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Saving Lives with Design

Posted by Zonk on from the this-is-not-a-political-post dept.

valdean writes "Last year, the White House declassified an August 2001 intelligence brief entitled: 'Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.' Among other things, the brief mentions that Bin Ladin 'wanted to hijack a US aircraft.' So why was it ignored? Graphic designer Greg Storey thinks part of the reason is poor design. He set out to modify the format of the original document into a more legible one."

4 of 430 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Latin Jibberish Generator... probably from iWor by vijayiyer · · Score: 3, Informative

    Further information is available at http://www.lipsum.com/

  2. Re:hindsight by hugzz · · Score: 4, Informative
    Oops: meant to say pseudo-Latin...

    it's lorem ipsum. basicly filler text that looks like english but wont distract the viewer from the real subject matter (the design)

  3. Re:hindsight by 1u3hr · · Score: 3, Informative
    Hindsight is always 20/20

    So that's why this is news over a year later. The TFA is dated "11 April 04". Slashdot: all the old news, dupes and hoaxes fit to print.

    Anyway, it doesn't matter how the information was presented. Bush DOESN'T READ these reports. He has his staff read them to him and summarise; even the one page format, which seemed like a dumbing down when Reagan did it, is too much detail for him.

  4. Revisionism by pudge · · Score: 3, Informative
    This is nice revisionism and all, but there is no evidence that the memo in question was "ignored." The 9/11 Commission notes quite plainly on page 342 that:
    Despite such reports and a 1999 paper on Bin Ladin's command structure for al Qaeda,there were no complete portraits of his strategy or of the extent of his organization's involvement in past terrorist attacks.Nor had the intelligence community provided an authoritative depiction of his organization's relationships with other governments,or the scale of the threat his organization posed to the United States.

    Further:
    Whatever the weaknesses in the CIA's portraiture,both Presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush and their top advisers told us they got the picture--they understood Bin Ladin was a danger.But given the character and pace of their policy efforts,we do not believe they fully understood just how many people al Qaeda might kill,and how soon it might do it.At some level that is hard to define,we believe the threat had not yet become compelling.

    In other words, it's not that they didn't realize what the memos said, but at the time, the memos did not amount to compelling evidence of the threat we now know was coming.

    Now, you can feel free to disagree with the 9/11 Commission. But to say as a statement of fact that it was ignored is, well, ignoring the evidence (and inventing new evidence).