Sharp and sarcastic as usual, Maureen Dowd commented last week on the president’s statement that Christmas Day’s almost-disaster was not due to “a failure to collect or share intelligence,” but rather to “a failure to connect and understand the intelligence that we already had.” She wonders why everybody was so surprised by the perpetrator’s Yemeni nationality and expresses this in the following paragraph/sentence:
“Even though Russ Feingold, who is on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been pointing out since 2002 that we need to focus on Yemen — ‘It’s the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden and the place where Al Qaeda blew up the U.S.S. Cole and we lost 17 people,’ he impatiently notes — the president said that the intelligence community was caught off guard by the attack planned by the Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, even though ‘we knew that they sought to strike the United States, and that they were recruiting operatives to do so.’”
To understand the intelligence conveyed here requires a second (third?) reading – or an intelligence analyst – because the interposed, rather lengthy quote makes it unnecessarily difficult for the reader to connect the information. Less collecting would allow for clearer intelligence. Moreover, the entire sentence becomes so long that the writer easily loses control. Since the sentence begins with even though, another even though clause cannot be tagged on. Not throwing "dots at us like 3-D asteroids" would help avoiding inner disconnection: Russ Feingold, who is on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been pointing out since 2002 that we need to focus on Yemen. “It’s the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden and the place where Al Qaeda blew up the U.S.S. Cole and we lost 17 people,” he impatiently notes. Nevertheless, the president said that the intelligence community was caught off guard by the attack planned by the Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, even though “we knew that they sought to strike the United States, and that they were recruiting operatives to do so.”
Terrorism is scary, maybe because most of us can hardly understand what can lead a person to believe that anything is worth it to blow up himself and dozens or hundreds of others. In a highly interesting article about “The Terrorist Mind”, Sarah Kershaw explains that “Paradoxically, anxiety about death plays a significant role in the indoctrination of terrorists and suicide bombers – unconscious fear of mortality, of leaving no legacy, according to a new research.” Not only is the phrase “according to a new research” tagged on helter-skelter but also the explanation of the terrorists’ death anxiety unnecessarily far removed from the phenomenon it attempts to define. A reader will easily fail to understand a sentence when related information or thoughts are not kept together but interrupted by phrases or clauses. It would be much safer to organize the points top to bottom: According to a new research, a significant factor in the indoctrination of terrorists and suicide bombers is, paradoxically, anxiety about death – an unconscious fear of mortality, of leaving no legacy.
Kershaw also points out that people like Ted Kaczynski are an exception because only very few terrorists act alone. “The Unabomber was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, while most terrorist groups weed out the mentally unstable, experts say; they even prefer to select those with higher status for the suicide missions, in the belief that sending those with the most to lose will raise the credibility of their cause.” The two sentences connected here with a semicolon concern two very different concepts, one being a particular person’s mental disorder, the other being a typical terrorist’s status in a group. These two ideas should be clearly separated by a period. Far more confusing, however, is the first part of this quote. While functions to show a difference between two situations, but the Unabomber being diagnosed with some mental condition cannot be compared to groups weeding out the mentally ill. The information about those groups’ preference for mentally stable members should be connected to the second sentence instead: The Unabomber was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Most terrorist groups, however, weed out the mentally unstable, experts say. They even prefer to select those with higher status for the suicide missions, in the belief that sending those with the most to lose will raise the credibility of their cause.
Kershaw then refers to a play by Albert Camus to explain the moral dilemmas a terrorist might face. Camus’s The Just “tells the true story of the assassination by a revolutionary group in 1905 of a grand duke in Russia.” The assassination and its victim here are placed at two different ends, which - although it would have been of utter advantage for the grand duke - makes this statement simply hard to read. What belongs together should be together: It tells the true story of the 1905 assassination of a grand duke in Russia by a revolutionary group.
If words and information are properly connected, the risks that “The intelligence fell through the cracks” (John Brennan, deputy national security adviser) are much slimmer.
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