And what will be the consequences for Zelikow and the other 100 or so known main offenders? It would appear nothing.

Should be NSC not NSA in the penultimate section.

Here's one of the tortured passages. First the description of a memo by Clarke:

"The Principals Committee had its first meeting on al Qaeda on September 4. On the day of the meeting, Clarke sent Rice an impassioned personal note. He criticized U.S. counterterrorism efforts past and present. The "real question" before the principals, he wrote, was "are we serious about dealing with the al Qida threat? . . . Is al Qida a big deal? . . . Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the CSG has not succeeded in stopping al Qida attacks and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the US," Clarke wrote. "What would those decision makers wish that they had done earlier? That future day could happen at any time." 247

"Clarke then turned to the Cole."The fact that the USS Cole was attacked during the last Administration does not absolve us of responding for the attack," he wrote. "Many in al Qida and the Taliban may have drawn the wrong lesson from the Cole: that they can kill Americans without there being a US response, without there being a price. . . . One might have thought that with a $250m hole in a destroyer and 17 dead sailors, the Pentagon might have wanted to respond. Instead, they have often talked about the fact that there is `nothing worth hitting in Afghanistan' and said `the cruise missiles cost more than the jungle gyms and mud huts' at terrorist camps." Clarke could not understand "why we continue to allow the existence of large scale al Qida bases where we know people are being trained to kill Americans." 248

"Turning to the CIA, Clarke warned that its bureaucracy, which was "masterful at passive aggressive behavior," would resist funding the new national security presidential directive, leaving it a "hollow shell of words without deeds."The CIA would insist its other priorities were more important. Invoking President Bush's own language, Clarke wrote,"You are left with a modest effort to swat flies, to try to prevent specific al Qida attacks by using [intelligence] to detect them and friendly governments' police and intelligence officers to stop them. You are left waiting for the big attack, with lots of casualties, after which some
major US retaliation will be in order[.]" 249"

And here's the balance, which comes right after it (p. 212-213):

"Rice told us she took Clarke's memo as a warning not to get dragged down by bureaucratic inertia. 250 While his arguments have force, we also take Clarke's jeremiad as something more. After nine years on the NSC staff and more than three years as the president's national coordinator, he had often failed to persuade these agencies to adopt his views, or to persuade his superiors to set an agenda of the sort he wanted or that the whole government could support."

Now, when you read that as a part of a 500+ page report, you might not fully realize what was going on here, but when you look at it in isolation, your reaction may be a little different. A "warning not to get dragged down by bureaucratic inertia"??!! And note the use of the casually disparaging word "jeremiad," which I had to look up. It's an absolutely stunning memo, but the commission just dismisses it. It wasn't the staff led by Bass and Hurley that did this, it was Zelikow.