Nostalgia for a time and a place can sometimes end up being very disappointing. My latest experience of this was provided by walking down a street in London’s Soho district. Celebrational banners arched above, and many union jacks hung limp in the chilly drizzle. Carnaby Street was marking its 50th anniversary as the epicenter of the phase of British cultural history known as Swinging London.

For a brief while in the early 1960s this short street, with adjoining alleys, became a 24-hour carnival of youthful rebellion, expressed in radical fashions—male and female—music, and a hallucinogenic club scene.

There was a dizzy, infectious energy at large in London then. An astonishing creative insurrection was taking place. In the worlds of music, theater, literature, advertising, journalism, television, movies, art and design, a generational demolition crew changed forever the idea that Britain was a class-ridden, hidebound and culturally reactionary society, not to mention sexually repressed.

Because it was smack in the middle of London and had a cocky, in-your-face freshness to it, Carnaby Street became a favorite first stop for visitors who wished to find out if it really was true that the Brits were suddenly letting it all hang out.
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You couldn’t get any closer to Michelangelo. There is nothing between you and the drawings, each little larger than a magazine page. It must be extremely rare to be able to see such masterpieces so intimately—as though you own them yourself and have hung them in a small, bare room so that nothing distracts from them. Except that nobody could own them, no matter how wealthy.

This is the setting for Michelangelo’s Dream, an exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery in London. It centers on one drawing in black chalk by Michelangelo, made around 1533 (the year is not certain). Trying to describe it is like trying to arrest a cloud in the sky to explain its composition and destiny. Michelangelo won’t oblige: Everything in the frame seems evanescent as though one puff of breath might disperse it.
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Here in London, wine buffs are toasting the exposure of the great French pinot noir scam. From January 2006 until March 2008, 13.5m liters of wine were shipped from producers in southwest France to E&J Gallo in the U.S. and sold under the Red Bicyclette label as pinot noir.

The demand for pinot noir had suddenly spiked as a result of the movie Sideways, in which this particular grape had been treated like the Holy Grail, largely to the detriment of merlot. Imagine the embarrassment when it turned out that Red Bicyclette was composed either of the scorned merlot or shiraz, with nary a droplet of pinot noir.

This week a French court delivered heavy fines to the fraudsters, ranging from the head of Ducasse wine merchants to eight co-operatives who produced the wine.

The forensic story that unfolded reminded me of the running joke about Tuscan olive oil: If Tuscany really produced all the olive oil sold with its name as the provenance, the entire province would be covered in olive orchards, leaving no room for the cities of Florence and Siena. In this case, French sleuths figured out that the volume of pinot noir headed for the Red Bicyclette bottlings was many times the actual amount, limited by regulation, produced in the Languedoc region to the southeast of Toulouse.
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I am surrounded by colleagues who are taking part in an experiment to determine if jet lag can be tamed. They have formed an ad hoc test group to try out various drug cocktails and regimes. Some of them are flying through as many time zones as one trip can accommodate. Body clocks, real clocks, circadian rhythms, night and day, every conceivable challenge is being endured in the interests of research.

For as long as this magazine has existed, jet lag has been a constant topic, ranging from claims to have a cure to the kind of empirical reporting now under way in the hope of finding, if not a cure, at least some relief.

And long before the magazine existed, I have steadfastly resisted all the nostrums. Even though one of my oldest friends was involved in developing the use of melatonin as a jet lag treatment—and as a globe-girdling doctor in high demand he was his own guinea pig—I swallowed neither the argument nor the pill. Never.

At one point in my career I had to commute weekly between London and New York, often to be found wherever there were three empty seats in the back covered in a blanket and snoozing happily.

My inspiration for handling this experience was a colleague who flew even more frequently than I did. His advice was not medical, but simple: “I tell my body what time it is, and it believes me.”
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History has a way of not going quietly. When I looked for a suitable name to attach to my award for dilatory performance from our intelligence agencies, I chose Kermit Tyler’s, that of the young army officer who was on duty near Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941. Famously, he received a call from the operators of a radar station saying that something large was approaching Hawaii and told them to “Forget it.” The something large was the first wave of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.''

It turns out that Tyler died within a week of my announcement of the Kermit Tyler Award for America the Unready. He was 98 years old.
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Clockwise from top left:  A Jan. 10 Berlin protest against body scanners; Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (AP); a released TSA image of a body scan; acting TSA administrator Gale Rossides; a TSA agent in action

Did Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Jockstrap Bomber, really fail?  In his principal objective, to blow up Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day, he surely did fail. But if you were his Al Qaeda controller, that disappointment would be tempered by some clear gains.

Terrorists make a close study of everything that follows an attack, whether it works or not. Given the gravity of the security crisis facing America, this is a time of surprising transparency in our anti-terrorism agencies. For example, every day brings new details about the de-briefing of Abdulmutallab as the Administration defends its decision to try him in a Federal court.
 
The motive is obviously to demonstrate that FBI interrogations are far more effective than waterboarding.

The latest picture of these de-briefings includes the influence of Abdulmutallab’s parents, who were flown here from Nigeria. One leaked detail is particularly striking: Abdulmutallab regarded himself as a suicide bomber - he wanted nothing short of blowing himself up, along with the airplane. The fact that he did not has apparently left him feeling ashamed.   

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The nation’s top counterterrorism chiefs admitted today what we already knew: They had plenty of clues about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallah’s long-hatched plan to blow up an airliner on Christmas Day but didn’t add them up.

Michael Leiter, the Director of the National Terrorism Center (pictured at left), testified to Congress that “Abdulmutallah should not have stepped on that plane. The counterterrorism system failed and I told the president we are determined to do better.”

He had company. This mea culpa, presented to the Senate Homeland Security Committee, was also signed by Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence. Blair conceded that he failed to assign sufficient numbers of intelligence analysts to piece together the different tips that had come in-including the warning from Abdullmutallah’s own father delivered to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria and an intercept from terrorists in the Yemen that included the jockstrap bomber’s first name.

I would hope that the president is more than disappointed with these guys. He should be hopping mad. Because, as it turns out, he called a meeting just before Christmas to review intelligence suggesting that an attack was impending.

So the situation in the White House was not unlike that in August 2001, that summer of blissful inattention, when Condoleezza Rice saw an intelligence report that Osama Bin Laden intended to attack the United States but did nothing about it. Except that this time the president, given what is called “the chatter” picked up by our intelligence watchdogs, did want something done about it-heightened vigilance.
 
Instead, the newly penitent Leiter went on a skiing vacation.

It’s worth calling attention to something that Defense Secretary Robert Gates said at a press conference at the Pentagon last week. This event was, understandably, greatly overshadowed by the earthquake in Haiti.
 
Gates was talking about the case of Major Nidal Malik Hassan, the army psychiatrist who killed thirteen people at Ford Hood army base in Texas.  In this instance there was a protracted failure to pick up many warning signs that Hassan was unstable and had probably been recruited by the same people in Yemen who found and dispatched Abdulmutallah.

This is what Gates said: “In this area, as in so many others, this department is burdened by 20th century processes and attitudes, mostly rooted in the cold war. Our counterintelligence procedures are mostly designed to combat an external threat such as a foreign intelligence service.” (Italics mine).

This is a truly alarming glimpse into the heart of the apparatus that’s supposed to ensure our security. I have great respect for Secretary Gates-he’s got a job that carries enormous responsibility, he’s shown a robust resistance to politicizing that post, and he’s often refreshingly candid. So we should take good note, and do something that the counterterrorism establishment says it failed to do, and connect the dots-connect Gates’s picture of seriously out-dated systems with today’s confession to Congress of missing all the clues to the Christmas Day plot.
 
We don’t just have a bureaucratic problem-though that is big enough, with counterterrorism responsibilities dispersed through many fiefdoms. We have an obviously obsolete technology trying to match the most dangerous low-tech operators in the world. That’s a fascinating if worrying tension and one quite new to warfare. In order to be on top of our game we need the most nimble and deep-searching surveillance technology, good enough to arrest the progress of a guy who lines his underpants with explosive-or, who arms his rectum. Remember, they began with box cutters and worked backwards from there. Who really understands this?

And do these touching public confessions of failure make us feel more confident of the people making them?  Not in my case.  Today the clueless Michael Leiter did more to earn my new Kermit Tyler award than he did by enjoying his Christmas vacation.

Related Stories on Truth.Travel
Announcing the Kermit Tyler Award for America the Unready
Who Really Picked Seat 19A?
Fearing the Fear Related to the Dec. 25 Terrorist Attempt
What About the Baggage Below?
New TSA rules: Déjà Vu All Over Again   

Photos: Staff Sergeant Preston Chasteen / DefenseImagery.mil; Logan Abassi / UN Photo

The night after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City in April, 1995, Bob Burton, a volunteer firefighter, went into a dangerous part of the collapsed building known by then as The Pit and heard an isolated cry for help. He found a young woman buried and asked what her name was. “Brandi” she said. She was fifteen. “I was lying sandwiched between rebar and concrete,” Burton recalled, “and, looking up for the first time, I noticed huge chunks of concrete dangling from the rebar. I thought, this is not a safe situation.” With help from others, Burton freed Brandi Liggons from The Pit. She was the last person to come out of the building alive - some 15 hours after the blast.

I arrived in Oklahoma City a day after that scene. Burton was one of hundreds of rescue workers interviewed for a book that I edited (In Their Name, Random House, 1995) on what was, back then, the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Talking to the rescue crews and survivors gave me a quick and concentrated education on the skills needed to find and save people trapped in collapsed buildings.

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President Obama understood the urgency. Announcing the relief effort aimed at the earthquake in Haiti he said yesterday that the first 36 hours were the most critical. As anyone watching the harrowing scenes unfolding street by street, block by block, building by building can see, people are tearing away at debris with their bare hands trying to reach others trapped under layers of concrete. And the thousands lucky enough to crawl out or otherwise escape often have severe internal injuries, invisible as they lie on the streets. Haiti is like one huge triage scene with nobody co-ordinating the medical priorities, knowing and seizing the opportunity to save lives according to need - or the search and rescue operations. The humanitarian work being done so far is improvised and being carried out by whomever has the means to do it.

So where are the Americans?

A few civilian units equipped with dogs and specialized equipment have reached the devastation. All day yesterday the Pentagon flew over the area “making assessments.”  These overflights were coordinated with a handful of military units also making “assessments” on the ground, directed by an officer who luckily happened already to be in Haiti.

(Ok...one handful of Americans--special operations no less--did make an early impact.)

Meanwhile, this morning, one large Chinese transport plane landed at Port Au Prince with 100 specially trained people ready to go into action, and three French transports also landed. Another piece of luck-the main runway is usable, although the control tower has been destroyed and normal air traffic control is impossible until emergency equipment can replace the tower.

The Pentagon’s strategy, as outlined yesterday, made the point that until the scale of the disaster can be properly “assessed” it will be impossible to effectively assign the right forces with the right skills-all very sensible, if you are following a management by committee playbook but not if you are dealing with the imperatives of a huge natural disaster.
 
The clock is ticking.

Anybody watching CNN for half an hour can make an assessment. The result: Get there as fast as you can because the President had it right. The time to save lives is running out, fast. Every minute counts.

Sounding like the familiar Washington buck-passing game, a Pentagon spokesman said that the effort was being coordinated by USAID, which is part of the State Department-in other words, over to you, Hillary.  The Secretary of State canceled her Asian trip. She understands. And her husband, President Clinton, has been making frequent appeals-his role is personal and knowledgeable. But they don’t control the boots and the airplanes.

Normally international relief efforts involve negotiating with the stricken state's government, military and social services heads. Haiti has virtually no functioning government and very few resources. So there were no political or diplomatic restraints to immediate action. In fact, what seems absent from the approach adopted by Pentagon planners is not how to provide command and control once their whole operation has emerged (I'm sure they have that well rehearsed), but an effective first response capacity. The Air Force's C17 heavy lifters are the only way to get the kind of cranes and lifting gear into place quickly that Haiti urgently needs if those still trapped but alive have any hope of being saved.

Never have we needed boots on the ground faster. The hospital ship and aircraft carrier steaming to Haiti won’t be there in time to really make a difference in this fast dwindling window of opportunity.
 
The Pentagon has already failed the President. And the people of Haiti.

Complete Haiti Coverage on Truth.Travel

When all the metaphors (not joining the dots, stove-piping data) have been exhausted in describing the failure to provide advance warning of the Christmas Day bomber we need to forget the technology and, instead, renew our study of one thing, the human mind. Agencies may be equipped with data digestive tracts that can process the equivalent of the contents of the entire Library of Congress in a few seconds but all this is useless if no mortal is engaged to spot what nuggets among the torrent are significant.

The President spoke of systemic failure. But systems are managed by people. And in the hope of instilling an uncommon sense of accountability, I have decided to institute an award, given to an individual who, responsible for keeping the nation safe, spectacularly drops the ball. This award is named for Lt. Kermit Tyler of the U.S. Army.

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