater good

MacRanger's latest post is a bit reflective about Able Danger and other recent 'conspiracies'. He asks the question, "do we really want to know the truth?" Maybe he was in a Jack Nicholson kinda mood.

He points out that sometimes leaders must make a choice regarding "the greater good", whereby "brutal honesty" with the population might be worse than some fictional story. My problem with the greater good argument is that it requires a person or small group to decide that question, and such actors might have trouble defining the term good.

Mac alludes to well-known conspiracies in the last 10 years, Oklahoma City, TWA800, Able Danger, and I'd add the first WTC bombing, too, and wonders if the reason we never saw closure was because of the greater good theory. Assuming the public stories surrounding these events were all tissues of lies, let's examine and speculate on exactly what the greater good might have been.

On the first WTC attack and Oklahoma City bomb--if evidence was found that Iraq or another terrorist state was involved, was the greater good really served by indicting and convicting individual suspects rather than going after state sponsors?

On TWA 800, the pivotal piece of evidence involved traces of explosive residue on seat fabrics in the section over the center wing tank. The FBI came up with a thin story about a bomb sniffing dog exercise, and the CIA literally made a cartoon to explain away the eye witnesses who saw rising streaks before the crash.

If state sponsors were behind any of the above events, surely the public would have clamored for war back in the mid 90s, de facto starting the GWoT then instead of after 9/11. Instead. we ccntinued the law enforcement approach and the attacks kept coming.

Forward to Able Danger. What if Shaffer's group uncovered data that conclusively showed Atta met with al-Ani in Prague or with other AQ members elsewhere? Bush would have his AQ-Iraq connection and the "Bush lied" meme would swirl right down the drain. One might ask, since Bush holds the greater good card now, why doesn't he act? We can only assume that unless the AD crew are complete frauds, there is some type of greater good card in play right now. Let's hope it's the public's greater good they have in mind, not their own.

Now, pop some corn and grab a beer, the game's coming on.