Politics & Power Quote by Sidney Blumenthal

The power move here is speed: a rapid-fire ledger of near-kills, secret orders, and averted catastrophes that reads less like reflection than like a preemptive rebuttal. Blumenthal isn’t trying to narrate counterterror history so much as seize the framing of it. “Barely missed” invites both drama and plausibility: close enough to claim competence, far enough to dodge the burden of proof. It’s the politics of the almost, where proximity stands in for outcome.

The phrase “numerous findings” is doing quiet, insider work. “Findings” is Washington argot for covert action authorizations; dropping it signals proximity to classified machinery while keeping the details conveniently offstage. The line also launders agency upward: “issued by the President” implies seriousness and moral clarity while shifting responsibility away from the messy operational failures that “missed” implies. If the public wants a villain, the subtext offers one: not an unwilling White House, but a world of contingencies, bad luck, and inevitable fog.

Then the list tightens: “rolled up terrorist cells,” “stopped the millennium bombings.” Those are muscular verbs meant to overwrite the dominant post-9/11 narrative that the 1990s were complacent. Context matters: Blumenthal, a Clinton-world polemicist as much as a journalist, is arguing in the long shadow of accusations that Democrats were soft on terror. The intent is reputational triage - turning a record often judged by its failure to prevent 9/11 into a story of constant, thwarted danger where the state was already in motion, and where the tragedy becomes not negligence but the one strike that got through.