"Now the difficulty with those warnings is that they were not specific"
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“Not specific” is the kind of phrase that sounds like a footnote until you remember what it’s designed to do: move culpability from people to paperwork. Lee H. Hamilton, the perennial Washington fact-finder, isn’t reaching for poetry here; he’s reaching for a safe lever in the machinery of accountability. The sentence turns on a bureaucratic standard - specificity - that feels objective, almost scientific, while quietly narrowing what counts as a meaningful warning. If the warning didn’t include a date, a target, a method, a map, then it can be filed as ambient noise rather than actionable intelligence.
That’s the subtext: in hindsight, everyone wants proof they couldn’t have acted. Hamilton’s line, often heard in the post-9/11 ecosystem of commissions and hearings, captures the political afterlife of tragedy, when institutions defend themselves by reframing failure as an information problem rather than a decision problem. “We didn’t know” becomes “we weren’t told precisely,” a distinction that flatters process and dulls moral urgency.
The rhetorical power is its restraint. No villains, no outrage - just a procedural complaint. That calmness reads as credibility, even as it smuggles in a high bar that intelligence rarely clears. Warnings are frequently fragmentary by nature; insisting on specificity can be reasonable for triage, or it can be a way to make responsibility impossible. Hamilton’s genius, and the era’s pathology, is how easily the two blur.
That’s the subtext: in hindsight, everyone wants proof they couldn’t have acted. Hamilton’s line, often heard in the post-9/11 ecosystem of commissions and hearings, captures the political afterlife of tragedy, when institutions defend themselves by reframing failure as an information problem rather than a decision problem. “We didn’t know” becomes “we weren’t told precisely,” a distinction that flatters process and dulls moral urgency.
The rhetorical power is its restraint. No villains, no outrage - just a procedural complaint. That calmness reads as credibility, even as it smuggles in a high bar that intelligence rarely clears. Warnings are frequently fragmentary by nature; insisting on specificity can be reasonable for triage, or it can be a way to make responsibility impossible. Hamilton’s genius, and the era’s pathology, is how easily the two blur.
Quote Details
| Topic | Decision-Making |
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