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Fred's son Registered: 10/18/00 Posts: 12,949 Loc: Dominican Republ Last seen: 9 years, 4 months |
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pinky: Let's talk about some scenarios suggested by the August 6 PDB, shall we?
infidelGOD: let's not. Right. That would demonstrate clearly your lack of understanding of the situation, wouldn't it? It's easier to just say that pinky is wrong. Why? Because he is pinky. Please give us the benefit of your superior wisdom, infidelGOD. Please tell the readers of this thread why the possibilities I mentioned -- all of them entirely consistent with the vague warnings included in the August 6 PDB which is after all the topic of this thread -- are more farfetched than the actuality of what occurred? Don't be shy. Give it your best shot. You then use the standard tactic of someone incapable of discussing the issue by responding not to my statement, but to a subclause of my statement. Here is my statement: "So let's just shitcan the whole circle jerk, recognize reality -- it was neither Bush's fault nor Clinton's fault; it was the Jihadist's fault -- and move on with the task of changing the way threats are appraised and responded to so that 9/11 ends up being a one-time event." Why are you pissed off with my urging the commission to get on with the task it was created for in the first place? if there is a failure in security... The very fact that the attack occurred indicates there was less than perfect security, duh! That's not the point I was making. The points I am making, the ones you are doing your best to ignore, are: 1) Neither Clinton nor Bush is to blame for the attack -- bin Laden is to blame. 2) The stated purpose of the commission is not to assign blame, it is to determine the drawbacks of the pre 9/11 national security apparatus so that the holes may be plugged. pinky
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Fred's son Registered: 10/18/00 Posts: 12,949 Loc: Dominican Republ Last seen: 9 years, 4 months |
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infidelGOD writes:
you seemed to have really convinced yourself that there was no way to prevent 9/11 absent "massive and prolonged violations of liberty"... Close. Very close. As I said in one of my recent threads, it was actually possible to have prevented 9/11. Clinton could have accepted the Sudanese government's offer to turn bin Laden over to the US. But once that opportunity passed and the plot was well underway, the attack could not have been stopped absent massive and prolonged violations of liberty. here are a few things that could have prevented 9/11: a president with his priorities in order Vague to the point of meaningless. a competent national security advisor Also vague to the point of meaningless. No matter how competent the director, if the intel isn't there, the intel isn't there. For an operation of the duration and audacity of the 9/11 attack, there were amazingly few leaks. I gotta give Al Qaeda that much. heeding the warnings of counterterrorism experts You mean like the vague to the point of uselessness warnings we've seen so far? What makes you think their warnings weren't "heeded"? The problem isn't that the warnings weren't listened to, it was that the warnings gave no actionable intel. following up on warnings by foreign intelligence services Vague again. Followed up how? By invading Afghanistan in the hopes of capturing bin Laden? Even if this had been done, it was by then too late -- all the principals were in place in the US and the plot was well on its way. For all we know those in the US were operating completely independently of bin Laden by that time. After all, much has been made made of Al Qaeda's vaunted "cell" structure. Followed up how? By detaining all Arabic-looking gentlemen in the US who weren't American citizens? Followed up how? By expelling all immigrants not in the country legally? reinforced cockpit doors, air marshals, armed pilots Do you just read my posts which respond directly to your own and ignore the rest in the thread? As I said to Edame, even today the cockpit doors aren't reinforced, there are not air marshalls on every domestic flight (and none at all on flights originating in other countries) and pilots aren't armed. If these things are still not in place after 9/11, how realistic are you in claiming they would have been put in place pre-9/11? Think, infidelGOD, think! regular air patrols over major cities To do what? Regular air patrols cost money. Lot's of money. That's why even today they aren't doing them. And if you think that shooting down off course commercial airliners would have been an acceptable option to the American public pre 9/11, you are seriously deluded. any one of these things could have potentially prevented 9/11. Incorrect. Your padded list (the first four are so vague as to be meaningless) only illustrates your inability to grasp the meaning of "action". The final two points which actually have some substance to them are impractical, given the political climate which existed in America pre 9/11. and it doesn't matter how "actionable" the available intelligence was. given that there was a huge amount of intelligence "chatter" indicating an imminent attack, it's inconceivable to me that NO measures were taken to protect Americans from attack. Apart from 70 ongoing FBI investigations of the organization responsible for the attack, of course. pinky
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gone ![]() Registered: 01/14/03 Posts: 1,270 Loc: outta here |
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Quote: I'd call it a terrorist attack. Quote: And your evidence is where exactly? Quote: As my edit illustrated, it's now not even known whether Bush did actually request this info or not. I still disagree with you anyway, stopping one action from happening in that chain of events may have been enough. You keep leading all of your comments and questions back to an eventual "we couldn't have stopped this unless we knew exactly what was going to happen, and when" line of thinking. If one hijacker had been arrested earlier, it may have scared the rest into aborting the plot. If the FAA had been told about the threat, if civilians were given the same info as government employees who were advised not to fly, then maybe certain flights would have been cancelled or had security tightened. These are all possibilities, they could have been weak links in the chain. I disagree when you state nothing could have been actioned. Quote: I guess the CIA must be in the habit of including "irrelevant" information into a document that warns of Bin Laden's determination to attack the US. They must just add this stuff in to fill it out so they can make it look like they're working. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the title of the brief, it couldn't possibly serve as a warning that there was a looming threat. Quote: He was still on holiday, they can be cancelled, especially if you're in charge of an entire country, and are being warned of imminent attacks on it. The day before, the president had received an intelligence briefing -- the contents of which were declassified by the White House Saturday night -- warning "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US." But Bush seemed carefree as he spoke about the books he was reading, the work he was doing on his nearby ranch, his love of hot-weather jogging, his golf game and his 55th birthday. ... National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, in her testimony Thursday to the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, spoke of a government on high alert for terrorism in the summer of 2001. "The president of the United States had us at battle stations during this period of time," she testified. ... But if top officials were at battle stations, there was no sign of it on the surface. Bush spent most of August 2001 on his ranch here. His staff said at the time that by far the biggest issue on his agenda was his decision on federal funding of stem cell research, followed by education, immigration and the Social Security "lockbox." http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A2676-2004Apr10?language=printer Quote: No more unreasonable than, say, speculation here on whether more could have been done by Bush administration to prevent the attacks. Quote: I didn't say anything about changing laws. I would want to make sure that they weren't hindered in getting their information to the people who needed to see it, like the POTUS and his advisors. I would want to make sure that investigations weren't hindered by departmenal bickering and uncooperativeness. Quote: I didn't mean those (Edit; that - HomeSec) departments either, just that I would like two departments working for the same country to share info and communicate. I don't think you need new legislation or a new federal agency to act as a go-between, they're on the same side. Quote: So when people in the administration say that there was no way to know that planes would be used as weapons, were they listening to allies like the Germans who warned that terrorists were 'planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture.' ? How about the Russian warning about 25 pilots trained for suicide missions? How about the fact that just about every Olympic games since the 70's has planned for this kind of attack, even when they were held in Atlanta? Quote: Of course, but I'm referring to these particular warnings about Bin Laden being determined to attack the US, and that hijackings were highly likely. Did the FAA know about those warnings? "Commissioner Jamie Gorelick, deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration, said staff inquiries determined that Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta and the administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration had no idea of the increased threat..." http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2001900804_terror11.html Quote: I didn't say photographs, but if they had people under surveilance then it may have been possible. A bulletin can take many forms. Federal immigration and aviation officials testified yesterday that they might have been able to locate two of the Sept. 11 hijackers before the attacks in New York and at the Pentagon if they had been given more information about a CIA alert in late August 2001. The Immigration and Naturalization Service did not use its master database to aggressively search for Sept. 11 hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar in the three weeks before the attacks because the agency was not told the case was urgent, Joseph Greene, the agency's assistant commissioner for investigations, told the House and Senate intelligence committees yesterday. Both terror suspects were already in the United States. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A30043-2002Oct1¬Found=true Quote: Apparently the time to scramble a fighter can be from about 5 to 15 minutes, I don't know whether this would have been quick enough or not, it depends when it became apparent that each plane was being hijacked and where. My question was also about coverage, as in "do we have enough planes located at enough air bases, available with a widespread coverage?". Quote: It's a question, a possible plan of action, to give the idea that me, the theoretical POTUS, is running through all available options. Quote: If you look in a thesaurus you'll find stop and prevent listed with each other, they can be used to mean the same thing. Funnily enough you're quite happy to pile the blame on Clinton, but apparently it's just impossible to fault Bush or his administration. Maybe they would have had to have caught all of the hijackers, maybe one or two a few days before would have been enough to force them to abort, who knows. To recap with something shamelessly stolen from another site, if we look at the document we can get this impression: Who: Bin Laden and Al Qaeda What: Explosive attacks within U.S. How: Hijacking airliners Where: Probably New York and/or D.C. When:??? Couple that with the foreign warnings and intelligence 'chatter' that something big was going to happen soon, and to me it starts to look like a series of credible warnings. I'll end with a Learyfan-esque image, showing the cover of a FEMA handbook from 1999/2000 called "Managing Weapons of Mass Destruction Incidents: An Executive Level Program for Sheriffs."
-------------------- The above is an extract from my fictional novel, "The random postings of Edame". In the beginning was the word. And man could not handle the word, and the hearing of the word, and he asked God to take away his ears so that he might live in peace without having to hear words which might upset his equinamity or corrupt the unblemished purity of his conscience. And God, hearing this desperate plea from His creation, wrinkled His mighty brow for a moment and then leaned down toward man, beckoning that he should come close so as to hear all that was about to be revealed to him. "Fuck you," He whispered, and frowned upon the pathetic supplicant before retreating to His heavens. Edited by Edame (04/13/04 03:30 PM)
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Fred's son Registered: 10/18/00 Posts: 12,949 Loc: Dominican Republ Last seen: 9 years, 4 months |
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Edame writes:
I'd call it a terrorist attack. So to you, it was not an act of war? Why not? And your evidence is where exactly? Any number of books written by ex-CIA and ex-FBI operatives, as well as reports in the media and the testimony of those appearing before the 9/11 committee. I realize the hearings are not receiving as much televised airplay in England as they are in the US, but today's testimony confirmed what I have said about the volume of tips. There are transcripts of a lot of today's testimony on the various net news services. Check it out. You keep leading all of your comments and questions back to an eventual "we couldn't have stopped this unless we knew exactly what was going to happen, and when" line of thinking. If I have given that impression, I apologize. No, it was not necessary to know everything about the plot in order to foil it absent a massive suspension of civil liberites. But it was necessary to know substantially more than merely that Al Qaeda was planning an attack someday "soon" inside the United States possibly involving hijacking or possibly involving explosives. If one hijacker had been arrested earlier, it may have scared the rest into aborting the plot. Perhaps. Or perhaps the remaining ones would have gone into deeper cover, delayed the operation, or chosen a differnt day or different airports from which to hijack the planes -- possibly even airports such as Ottawa and Montreal and Toronto -- all of which have multiple daily flights to New York and Washington. And I should remind you that one of the original group was already missing -- Moussaoui. The attack went ahead anyway. As for arresting one of the hijackers -- arrested him for what? Since when it is a crime to attend flight school? If the FAA had been told about the threat, if civilians were given the same info as government employees who were advised not to fly... Uh huh. I can see that going over well. "Attention passengers. Please be prepared to subdue by force any Middle-Eastern males sitting next to you if they act suspicious. They may be terrorists." ...then maybe certain flights would have been cancelled or had security tightened. Cancelled for how long? Until the unknown number of potential conspirators are all in custody? Do you not think Atta and the boys might have had backup plans for such an eventuality? "Hmm... looks like the flights we wanted to go with have been cancelled. Let's wait two weeks and try again." I disagree when you state nothing could have been actioned. Then there is nothing to do but agree to disagree on this point. I guess the CIA must be in the habit of including "irrelevant" information into a document that warns of Bin Laden's determination to attack the US. They must just add this stuff in to fill it out so they can make it look like they're working. Sigh. Are you being deliberately obtuse? Why must I keep repeating myself? The number of active investigations is relevant in the sense that the FBI recognizes Al Qaeda is up to something. But until such investigations produce something of value, they are irrelevant from the point of view of foiling a plot. I honestly don't know how to rephrase this point any more clearly. If you still don't grasp it, I will have to just drop it. Note that despite 70 investigations, neither of the only two scenarios tentatively put forward as possibilities actually occurred -- Al Qaeda didn't attack with explosives. Al Qaeda didn't hijack a plane in order to release prisoners. Not only wasn't there enough intel to foil the plot, there wasn't enough intel to even accurately describe the plot. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the title of the brief, it couldn't possibly serve as a warning that there was a looming threat. And warnings (as I keep repeating) are 100% useless in stopping the threat. I doubt very much anyone in the intel community was unaware that Al Qaeda wanted to continue attacking the US. The major newspapers even reported bin Laden's pronouncements, for cryin' out loud! This wasn't news. He was still on holiday, they can be cancelled, especially if you're in charge of an entire country, and are being warned of imminent attacks on it. I am curious, Edame. What do you do for a living? Have you ever held a management position? The president can't do everything. He delegates. That's why there are such things as cabinet ministers and department heads. What could Bush do in Washington that he couldn't do from his ranch? Would he sit at a desk in FBI headquarters and review reports from field agents? Would he fly to the FBI New York field office and do a "grip and grin" with the office staff to motivate them? What -- specifically could the president of the United States have done from the Oval Office that he couldn't have done from the ranch? But Bush seemed carefree as he spoke about the books he was reading, the work he was doing on his nearby ranch, his love of hot-weather jogging, his golf game and his 55th birthday. Oh please. I ask again -- what do you do for a living? Are you familiar with the term "compartmentalize"? What is he supposed to do -- walk around 24-7 with a worried look on his face? And is he supposed to answer all innocuous questions about his activities with "Well, you know, I wish I could read a few more books and enjoy the weather, but I'm just so darned obssessed with these Ay-rab fellers I can't seem to focus" ? Give me a break. No more unreasonable than, say, speculation here on whether more could have been done by Bush administration to prevent the attacks. Again, there's no point doing more on this point than agreeing to disagree. I didn't say anything about changing laws. I would want to make sure that they weren't hindered in getting their information to the people who needed to see it, like the POTUS and his advisors. And what makes you think their info wasn't getting there? I didn't mean those (Edit; that - HomeSec) departments either, just that I would like two departments working for the same country to share info and communicate. I don't think you need new legislation or a new federal agency to act as a go-between, they're on the same side. I wouldn't have thought such a thing was necessary either. But as it turns out, it was. The FBI is charged with investigating domestic crimes. The CIA is charged with gathering intel from foreign sources. The department of immigration is charged with preventing illegal immigrants from entering, and with identifying and expelling those who make it through. The IRS (tax department) is forbidden (except in extraordinary circumstances) to turn over their files to other agencies, etc. etc. etc. All of these checks and balances give a measure of protection to the privacy of US citizens, and the terrorists were canny enough to exploit these protections. The Patriot Act lessened these checks and balances. So when people in the administration say that there was no way to know that planes would be used as weapons, were they listening to allies like the Germans who warned that terrorists were 'planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture.' ? How about the Russian warning about 25 pilots trained for suicide missions? How about the fact that just about every Olympic games since the 70's has planned for this kind of attack, even when they were held in Atlanta? Yes, and Tom Clancy had proposed the exact same scenario in one of his best-selling novels years before 9/11. And Tom Clancy is very widely-read in the intel community. It seems we are doomed to go over the same ground here -- over and over again. Let's not forget that none of these "fantasy fiction-based scare scenarios" had ever occurred at the time. 9/11 was the first. Suppose for just a minute that the four planes had been shot down by US interceptors. Do you honestly believe that Bush could ever have convinced anyone that those planes had buildings as their targets? Hell, Edame, there are people still posting in this very forum that: 1) A plane never hit the Pentagon 2) There were no Arab hijackers, and no proof Al Qaeda or bin Laden had anything to do with it 3) The towers were brought down by explosive charges after the planes hit 4) The entire scenario was engineered by Bush to scare people into approving the invasion of Afghanistan so a pipeline could be built 5) Other even more bizarre and fringe scenarios As for the reference to protecting a specific small Olympic site from air attacks for a known period of time, that is nowhere near the same thing as protecting an entire country from air attacks forever. Now, you may say the attacks should have been stopped before the guys ever got on the planes, by somehow (how, exactly?) capturing the perpetrators before it came to that. But you have still failed to tell us how this was to be done absent massive violation of civil liberties. Give us a clue, here. Arrest all those of Middle-Eastern heritage who attended flight school in any country anywhere in the world? Of course, but I'm referring to these particular warnings about Bin Laden being determined to attack the US, and that hijackings were highly likely. Did the FAA know about those warnings? So what are you suggesting? That each and every morning, the supervisor of the baggage checkers is supposed to remind his staff to be especially careful checking baggage today? And to do a full body search on every Arab male? Forever? I didn't say photographs, but if they had people under surveilance then it may have been possible. A bulletin can take many forms. Federal immigration and aviation officials testified yesterday that they might have been able to locate two of the Sept. 11 hijackers before the attacks in New York and at the Pentagon if they had been given more information about a CIA alert in late August 2001. The Immigration and Naturalization Service did not use its master database to aggressively search for Sept. 11 hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar in the three weeks before the attacks because the agency was not told the case was urgent, Joseph Greene, the agency's assistant commissioner for investigations, told the House and Senate intelligence committees yesterday. Both terror suspects were already in the United States. Where in the United States? Had the two been photographed? Was it known how tall they were, what they weighed, how old they were, where they were last seen and how long ago? Just to clue you in, police departments routinely fail to find fugitives (murderers etc.) on which they have a lot more information than that for years and even decades, even with nationwide manhunts including "ten most wanted" pictures in every post office and often even television broadcasts appealing to the public to pitch in and help. I am not saying it was impossible to find those two in the stretch of three weeks -- anything is possible -- but it sounds to me like the statement you quoted is a pro forma version of bureaucratic "pass the buck". Even if the capture of those two had been the top priority of every single LEO in the US, that doesn't mean they would be captured in time, and even if they were, it doesn't mean they'd crack under interrogation and betray the other seventeen. And even if they did betray the other seventeen, it's unlikely that any one group even knew the location of the other three groups. Compartmentalization and standard guerilla cell structure. My question was also about coverage, as in "do we have enough planes located at enough air bases, available with a widespread coverage?". If you are talking about a fifteen minute response time, from the time the airliner is reported to be off course till the time the interceptor is beside it, then no, there is not even a tiny fraction of the amount of planes required to cover that many airports 24-7. To buy that many and train the necessary staff to fly and maintain them would bankrupt the country. Funnily enough you're quite happy to pile the blame on Clinton, but apparently it's just impossible to fault Bush or his administration. Then you haven't been following what I have been saying. I don't fault Clinton for 9/11. I have said already that given the political climate in America pre-9/11, the necessary steps to stop a well-plotted attack such as 9/11 couldn't have been implemented without basically a giant lockdown of the entire country. The Americans didn't realize they were involved in a war declared already by Al Qaeda. You apparently still don't see 9/11 as an act of war, let alone Al Qaeda's previous attacks on US embassies, the 1993 WTC bombing, or the attack on the USS Cole. Neither do many Americans. I do point out that Clinton was remiss in not taking advantage of any of the oppportunities he had to capture bin Laden -- not because bin Laden might have made future attacks, but because of his previous attacks. Clinton's failure there was a real one, and there is no denying it. But absent capturing bin Laden before the 9/11 planners were in place, was there anything else Clinton could have realistically done to stop 9/11 before leaving office? I have to say that given the information we have available to us today, the honest answer is "no". The American public would simply not have stood for it, and despite his many other faults Clinton is a canny enough politician to understand that fact. To recap with something shamelessly stolen from another site, if we look at the document we can get this impression: Again, vague to the point of uselessness. Who: Bin Laden and Al Qaeda -- Incorrect. An unknown group of twenty men. What: Explosive attacks within U.S. -- Incorrect. No explosives. How: Hijacking airliners -- To do what? Hold as hostage for release of bin Laden buddies? Where: Probably New York and/or D.C. -- Finally, something accurate. When:??? -- Exactly. And without a "when", what is your recourse? Ground all air traffic for a day? A month? A year? Couple that with the foreign warnings and intelligence 'chatter' that something big was going to happen soon, and to me it starts to look like a series of credible warnings. I have never said the warnings were not credible. Just that they were vague to the point of uselessness from the point of view of crafting a practical plan of action which didn't involve the massive suspension of civil liberties. pinky
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illusion ![]() Registered: 04/18/02 Posts: 3,040 Loc: there |
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Dire warnings are not actionable intelligence
I didn't say they were. I would presume it was the years of dire warnings that led to the 70 ongoing FBI investigations into Al Qaeda activities -- investigations which had as yet produced no actionable intelligence. I guess that depends on your definition of "actionable intelligence". and that of couse, depends on what you are willing to act on. it's funny that Bush is complaining about the lack of actionable intelligence when he relied on completely fictitious intelligence to launch an unprovoked, full scale invasion.
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Resident Cynic Registered: 10/01/02 Posts: 5,385 Loc: Apt #6, The Vill |
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Quote: -------------------- To call humans 'rational beings' does injustice to the term, 'rational.' Humans are capable of rational thought, but it is not their essence. Humans are animals, beasts with complex brains. Humans, more often than not, utilize their cerebrum to rationalize what their primal instincts, their preconceived notions, and their emotional desires have presented as goals - humans are rationalizing beings.
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illusion ![]() Registered: 04/18/02 Posts: 3,040 Loc: there |
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Right. That would demonstrate clearly your lack of understanding of the situation, wouldn't it? It's easier to just say that pinky is wrong. Why? Because he is pinky.
Please give us the benefit of your superior wisdom, infidelGOD. Please tell the readers of this thread why the possibilities I mentioned -- all of them entirely consistent with the vague warnings included in the August 6 PDB which is after all the topic of this thread -- are more farfetched than the actuality of what occurred? Don't be shy. Give it your best shot. umm ok. here are some of your scenarios: "What if the real plan had been to lease a tanker filled with LNG (liquid natural gas) and detonate it in New York harbor?" "What if he decided to stick with the airliner scenario, but rather than divert airliners from their intended flight plans, had instead hijacked one from Montreal..." "What if the target for explosives wasn't in fact a federal building in New York, but a football stadium in Wisconsin?" "What if the method wasn't in fact explosives, but the release of a nerve gas, or smallpox?" any more "what if" scenarios? what's there to discuss? none of these things actually happened. let's try and deal with reality here. You then use the standard tactic of someone incapable of discussing the issue by responding not to my statement, but to a subclause of my statement. Here is my statement: "So let's just shitcan the whole circle jerk, recognize reality -- it was neither Bush's fault nor Clinton's fault; it was the Jihadist's fault -- and move on with the task of changing the way threats are appraised and responded to so that 9/11 ends up being a one-time event." here is the part of your statement that I quoted: "So let's just shitcan the whole circle jerk, recognize reality -- it was neither Bush's fault nor Clinton's fault; it was the Jihadist's fault". you accuse me of using a "standard tactic of someone incapable of discussing the issue by responding not to my statement, but to a subclause of my statement" but later you say: The points I am making, the ones you are doing your best to ignore, are: 1) Neither Clinton nor Bush is to blame for the attack -- bin Laden is to blame. wtf? so which is it? the "subclause" of your statement is now the #1 point you're making? make up your mind pinky. you're all over the map... and you say I'm trying to ignore your points?! ARE YOU SERIOUS?! you must be ignoring the part where I addressed your point... here it is again: "it's not an either/or choice between blaming the attackers and blaming those who failed in their task to protect us" your second point: 2) The stated purpose of the commission is not to assign blame, it is to determine the drawbacks of the pre 9/11 national security apparatus so that the holes may be plugged. has also been addressed already: "these people have specific responsiblities and if they fail, questions have to be asked to find out what went wrong and how to fix it."
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Stranger Registered: 02/25/01 Posts: 9,134 |
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it's funny that Bush is complaining about the lack of actionable intelligence when he relied on completely fictitious intelligence to launch an unprovoked, full scale invasion.
Wonder which is the most tricky. Launching a full scale invasion of a country halfway around the world or putting tails on a couple of dozen al-qaeda guys.
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illusion ![]() Registered: 04/18/02 Posts: 3,040 Loc: there |
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No matter how competent the director, if the intel isn't there, the intel isn't there.
oh well THAT settles it! of course! the intel wasn't there! we couldn't prevent 9/11 because the terrorists didn't TELL us the flight numbers! heeding the warnings of counterterrorism experts You mean like the vague to the point of uselessness warnings we've seen so far? What makes you think their warnings weren't "heeded"? The problem isn't that the warnings weren't listened to, it was that the warnings gave no actionable intel. you're missing the point again, complaining about the lack of actionable intelligence. I already covered this: the president doesn't sit around just waiting to be handed memos with actionable intelligence so he could act - he decides what the priorities are. the counterterrorism experts felt that resources were not being allocated to the threat of terrorism (some still feel this way), they wanted more resources to do their jobs, which includes the gathering of intelligence. reinforced cockpit doors, air marshals, armed pilots Do you just read my posts which respond directly to your own and ignore the rest in the thread? As I said to Edame, even today the cockpit doors aren't reinforced, there are not air marshalls on every domestic flight (and none at all on flights originating in other countries) and pilots aren't armed. do YOU read anything I write? very carefully now (I hate repeating myself): "these things could have potentially prevented 9/11" I'm not saying that doing these things would have prevented 9/11, I'm saying that the government did next to nothing to make it more difficult for the terrorists to carry out their plans. even without specific warnings, there was a lot that could have been done (not involving massive violations of liberty).
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gone ![]() Registered: 01/14/03 Posts: 1,270 Loc: outta here |
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Quote: I didn't say that, but since you ask, I don't think it was an act of war because I think Bin Laden declared war (and carried out attacks) on Americans in '98. Quote: The burden of proof lies with you, can you show that the President or his advisors receive "literally thousands" of bulletins like the PDB each month? Quote: If the government thought it important enough to warn government staff not to fly, then they should have at least had the decency to inform their citizens and let them make their own choices. I don't think thousands dead buried beneath two skyscrapers went over particularly well either did it? Quote: I wouldn't call it obtuse, I'm just not playing ball with your attempts to railroad the discussion towards proving your point. Apparently you argue that hijack warnings were useless because they didn't specify the exact aims of the hijackers. They hijacked a plane (Edit: 4 planes), the warnings were about hijackings, but you narrow your arguement to ignore this because they didn't didn't demand the release of prisoners. The PDB warns of attacks with explosives, but your narrow definition refuses to see a plane loaded with fuel as an explosive weapon. Quote: Did Tom Clancy send warnings to the US that Bin Laden was planning to use planes as weapons? Are you suggesting that Tom Clancy has more credibility than said foreign agencies? Quote: Do you want me to repeat the warnings again that said Bin Laden was planning to crash planes into American landmarks, or the fact the the Olympic organisers in Atlanta and Sydney were aware of the same scenario and planned for it years ago? Quote: My point was that the scenario of terrorists flying planes into populated buildings and events was well known, and not as unimaginable as people like Bush insist. Quote: I'm suggesting that the FAA could have been warned about the increased threat. Notifying them would have been a start, are you suggesting that the FAA shouldn't be notified when there is an increased terrorist threat? Quote: Again, you narrow the topic to specific details of the attack in order to prove that because they didn't know the specifics details they were unable to do a thing. I've given examples of what I think is 'actionable' (warning the FAA etc...), you obviously disagree and I'm happy to leave it at that. Neither of us appears to be getting through to the other. -------------------- The above is an extract from my fictional novel, "The random postings of Edame". In the beginning was the word. And man could not handle the word, and the hearing of the word, and he asked God to take away his ears so that he might live in peace without having to hear words which might upset his equinamity or corrupt the unblemished purity of his conscience. And God, hearing this desperate plea from His creation, wrinkled His mighty brow for a moment and then leaned down toward man, beckoning that he should come close so as to hear all that was about to be revealed to him. "Fuck you," He whispered, and frowned upon the pathetic supplicant before retreating to His heavens. Edited by Edame (04/14/04 01:01 PM)
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gone ![]() Registered: 01/14/03 Posts: 1,270 Loc: outta here |
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"Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late."
Bush, State of the Union Jan. 28, 2003 "There was nothing in there that said, you know, there's an imminent attack. There was nothing in this report to me that said, 'oh, by the way, we've got intelligence that says something is about to happen in America,'" Bush, responding to questions about the Aug. 6, 2001 PDB Apr. 13, 2004 -------------------- The above is an extract from my fictional novel, "The random postings of Edame". In the beginning was the word. And man could not handle the word, and the hearing of the word, and he asked God to take away his ears so that he might live in peace without having to hear words which might upset his equinamity or corrupt the unblemished purity of his conscience. And God, hearing this desperate plea from His creation, wrinkled His mighty brow for a moment and then leaned down toward man, beckoning that he should come close so as to hear all that was about to be revealed to him. "Fuck you," He whispered, and frowned upon the pathetic supplicant before retreating to His heavens.
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illusion ![]() Registered: 04/18/02 Posts: 3,040 Loc: there |
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for some, delusional threats take precedence over actual threats.
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Fred's son Registered: 10/18/00 Posts: 12,949 Loc: Dominican Republ Last seen: 9 years, 4 months |
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Bumped because sections of this thread are relevant to the current discussion going on in post http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/5769725/page/0/fpart/1/vc/1 and I don't feel like typing it all over again for those too stubborn to click on the link to this thread I provided.
Phred
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J♠ Registered: 04/17/01 Posts: 20,815 Loc: Ontario, Canada |
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Quote: Neither the Skull and Bones, Masons, or the Catholic Church have published a document that outlines their proposal for continued US dominance. Certainly none of those groups published anything saying that "a new pearl harbor" would catalyze their plans for US supremacy. PNAC did, and at least a few of the current administration signed their names at the bottom of the document. The next step is simple inference. -------------------- But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
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