I think you have to start with the fact that while AQ was at full force and relatively untargetted by the US it took them 8 years between attacks on the World Trade Center, there is just no epistemological model which gives you any way to measure effectiveness once we are already at war in Afghanistan.
Additionally you have a problem of us saying that we have to fight them over there so they can't fight us over here, but that has a side effect of ensuring that they don't have to come over here to fight us. If we include every bombing in Iraq or Afghanistan which has targetted US or coalition forces, the result has been a flurry of successful attacks against us. If you exclude them you end up with a footnote which says "true we haven't been attacked over here but it is also true that resources are being diverted to attack US interests in war zones."
The simple fact is they have done so much and in such a way that the success couldn't be measured even if they wanted to.
I would certainly like to know more about it too, but whenever the government (regardless of party) throws out details of such things it rarely seems to change anyone's minds. In a different context, I'm quite interested in financial fraud and in discussions with others I've heard over and over that the government never prosecutes anyone in the finance sector. For a while I got into the habit of pointing them to a DoJ website which demonstrates that a surprising number of people on Wall Street have been successfully prosecuted (http://www.stopfraud.gov/news-index.html), but in the end I gave up and just stayed out of those arguments because nobody ever seemed interested in rethinking their position.
I think most people (and I include myself in this) are much better at rationalizing their existing position in spite of new data than they are at re-evaluating their position. Of course this is an endemic problems at institutions like the NSA and in Congress.
If you want to know why the wall st. bigshots are above the law, think about the nature of Capitalism, namely an economy based on the idea that those with capital buy land, facilities, and tools, and hire labor to build businesses.
Such an economy ends up essentially being owned by the financier, which ends up being the lenders and the institutional investors. Banks end up too big to fail because, particularly when they have investment arms. This is one reason why building an alternate financial system is so important ;-)
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Ok, since they "done so much" to protect us, why don't they tell us about the effectiveness of their program in concrete terms?
I think you have to start with the fact that while AQ was at full force and relatively untargetted by the US it took them 8 years between attacks on the World Trade Center, there is just no epistemological model which gives you any way to measure effectiveness once we are already at war in Afghanistan.
Additionally you have a problem of us saying that we have to fight them over there so they can't fight us over here, but that has a side effect of ensuring that they don't have to come over here to fight us. If we include every bombing in Iraq or Afghanistan which has targetted US or coalition forces, the result has been a flurry of successful attacks against us. If you exclude them you end up with a footnote which says "true we haven't been attacked over here but it is also true that resources are being diverted to attack US interests in war zones."
The simple fact is they have done so much and in such a way that the success couldn't be measured even if they wanted to.
Bad opsec to tip your hand about ongoing operations.
So, tell us about operations from 2001 through 2008 which are no longer ongoing.
I don't think that would help though because there isn't a reasonable way to measure success and that's what the real problem is.
I would certainly like to know more about it too, but whenever the government (regardless of party) throws out details of such things it rarely seems to change anyone's minds. In a different context, I'm quite interested in financial fraud and in discussions with others I've heard over and over that the government never prosecutes anyone in the finance sector. For a while I got into the habit of pointing them to a DoJ website which demonstrates that a surprising number of people on Wall Street have been successfully prosecuted (http://www.stopfraud.gov/news-index.html), but in the end I gave up and just stayed out of those arguments because nobody ever seemed interested in rethinking their position.
I think most people (and I include myself in this) are much better at rationalizing their existing position in spite of new data than they are at re-evaluating their position. Of course this is an endemic problems at institutions like the NSA and in Congress.
If you want to know why the wall st. bigshots are above the law, think about the nature of Capitalism, namely an economy based on the idea that those with capital buy land, facilities, and tools, and hire labor to build businesses.
Such an economy ends up essentially being owned by the financier, which ends up being the lenders and the institutional investors. Banks end up too big to fail because, particularly when they have investment arms. This is one reason why building an alternate financial system is so important ;-)
I think he just made the case that they aren't above the law.
Wouldn't that just serve the terrorists?