I lived through this stuff and you probably did too. Much of it I saw live on TV or next day in the paper. Open your eyes.
(The bit about the Saudi agents was leaked from the redacted parts of the Senate investigation and didn't come out till last year, but I learned about it contemporanious with the leak, and you could have too if you'd been paying attention.)
Bush's ass kissing of Prince Abdullah is the first time I've ever wanted to throw anything through my TV set and marked the complete end for me of the "Let's all be united against this new threat" notion that had begun begun on 9/11 and had started to die not soon after as Bush swung into cover up mode.
Or would this be the same Richard Clarke who permitted Bin Laden family members to leave the US after 9/11?
He approved the request, but who made it? Clarke has come clean, why did the rest of the administration cover it up?
Would this be the same Richard Clarke who was head of US counterterrorism for eight years under Bill Clinton
Yes, and you left out the foiled Millenium bombings. I'm not a big fan of Clarke's, but he's been right about the threat posed from bin Laden for a long time now.
Or the same Richard Clarke who blamed Bill Clinton for not destroying terrorist training camps after the USS Cole bombing?
Do you think Clarke was wrong here?
If Clarke is right about anything, it's only because he's like a stopped clock.
He seems to be a lot better bet than either Clinton or Bush when it comes to assessing terrorist threats, don't you agree?
e.g., drastically tougher screenings, attacking Afghanistan, rounding up people with expired or suspicious visas, FBI investigations into foreign students in US flight schools...
Politically, there was no way Clinton or Bush would have gone for any of those things. Clinton already caught enough shit from the Republicans + left-wingers after his cruise missile attack on a terrorist training camp.
Certainly after the embassy bombings or the Cole bombing, and the foiled Millenium bombing Clinton could have attacked Afghanistan and performed some of the measures you mentioned above, and he was more hampered politically than Bush in this regard, although Bush had some distance between him and the attacks.
However, all this might amount to to a corrupt, immoral, hypocite administration, but it still falls way short of showing any active ingoring.
I agree.
Further, I think it's very easy to explain, why the administration did everything to prevent the 9/11 investigation, it simply was totally embarassing to them.
I agree here too. However, even assuming that the failures before the attacks were merely an embarrasment and not criminal, the subsequent cover up is every bit as malignant as if they had ignored bin Laden purposefully before 9/11. Any hinderance of 9/11 investigations hurts our ability to foil future attacks.
Finally, why do you assume that the Saudi and Pakistani intelligence community had to have insight knowledge about exactly what would happen?
The pakistani intelligence community has always been tight with Al Qaeda. The Taliban, Al Qaeda's host government, was a creation of Pakistani intelligence. There is evidence that Saudi agents helped some of the hijackers while they lived in the US. On who's orders? Who knows. Some of the hijackers were assisted financially through fake Saudi charities, which are only the means by which spoiled rich idealistic saudi princes can feel like they're sticking it to the man by laundering money to terrorists. One of these, BTW, was the wife of Prince Bandar, who as I mentioned is a close friend of the President.
From all I read the policy of the Saudis was merely to tollerate Bin Laden and what he did, that is to look away on purpose.
I believe there is a great deal of sympathy for bin Laden among the snot-nosed idealists among the rich saudis.
You also seem to forget, that Pakistan and the US weren't exactly friendly at the time.
Funny how quickly that changed, isn't it? Now Al Qaeda and probably bin Laden have taken refuge in Pakistan, Pakistani troops shoot at US troops that track them across the border, they sell nuclear technology to Libya and God knows who else, and they are *still* our friends.
Churchill wouldn't hesitate to use decrypted intelligence if it was plausable that he could have got the intelligence in some other manner.
But even if US intelligence couldn't have drummed up a fake source to protect their real sources (they probably had a lot more time than Churchill did), I doubt very much that any of the sources were worth perserving at the cost of the 9/11 attacks. Plus, if preventive measures would have burned a source, then likely any post-attack investigation would as well.
We were thinking we were scared of the terrorists and gays, so we re-elected a corrupt closeted dimwit who didn't stop the terrorists the last time and decided the best way to stop the terrorists this time is to invade a non-terrorist country and turn them all in to terrorists.
So to answer your question, I don't know what we were thinking.
In any case, it's interesting that Prince Abdullah, leader of Saudi Arabia, home of most of the hijackers who were at least partly assisted by Saudi agents, came to Crawford Texas less than six months after the attack. Bush proceeded to kiss his butt.
One of G.W.Bush's closests advisors is Prince Bandar "Bush" (so called by the Bush clan), who is ambassador to the US from Saudi Arabia. He worked closely with Bush in determining the country's response to 9/11, was one of the first people to revue the Iraq war plans, and smoked a cigar with Bush on the White House balcony at the beginning of the war in Afghanistan.
All you really need to know is that Bush/Cheney fought tooth and nail to prevent investigations into 9/11. Why the American people didn't run them out on a rail for that alone, I will never understand.
My question is this: Some rich, powerful members of the Saud and bin Laden family, some Saudi agents, and some Pakistani agents must have had wind of the attack, and yet they feared the wrath of America so little that they never tried to stop it or tip off American intelligence. Why is that?
That's my understanding, that the anylists that wrote the briefing did so because they thought the threat was serious and needed attention from the president. (Which, I suppose, must by anything gets the lead in a PDB.
Maybe they should have rounded up the known Al Qaeda members in the US (at least two of the hijackers were known by the governement to be associated with Al Qaeda and to have entered the US), beefed up security on the planes, kept pilots informed, and perhaps most importantly, sifted through FBI field reports to see if there were any leads (there were several).
Now, if that's too difficult, Bush could have just asked his head of counter terrorism, Richard Clarke, if the threat was serious and what he ought to do about it. Even that, apparantly, was too much to ask from our boy wonder.
It's not much of a leap of faith. You can look around you and see that logic and reasoning works. It *is* a leap of faith to believe that *everything* has a logical explanation, but you don't need to make that leap to be a good scientist.
It's like having a baby. If you wait until you're ready, you won't have one until you're 35 and go into biological clock panic, and it will be your only kid. Nobody's ever ready for it, the best thing is to jump in.
No sane person would ever have a kid unless they were rich, retired, healthy, young and strong. No sane species would ever go into space unless it was stable, peaceful, wealthy in energy and vitality.
Television is addictive like smoking cigarettes. You can get hooked to stupid storylines. They do use simple emotional manipulation to keep interest.
If you quit TV cold turkey, after only a couple of days you won't miss it. For me, it opened my eyes to how much I'd compared the world to TV, but for all its boobs and guns, tv is really a tiny, pollyannaish, puritanical sterilized view of the world. Most things that happen just don't *fit* into that idiot box.
This goes along with the notion that one of the chief evolutionary differences between humans and other apes is that human development is arrested. Adult humans have quite a number of infantile traits that disappear completely in other apes after age 2 or something.
I saw this documentary where a guy used special glasses to invert the image to his eyes. After a week or two of stumbling around, his brain was able to flip the image, and he couldn't get around without the glasses.
Evolution does not make it past step 1. Even if Darwinian evolution where true, the process itself would be unobservable.
Dude, there are more interesting things going on in the world than you imagine. Go look for yourself, quite a bit of this is easily observable with no better instruments than your two eyes.
Slashdot Mirror
I lived through this stuff and you probably did too. Much of it I saw live on TV or next day in the paper. Open your eyes.
(The bit about the Saudi agents was leaked from the redacted parts of the Senate investigation and didn't come out till last year, but I learned about it contemporanious with the leak, and you could have too if you'd been paying attention.)
Bush's ass kissing of Prince Abdullah is the first time I've ever wanted to throw anything through my TV set and marked the complete end for me of the "Let's all be united against this new threat" notion that had begun begun on 9/11 and had started to die not soon after as Bush swung into cover up mode.
Of course. Would *you* want to hibernate the bear?
Or would this be the same Richard Clarke who permitted Bin Laden family members to leave the US after 9/11?
He approved the request, but who made it? Clarke has come clean, why did the rest of the administration cover it up?
Would this be the same Richard Clarke who was head of US counterterrorism for eight years under Bill Clinton
Yes, and you left out the foiled Millenium bombings. I'm not a big fan of Clarke's, but he's been right about the threat posed from bin Laden for a long time now.
Or the same Richard Clarke who blamed Bill Clinton for not destroying terrorist training camps after the USS Cole bombing?
Do you think Clarke was wrong here?
If Clarke is right about anything, it's only because he's like a stopped clock.
He seems to be a lot better bet than either Clinton or Bush when it comes to assessing terrorist threats, don't you agree?
Therefore in Soviet Russia the Bear hibernates you?
And take a boatload of antibiotics.
e.g., drastically tougher screenings, attacking Afghanistan, rounding up people with expired or suspicious visas, FBI investigations into foreign students in US flight schools...
Politically, there was no way Clinton or Bush would have gone for any of those things. Clinton already caught enough shit from the Republicans + left-wingers after his cruise missile attack on a terrorist training camp.
Certainly after the embassy bombings or the Cole bombing, and the foiled Millenium bombing Clinton could have attacked Afghanistan and performed some of the measures you mentioned above, and he was more hampered politically than Bush in this regard, although Bush had some distance between him and the attacks.
However, all this might amount to to a corrupt, immoral, hypocite administration, but it still falls way short of showing any active ingoring.
I agree.
Further, I think it's very easy to explain, why the administration did everything to prevent the 9/11 investigation, it simply was totally embarassing to them.
I agree here too. However, even assuming that the failures before the attacks were merely an embarrasment and not criminal, the subsequent cover up is every bit as malignant as if they had ignored bin Laden purposefully before 9/11. Any hinderance of 9/11 investigations hurts our ability to foil future attacks.
Finally, why do you assume that the Saudi and Pakistani intelligence community had to have insight knowledge about exactly what would happen?
The pakistani intelligence community has always been tight with Al Qaeda. The Taliban, Al Qaeda's host government, was a creation of Pakistani intelligence. There is evidence that Saudi agents helped some of the hijackers while they lived in the US. On who's orders? Who knows. Some of the hijackers were assisted financially through fake Saudi charities, which are only the means by which spoiled rich idealistic saudi princes can feel like they're sticking it to the man by laundering money to terrorists. One of these, BTW, was the wife of Prince Bandar, who as I mentioned is a close friend of the President.
From all I read the policy of the Saudis was merely to tollerate Bin Laden and what he did, that is to look away on purpose.
I believe there is a great deal of sympathy for bin Laden among the snot-nosed idealists among the rich saudis.
You also seem to forget, that Pakistan and the US weren't exactly friendly at the time.
Funny how quickly that changed, isn't it? Now Al Qaeda and probably bin Laden have taken refuge in Pakistan, Pakistani troops shoot at US troops that track them across the border, they sell nuclear technology to Libya and God knows who else, and they are *still* our friends.
Churchill wouldn't hesitate to use decrypted intelligence if it was plausable that he could have got the intelligence in some other manner.
But even if US intelligence couldn't have drummed up a fake source to protect their real sources (they probably had a lot more time than Churchill did), I doubt very much that any of the sources were worth perserving at the cost of the 9/11 attacks. Plus, if preventive measures would have burned a source, then likely any post-attack investigation would as well.
We were thinking we were scared of the terrorists and gays, so we re-elected a corrupt closeted dimwit who didn't stop the terrorists the last time and decided the best way to stop the terrorists this time is to invade a non-terrorist country and turn them all in to terrorists.
So to answer your question, I don't know what we were thinking.
Is this the same government that convicted the first WTC bombers, executed McVey and convicted Nichols, and foiled the Millenium bombing?
It's always worth asking who benefits.
In any case, it's interesting that Prince Abdullah, leader of Saudi Arabia, home of most of the hijackers who were at least partly assisted by Saudi agents, came to Crawford Texas less than six months after the attack. Bush proceeded to kiss his butt.
One of G.W.Bush's closests advisors is Prince Bandar "Bush" (so called by the Bush clan), who is ambassador to the US from Saudi Arabia. He worked closely with Bush in determining the country's response to 9/11, was one of the first people to revue the Iraq war plans, and smoked a cigar with Bush on the White House balcony at the beginning of the war in Afghanistan.
All you really need to know is that Bush/Cheney fought tooth and nail to prevent investigations into 9/11. Why the American people didn't run them out on a rail for that alone, I will never understand.
My question is this: Some rich, powerful members of the Saud and bin Laden family, some Saudi agents, and some Pakistani agents must have had wind of the attack, and yet they feared the wrath of America so little that they never tried to stop it or tip off American intelligence. Why is that?
That's my understanding, that the anylists that wrote the briefing did so because they thought the threat was serious and needed attention from the president. (Which, I suppose, must by anything gets the lead in a PDB.
Maybe they should have rounded up the known Al Qaeda members in the US (at least two of the hijackers were known by the governement to be associated with Al Qaeda and to have entered the US), beefed up security on the planes, kept pilots informed, and perhaps most importantly, sifted through FBI field reports to see if there were any leads (there were several).
Now, if that's too difficult, Bush could have just asked his head of counter terrorism, Richard Clarke, if the threat was serious and what he ought to do about it. Even that, apparantly, was too much to ask from our boy wonder.
Just think of the cool booby traps you could design
The great irony is that Creationism is so much less creative and more banal than even the tiniest, most mundane slice of reality.
A root premise of science is that logic works.
It's not much of a leap of faith. You can look around you and see that logic and reasoning works. It *is* a leap of faith to believe that *everything* has a logical explanation, but you don't need to make that leap to be a good scientist.
Mostly though, I'm not going to risk my soul without being able to go back in time and see things for myself
That's a little selfish. Besides, what makes you think you have anything worth risking?
A move to later in the year means they think they have a shot at Best Picture.
Some materials have negative refraction.
Which I believe means light travels faster than C through them.
You brits are spoiled. That sounds refreshingly forthright to this American.
It's like having a baby. If you wait until you're ready, you won't have one until you're 35 and go into biological clock panic, and it will be your only kid. Nobody's ever ready for it, the best thing is to jump in.
No sane person would ever have a kid unless they were rich, retired, healthy, young and strong. No sane species would ever go into space unless it was stable, peaceful, wealthy in energy and vitality.
Television is addictive like smoking cigarettes. You can get hooked to stupid storylines. They do use simple emotional manipulation to keep interest.
If you quit TV cold turkey, after only a couple of days you won't miss it. For me, it opened my eyes to how much I'd compared the world to TV, but for all its boobs and guns, tv is really a tiny, pollyannaish, puritanical sterilized view of the world. Most things that happen just don't *fit* into that idiot box.
This goes along with the notion that one of the chief evolutionary differences between humans and other apes is that human development is arrested. Adult humans have quite a number of infantile traits that disappear completely in other apes after age 2 or something.
I saw this documentary where a guy used special glasses to invert the image to his eyes. After a week or two of stumbling around, his brain was able to flip the image, and he couldn't get around without the glasses.
Evolution does not make it past step 1. Even if Darwinian evolution where true, the process itself would be unobservable.
Dude, there are more interesting things going on in the world than you imagine. Go look for yourself, quite a bit of this is easily observable with no better instruments than your two eyes.