Oh, For Fuck's Sake....

That's ludicrous, Amy.

Also, LBJ had Kennedy killed. And Roosevelt knew the attacks on Hawaii were happening, but declined to warn his own people... Because he wanted to get the United States involved in World War II!

Wake up, sheeple!

Also, Boooooosh! Rove-Rove-Rove!!!!

Everytime someone writes a piece like that, Napolitano masturbates... Because it gives her more time and power to expand her intrusion into our lives, as her explosively-expanding cadre of ruthless technocrats resolves not to be the guy who let a big one get through.

The TSA may well be the least of this.

Crid, I am certainly receiving your poutrage, but let's try argument, you know, a connected series of statements intended to support a proposition.

The attacks were proceeded by incompetence, handled with incompetence, and the days that followed were marked with incompetence. And certainly, leaving Tora Bora for Iraq should be judged one of the stupidest, most incompetent, cowardly and downright traitorous presidential decisions in the history of the United States.

"The attacks were proceeded by incompetence, handled with incompetence, and the days that followed were marked with incompetence. And certainly, leaving Tora Bora for Iraq should be judged one of the stupidest, most incompetent, cowardly and downright traitorous presidential decisions in the history of the United States."

WRT Crid, that's rant not argument. But Crid's 3 comment "attack" was neither rant nor argument just poutrage. If Amy or the article is wrong, let's hear why.

Hint: they are wrong only to the extent they express the cravenness and idiocy of George W. Bush.

Yet, the White House failed to take significant action.

And that significant action - in response to what specific threat - should have been? Do tell.

Whole lot of Monday Morning quarterbacking, but idiots like this - and Jerry - would be the first people screaming that Bush was over-reacting had he done something to address chatter, general threats and warnings that had been going on for years ... including the first WTC bombing in 1993.

No, seriously Jerry. Run your mouth.

Tell me what you would've done if you had hard evidence that 19 people were going to use box cutters to hijack four airplanes and crash them into buildings.

Tell me, bright boy. What would you have done?

Govts receive lots of intelligence all the time. In retrospect it's easy to see what should be paid attention to and what should be ignored.

"...a group presently in the United States" was planning a terrorist operation.

Qaeda strikes could be "imminent"

direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack...

...the operation... "will occur soon."

...the planned assault was on track.

Golly gee, that's a lot of really specific, detailed information there. Obviously if Bush hadn't wanted the attacks to happen he would have had the terrorists arrested or killed... or had a SEAL team on each of the four airplanes that were going to be hijacked... or maybe he could have arrested and waterboarded every freakin' Muslim in America... or maybe he should've had tens of thousands of boneheads in blue costumes strip searching every man, woman and child that came anywhere near an airport, train station, bus terminal, mall, stadium, school, theater, bridge...

Unless they told him who, what, when and where, how exactly could he have prevented a terrorist attack?

“Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”

Well duh! So the CIA warned President Bush that for sure some terrorists out there somewhere were planning some unknown kind of an attack on some unknown target at some unknown time and place. Are terrorists ever not planning an attack? I thought that was their reason for existing. I'm sure the CIA was doing all it could to figure it out, but there was nothing in it's "intelligence" that hasn't been true at pretty much any given time since about 1970... nothing that isn't true right now.

An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews...

...two people who were there told me in interviews.

Ah, secret sources... of course. Or imaginary sources, or maybe composite sources, kind of like President Obama's composite ex-girlfriend. Or more likely, just bullshit. This was in the New York Times for crying out loud! Bullshit!

the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon...

The "neoconservative leaders" of "the Pentagon"? What the hell is that supposed to mean?

This is all bullshit.

So, W knew all about it, but did nothing. Yeah, and Roosevelt knew all about Pearl Harbor before it happened. Or he was complicit, or something. There was even one rumor that the British carried out the attack in Japanese planes to force the Americans into the war.

So why do we come up with stuff like this? Maybe because blaming somebody we know lets us believe that control of the situation is still in our grasp, or could have been. Maybe it's easier to feel betrayed than outmaneuvered.

> let's try argument, you know, a connected
> series of statements intended to support a
> proposition.

I think you're pompous.

> The attacks were proceeded by incompetence,
> handled with incompetence, and the days that
> followed were marked with incompetence.

That's not argument, it's a head cold.

The United States in world history isn't a tiny post office in the country somewhere with a nice, "competent," little-old-man in a green eyeshade with his sleeves rolled up, dropping a limited number of Christmas cards into fifty little cubbyholes in a wall. It's a global enterprise composed of brilliant people, dim ones, sincere ones and reckless murderers, each pursuing his own interests in a shifting network of alliances. (Hey Jerry!... Imagine where I'd put you in that matrix!) Some work in entrenched bureaucracies (like the CIA and the New York Times), and some work in tandem for only a moment.

No matter what happens and no matter what happened, there is ALWAYS gonna be someone who said 'Boosh shoulda known! There was a memo in black and white!' A lifetime's worth of argument in each direction is published, if only to CYA file cabinets, every day of the year.

That these people would decline to be identified, EVEN ELEVEN YEARS LATER TO THE DAY, WHEN THAT ADMINISTRATION HAS BEEN OUT OF OFFICE FOR FOUR YEARS, indicts the reportage of this entire election-year piece. I'd not be surprised if it had been composed, on assignment, within two hours on Sunday afternoon. 'Yeah, Kurty, gimme 1300 words on how Boosh didin'do nuthin'. Usual angles.' 'OK okay boss, I'll make a couple calls after lunch.'

That you and Amy could still fall for this stuff, in September of an election year, is remarkable. If you really believe Dubya taught all the little children how to hate, it's your own beezwax... But Good Lord it's pitiable.

So there I was, driving into work, thinkin'—

There's a generation of voters who kind of sat out public life during the Bush years... And then they feel asleep during the Clinton administrations. And then they woke up on 9/11 to realize that [A] the world isn't an entirely soft and fluffy place and [B] there are people in the world who take political positions they do not share.

Both of these insights were entirely new to them.

Eleven years later, it's apparent that these somnambulent stooges — 'Daywalkers,' let's call them — are going to go to their deathbeds thinking that life was a paradise of dotcom bubbles and Brittney videos until George Bush came to the White House and started making things go wrong... As Amy puts it, 'Because he looked like a good guy to drink beer with'. To such people, "neoconservative" is a granite-sturdy political identifcation.

Jerry, I believe you when you make blog comments like that. I accept them as representative of your understanding.

What exactly should he have done? There's no evidence they knew it would be planes. It could have been cars, or suicide bombers, or something in the water, or something sprayed by planes. It could have been in May or a year from then.

Without at least a hint of a direction, there is literally nothing to BE done. That's why terrorists can succeed in their attacks. Isreal is hit almost daily, and it's not because they do nothing.

I'm no Bush fan, but to blame him for "allowing" the attacks is just stupid.

Wouldah been nice if Bubba had nailed OB when he had the chance....

http://www.forbes.com/sites/henrymiller/2011/05/05/bin-laden-lived-to-fight-another-day-thanks-to-bill-clinton/

And I could be mistaken about this- having a hard time finding it online (and Bush certainly isn't one of my favorites- but not because of 9-11, or OBL - but definately Norm Manetta) but I seem to remember that Bush hadn't even gotten his entire cabinet in place by the time of the attacks because the Democrats were pissing and moaning and obstructing his cabinet nomination because of the Gore vs. Bush Florida deal. I seem to remember it being a cluster fuck with his appointments (childish to put it mildly).

The transition wasn't smooth at all.

Excuse? No. Context, I think so.

So let's check the timeline. "In the spring of 2001"... Yes, George W. Bush had been President of the United States for all of about six weeks at that point. At that time, few of his Cabinet and senior-executive nominations had made it through the Senate, because the Democrats were determined, by their own admission, that they would block all Bush appointments. It was an open secret in Washington that there was a huge amount of treachery taking place in the CIA, and it would have been difficult for a newly-minted incoming President to know who to trust. (Clinton had the same problem in 1993, and I'm not sure he ever really solved it.) And let's not forget that there was no transition period, because the Gore lawsuits over the election prevented Bush's transition team from getting access to the White House.

Yes, by all means, let's blame Bush for the thing that happened as he was walking in the front door. The Red Sox collapsing for the second year in a row was all Bobby Valentine's fault too.

M4 and Feebie beat me to it. Great minds think alike!

Unnamed sources are as useful as primary mammaries
on a bull.

Wouldah been nice if Bubba had taken things more seriously, for sure....

http://www.infiniteunknown.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/uss-cole.jpg

I mean, how does Bubs get away with all his incompetence and handling (or LACK of handling)of the terroist situation....

Coverup of the most unbelievable outright abdication of Presidential duties....

http://www.amazon.com/First-Strike-Flight-Attack-America/dp/0785263543

I've got one word for y'all:

Gorelick Rule

The FBI and the CIA weren't talking to each other due to this short-sighted rule.

To publish this garbage on the anniversary of 9/11, a couple of months before a Presidential election, is despicable. I would ask "Have they no shame" but I already know the New York Slime doesn't.

For the last few days all I have heard is hatred for Bush, hatred for Obama, and conspiracy theories about how America blew up the trade centers and there was no physical proof of a jumbo jet hitting the Pentagon, how it was probably a missile.

I worry that as a country we are suffering from a deep, collective, mental illness.

Bush couldn't have done anything wrong that might have given the terrorists the opportunity to pull off the massive terrorist attack of 9/11.

How do I know he couldn't have done anything wrong? Well, because he was on vacation! Seven out of his first nine months were on vacation. How can you screw up your job when you're not working?

I disagreed with you sometimes but I still respected you. I never took you for a "Truther". Bye-bye.

I wasn't suggesting you Amy. I think memories are short and each side is so convinced they are right that they are blinded to the truth.

We should have done what, exactly? We could have rounded up the Muslims and stuck them in concentration camps, like FDR did to Japanese-Americans, right? Hardly.

OK, how about deporting Muslim youth in this country overstaying their visas? Too harsh - it not like we still don't allow students from those countries into our universities. It's money, and nobody is going to get in the way of money.

We as a nation lacked the political will to do anything about this prior to the attack. It wouldn't have mattered a bit if Bill Clinton or George Bush or Ronald Reagan or Geroge Washington were president.

Jesus Christ on a Stick.

Except as a symbol... Except as a name to drop in the company of the very motherfuckers you described this morning, Eric... What did anyone have to fear from Bin Laden after Halloween 2001? His networks, financial and otherwise, were being brutalized by military, commerce and law enforcement enterprises around the globe.

Do you seriously, seriously, believe that the enemy was that one guy? Then what the fuck were all those people cheering at breakfast for?

OK, Maybe Bobby Brown might have been a little concerned... But at that point, he hadn't had a hit in years.

The TRUTH, Eric! The TRUTH!

Kurt Eichenwald, the disgraced former New York Times reporter whose career went up in flames after he got caught secretly paying thousands of dollars to a child pornographer he wrote about, is on the comeback trail.

So, in the first few weeks of his administration, Bush is informed that al Qaeda is planning "something big" with "major casualties" but that the attack's timeframe was "flexible" despite the attack being "imminent."

No mention is made that anyone informed Bush of what, if any, procedures or policies the Clinton administration had already put in place to thwart "imminent" al Qaeda attacks ... or did the New York Times only sigh in relief that it hadn't happened on Bubba's watch?

If the information that the attacks were "imminent" (depsite their "flexible" timeframes) was available in January 2000, then much of the information that something was in the works was developed prior to January 2001 - when Bubba was president (consumed though he was by obstructing the investigation in the Monica Lewinsky scandal and lying to a grand jury).

Bush wasn't sworn in as president until mid-to-late January 2001. A large chunk of his administration was still not in place by September.

The average Kennedy appointee (1960) was approved in 2.38 months. And it got worse (Nixon = 3.39 months, Carter = 4.55 months, Reagan = 5.3 months, GHW Bush = 8.13 months). Clinton's appointees took an average of 8.53 months from appointment to approval. That's average - meaning some of Bubba's appointees were still spinning their wheels by the end of his first year in office. The approval process ground even slower for Bush as paperwork requirements and background investigation processes .

[Here's a link to an interesting viewpoint from March 2002 on staffing a modern presidential administration:
http://whitehousetransitionproject.org/resources/briefing/appointments/PresAppt-GWB.pdf]

So, Clinton ignored a growing (but apparently vague) threat that became "imminent" only as his successor took office ... and the fault for not doing something about a terrorist organization planning an attack on the US soon lies with the successor?

Bush did not get the usual November to January transition period. Al Gore's repeated attempts to get the Florida vote counted in a way that benefited him absorbed the energy that Bush could have used to select appointees and begin socializing them to Congress for approval. And the late start meant lost time that could have been used by the eventual appointees to familiarize themselves with situational briefings and to get to know current officeholders and lower-level functionaries (i.e., support staff). As a result, you had a 2-3 month delay in an already unneccessarily long staffing process.

However, Bush does share some of the blame. No matter the inherent difficulties of the staffing process, as of the afternoon of January 20th he was the president, responsible for the success or failure of the executive branch of the US government.

However, let's not act like the hypervigilant clinton adminstration left him a well-oiled national security machine and Bush left us all vulnerable.

==========================

Keep in mind, too, up to that point, al Qaeda had been the gang that couldn't shoot straight.

The group's 1993 attack on the World Trade Center (the one that was going to cause "major casualties" and bring the building crashing down) ended up being mostly flash and the perpetrators were soon caught when they went back to the rental agency to get a refund on the security deposit they put down on the truck they blew up.

The "major" attack on the USS Cole was going to sink the ship and kill the crew, but ended up merely blowing a hole in the ship's side and causing relatively few casualties (not to make light of any casualty).

Not to mention, hijacking planes to use them as missiles against buildings was a brand new tactic. Up to that point, hijacked planes were held for ransom with complicated negotiations. Delta Force and HRT were both well-trained on how to handle that.

The problem Amy is that it is only hindsight that is 20/20.

The fact is that warnings about Bin Ladin were not just being ignored, but when you have a hundred lies, disinformation, and counterintel, as well as just theories from your own people, the idea of "targeted intelligence" becomes little more than guesswork.

How do you tell exactly what the REAL threat is? At the same time intel was coming in about 9/11 you also had reports about pending attacks in our pacific region assets, none of which ever materialized, some of which may even have been real, but were cancelled by the planners for their own reasons.

The cold hard truth is that you can't take decisive action on every single potential threat. No matter what you do, some assets will be successfully attacked.

People were worried about Bin Ladin way back in the 80s, there is nothing new about this, he was not some new shadowy figure nobody in the administration had ever heard of before, he was a well known terrorist figure. He was an ally of convenience against the Russians in Afghanistan. But everybody knew even then he would turn on us.

I was in military intelligence prior to 1993. My unit only had access to radio and signal intercepts (non-human), imagery data interpreted to computer compliant text and extremely limited human intelligence data for a small Asian country. We also got the worldwide summary reports.

Just for grins we picked a 24 hour period of one normal day and printed it out all of it one time. It was about 13 reams of paper with a .7 inch margin single spaced and double space paragraphs. That is about 6500 pages of single sided pages.

That is just 24 hours in the backside of the world. Up that by 193 countries * 6500 pages = 1,254,500 pages of data per day.

So without saying <suspected terrorist> is booking flights here on this day -- you don't get the answer you are looking for. We don't have Trainables yet.

By my tally that's about 14 to 3, with two or three middlegrounders.... Makes me feel better about being such a screechy bitch first thing in the morning.

Besides.

Also (OT).

Best news of a bad day, and completely unexpected.

Well, Crid, since you're on the subject of being a screechy bitch, I can't help but notice that aspect of your personality comes out only on certain issues, such as gay marriage. I also remember this coming out some time ago, when we were discussing Helen Thomas (this was before she made the comments that would have killed her career...if she had still had one at the time). Amy had complimented her for her bulldog tenacity and you screeched ear-splittingly about there being no way that anyone could take her seriously and "feel sorry for the shriveled loon," a poor choice of words which reveal yet another prejudice that Crid has: the elderly. (Which is a serious mistake, since we're all going to join their ranks, barring a premature death.)

I can't help but wonder if "screechy bitch" comes out to play only when you know you're on the wrong side of an argument.

As for Bill Clinton, when did he have this opportunity to pick up Bin Laden? He plainly stated that he had no legal grounds to take him. And if you're going to condemn Bill Clinton for not picking him up anyway, then you'd have to condemn Bush for the same reason.

I'm "prejudiced" against the elderly. Continue to take notes on my "choice of words," noting "issues". (As an alternative, don't waste your time.) Meanwhile, I'll "condemn" the the condemnable. OK good talk

You'd think Eichenwald, with over a decade to think about it, wouldn't have missed the point quite so thoroughly.

Read the report on the Challenger accident. Sally Ride used the concept "normalization of deviation" in order to explain how organizations can fall prey to making decisions that are just outside the accepted bounds of normal operation, and when there are no particularly bad consequences, what was once a deviating practice becomes the new normal. (Sadly, NASA pulled a repeat with Columbia.)

Such normalization is particularly likely to happen when dealing with the deviation will be very difficult or expensive.

This is the point Eichenwald so completely missed. bin Laden -- a nihilistic zealot, but no fool -- specifically chose the means he did because he recognized a fundamental normalization of deviation in air travel.

The stated US policy with respect to terrorism is, and was, never to negotiate.

However, when it came to hijackings, the protocol universally and explicitly taught to pilots prior to 9/11 was exactly the opposite: *always* negotiate.

That deviation seemed to make sense, the perceived costs of changing the policy appeared to far outweigh the costs of continued hijackings.

Of course, as we know now, we (and the rest of the world) should armored flight deck doors and made it clear that any attempt to commandeer an aircraft would result in it being landed at the nearest suitable runway, to be met with overwhelming force, no matter how many people were getting killed in back.

The problem with normalized deviation is recognizing it ahead of time sufficiently forcefully to do something about it.

White House negligence or stupidity isn't the culprit (nor is it even a plausible charge).

Rather, it goes down to the behavior of human organizations. bin Laden figured this one out, and exploited it.

Only those with a 20/20 IQ could possibly conclude otherwise.