FBI Allowed 1/6 to Occur

 

FBI Allowed 1/6 to Occur

Peter Schultz

 

            The NY Times has published an article – which I cannot share because only subscribers can read it – that is about a report on how the FBI responded, or didn’t respond, to the “insurrection” on 1/6.

 

Bottom line: the FBI allowed the 1/6 “insurrection” to occur, despite much intel indicating that Trump supporters were going to the capitol to a “Stop the Steal” event. No doubt the groups involved in this event had been infiltrated by federal agents or assets, so the FBI had to have had intel about the possibility of violence occurring. But the FBI claims that because they were focused on “lone wolf” types and were worried about left-wing violence, they failed to respond appropriately on 1/6. But neither of these phenomena, even if they are not just excuses, accounts for the FBI’s failure to recommend the kind of show of force that would have prevented the “insurrection.” 

 

So, as with the 9/11 attacks, our bureaucracies failed to prevent violence. Questions occur to me that needs raising: Could it be that our bureaucracies aren’t primarily concerned with preventing attacks? Could it be that bureaucracies are essentially reactionary organizations? And could it be that they are reactionary organizations because they think rationally, rather than politically? 

 

There are indications that those who thought politically about 9/11 were not surprised by those attacks, people like Michael Scheuer, as well as some others. That is, Scheuer thought about al Qaeda and bin Laden in political terms, not as terrorists or any other behavioral categorization. As political actors, al Qaeda had an agenda and, as they had announced, that agenda included waging war on the United States. Attacks such as 9/11 should have been, therefore, expected and “the dots,” as they were called after the attacks, should have been connected. As one intel agent put it, when he learned that there were al Qaeda members in the US: “They sure as hell weren’t here to go to Disneyland.” But this agent was dismissed as “irrational” because there was no evidence indicating what these people were going to do, and there certainly was no evidence that they were going to successfully commandeer planes and fly them into buildings. Rationally speaking, that possibility seemed just crazy and so that dismissal made sense. For similar reasons, to think that there would an “insurrection” on 1/6 was, rationally speaking, crazy. Hence, it made no rational sense to lockdown the capitol on 1/6.

 

A little political imagination, as I like to call it, would have gone a long way regarding both 9/11 and 1/6. To think that human beings behave rationally is to ignore what seems obvious, viz., that human beings are political animals. Their thoughts and desires are political, which means that those thoughts and desires are not necessarily or primarily rational. As political animals, human beings have agendas and to achieve these agendas, political beings, humans, always rely on force and fraud, defending such activities by appeals to justice. Needless to say – although it seems necessary to say it now – violence, even war are possibilities embedded in political activity, always. As we should know by now, wars or violence that often seem irrational are politically attractive, to say the least.