Amidst the carnage and horror of the attack on America there can be room in our hearts right now only for prayers for the dead and compassion for the living, hundreds of whom, we are beginning to learn, have bodies completely and massively burned from head to toe.
When Peter Jennings impatiently dismissed an ABC Pentagon analyst’s foray into theorizing about possible declarations of war, I cheered him—for once—for rightly insisting that Grief precede Retribution.

But we all know this will very quickly change.

For myself, I cannot get out of my mind the image of an anonymous man in white pants dangling out the window of the 97th (or so) floor of one of the Twin Towers. We couldn’t even see his face, because of the distance and the smoke, and for once I was grateful for an MTV-like shaky-cam effect that had more to do with the honest human emotions of an anonymous cameraman than any postmodern cinegraphic trendiness.

I didn’t want to know too much about that dangling man in white pants. He was soon to be dead. And I didn't want any close-ups of his face showing with horrifying detail whether he already knew it.

But as the acrid smoke of burning flesh lifts there will be more than a whiff of Revenge in the air. And before the finger of retribution begins pointing "over there," I want to point mine in another direction– towards something over here.

Surprisingly, NBC anchor Brian Williams—yes, he of the oft-remarked unnatural tan—gave voice to it first.

"There will be many people asking tonight," he stated, right over the public airwaves, "just what it is we are getting for all those tens of billions of dollars being spent on intelligence."

Here here.

("The only real news you get about anything really big," stated a journalist of my acquaintance, "comes in the first 24 hours, before they can get the cover-up mechanism in place.")

So, before I forget, I’d like to send a bottle of Man Tan over to Brian Williams’ table, for blurting a truth on national television.

After writing a recent book about the tawdry corruption surrounding the career of one of America’s most famous CIA agents, who was also and not coincidentally the most successful drug smuggler in history, I feel compelled to blurt out a similar question…

Has the endemic corruption in our national intelligence services contributed to—or even in some sense been responsible for—leaving us helpless before this national tragedy?

 Could the truth really be as sordid as a statement I heard from a former NSA operative about the huge US intelligence operation in South America called Operation Condor?

"Operation Condor was the result of years of careful planning designed to take over an entire hemisphere," he had stated, matter-of-factly, "the conquest and then plundering of an entire, nearly virgin, continent, for the benefit of the American intelligence operatives involved in the operation."

Anyone who has brushed up against the minions of this nation's clandestine services these past few decades cannot have failed to notice their pocket-lining preoccupation with gunrunning and massive financial fraud; the unpunished looting of America’s Savings and Loans, to cite one example.

Not to mention the narcotics trafficking. (Paging Colin Powell; pick up a white courtesy telephone in the Lima Aero Porto, please.)

Did the cretins with an obsession to increase their market share in the illicit narcotics industry—Plan Colombia, to give it its formal name—keep them from doing the job we are all paying them to do?

Are the guardians of our country’s national security apparatus too preoccupied these days with looting the system to waste their time on drudgery which doesn't positively affect their Cayman Island's accounts?

The brutal reality of American life entering the 21st Century was faced almost 2000 years ago by the citizens of Rome, when they looked with despair at the corrupt and swaggering Praetorian Guard which had made a mockery of their once-proud Republic, and asked out loud the question that echoes down to us across the centuries…

"Who will guard the guards?"

In one of the ironies of which history is so full, two days ago the New York Times ran an article on  Bin Laden. So his name has been in the air. And hey, I’m human, too…. As our pitifully inadequate President might pitifully put it, "I’d like to kick some Arab ass" too.

But as I sit in front of my television with the rest of my countrymen today, I am thinking about none of that; I am riveted in horror, as you are, watching helplessly, wondering if the cameras caught that man in white pants on the 97th floor loosen his grip on the ledge, and free-fall 100 stories into the canyons of Wall Street, like so much human confetti.
 
 

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Daniel Hopsicker is the author of  "Barry & ‘the boys;' The CIA, the Mob & America’s Secret History."