Today is the 25th anniversary of the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, A huge truck bomb detonated outside of the building housing our Marines located near the Beirut Airport and leveled the structure killing 241 American servicemen.In a sobering column in today's Wall Street Journal, Robert F. Turner draws a straight, undeviating line from that bombing to the attacks on 9/11 and shows how Osama Bin Laden took the measure of America and found it wanting while Congress seized powers previously reserved to the executive and emasculated our intelligence apparatus:During a 1998 interview with an ABC News reporter in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden declared that this withdrawal proved Americans can't accept casualties. It was obviously a consideration in his decision to order the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But the conventional wisdom, that those deadly attacks resulted from "an intelligence failure," doesn't tell the full story.A major reason we failed to...(Read Full Post)