Current Quagmire *What did the US Govt know*

[AsIs]

Ok, I don't start topics or post much anymore...please humor me.

I have been watching the latest news about what did the Bush Administration know about warnings that *could* have prevented September 11th, or at least given them a friggin clue...

I doubt anyone remembers, but I said a few days after the event that our spook agencies at the very least, should have been putting the pieces together. I am sort of amused it took the press 8 months to come to the same conclusion.

In the first few days after that tragic event, I was a news hound. I watched CNN, I listened to NPR. I surfed other news stations. I tracked it on the internet. It was a event that touched me deeply. I commented on something that happpened the first few days, information would pop up and die rather quickly. Stories would simply be dropped, if you blinked you missed them. But all of the stories had threads, that led to the information being there, but being overlooked.

What makes this a scandal is not that they didn't prevent September 11th. At least not for me. The scandal is that on repeated occasions the government stood in front of cameras and said outright, they had no information to lead them to the conclusion that zealots would hijack planes and fly them into buildings.

My brain is a bit fuzzy, but let me recall some of the stories at the time that were buried...

- Zach M. was in jail, for imigration violations. He wanted to fly planes, but wasn't interested in learning how to take off or land... hmmm, makes me, a ordinary citizen think...

- At the trial of one of the people who first bombed the WTC, he said pilots were learning to fly planes to fly into buildings.

- Argentina told us there were a number of Bin Laden people in the US.

- Israel's Mossad, a spook force without many of the messy rules the US forces have, told us that a *major* action was planned.

Those are just the things I remember, although Argentina and Israel info might be other way around.

In addition to that, there was the FBI memo. And a few other tidbits that are now coming out that I don't remember.

What really really gets me is the head of the FBI saying that they had no info, while Zachy was sitting in jail, put there by one of his men.

*IF* this doesn't become a scandal then it will become completely apparent that the Democratic party has no b@lls. Whitewater didn't affect the nation. Neither did who Clinton boffed in the Oval Office. But a major breakdown by our intelligence agencies, swept under the carpet to hide thier gaff...that did affect our nation in a profound way.

I fault them slightly for not reaching the conclusion before the actions, but for lying after the fact, it just illustrates how little we can trust anything coming from our government.

And that they have hog tied the press, the congress and the public under the guise of patriotism, is just plain sad and scary.

*steps off soapbox*

Thanks, gang, I needed to vent.

And Woo Hoo, Hostboard is back!

[erisesoteric]

Being much more paranoid than you, Asis, I'm willing to go further.

Government needs an enemy to keep itself in power. The easiest way to unite a group of disparate people is to give them a common enemy. Russia fell, Hussein is laughable. Osama has potential. Osama, especially after 9/11 is scary.

Of course, if it were a conspiracy, and they were THAT good, we'd never see evidence of it, right? So it must be incompentence.

The question is, are you willing to believe that our government is willing to sacrifice THAT many people in order to maintain the status quo.

I'm not sure either way, but I'm afraid that I think the answer is yes, they are willing, yes, they are able.

Did they do it?

I'm afraid I can't answer that.

[AsIs]

Sort of like FDR let the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor...

I wouldn't say that our govt wouldn't be willing to sacrifice people to unite the country and obfuscate the current President's flaws, but I think even the most jaded, greedy politian wouldn't be willing to sacrifice that many people.

Did they let it happen on their watch. Yup. Did they know it would be that bad, that horrific? Nope. For one thing, if they did, they would have had a better plan in place once it happened. They could have grabbed much more power than they did, not for lack of effort tho.

[3peanuts]

I read an interview on an Italian newspaper time ago.
The journalist was interviewing Chomsky (wish the spelling is correct) during the Porto Alegre Forum. When asked about 11th Sep he answered that not only U.S. Gov was perfectly aware of what was going to happen, but that there was a POLITICAL will to use the tragedy to have a motive for a long desired war and to gain the approvement of public opinion.

When I read those words, I looked my girlfriend's eyes with a face like this [img]eek.gif[/img]
(her face was [img]rolleyes.gif[/img] ).

I told myself it was just an opinion, something to read but not to care about more than necessary.

Now I am reconsidering my position.
And my face goes [img]graemlins/cry.gif[/img]

[JaceSan]

I think they (US intel.) knew that something big was going to happen, and may have known about suicidal plane hijackings being a possibility. They most certainly knew that bin Laden & Co. were training in Afghanistan.

I find it hard to believe that they knew exactly when and where the attacks of 9/11 were going to take place. Am I being incredibly naive?

[erisesoteric]

I don't know about Republican power grabs, but how many laws have been scribbled up since the attacks? How many "War against terrorism" stuff have we been hearing as justification for restriction of our rights?

[AsIs]

Nah, I don't think you are naive Jace. If anything, they might have had intell that suggested these terrorists would attack military installations, not civilian ones. But if they had really really done thier homework on terrorism they would have been better prepared for civilian terrorism. Look at Israel, last I looked Pizza places and supermarkets were civilian, it wasn't a great leap of faith that they would go after high body counts.

Re: power grab, yeah, in the name of patriotism the Dems fell asleep at the wheel and we have lost a lot of rights. Blame the press a bit on this as well and credit the far right with being shameless and using tragedy to further a agenda.

But power, real power, they missed out on. They had a chance to really, really unite a world. The tragedy itself was enough to do that for several months. But our dubious leadership has missed the boat on making it stick. Now many countries just go yeah, yeah and do what they want anyway.

We chose bombing the hell out of Afganistan for peace in the Middle East. There was a excellent chance to achieve that for two weeks after the tragedy. I am not a pacifist, but if we had chosen peace over war, we could have made a real difference in that region. But war boosts a President's popularity more than anything else.

[AsIs]

Terrorism is not by definition a war. In this country at least Congress must declare war, the President doesn't have that power. Uh, unless something so horrific happens that the country enmass let's him declare war. *sigh*

But that aside, terrorism is very different than war. War is about the taking of lands. Terrorism is about ideology and the taking of souls. War, you go after strategic targets, terrorism, you go after the highest body counts. These are all generalities, but I believe one of the biggest problems we have in this country is that we really don't understand terrorism.

We are just starting to understand terrorism. Homegrown and foreign born. In a very real sense, the school shootings and office shootings we are seeing are closely linked to terrorism, but the difference is that is individual terrorism vs. organized terrorism. Both have similar effects. Schools, workplaces are no longer safe.

But still, our instances of terrorism, 9/11 aside pale in comparison with the Middle East. We don't know what it feels like to take our lives in our hands getting on a bus, going for pizza, standing on the street. It is close to a daily occurance that someone sets off a bomb in that tiny country. We take for granted the relative safety we have here. We still do. We are arrogant enough to think we can defeat terrorism and win a shadow war.

We could defeat terrorism, the same way we could eliminate homelessness. Drastically reduce drug abuse and teen pregnancies. But all would take social responsibility and compassion, something we don't really have in abundance. *I work for my money, why can't that bum!* *My girls arn't even allowed to look at boys!*

You can't fix a problem by saying it should be fixed. You can't fix a problem by treating it's symptoms. You have to fix the underlying causes to fix problems. Take away desparation and hopelessness and you can fix most of these problems, but that takes giving something of what you have. And that goes against captialism.

We are reaching the end of the viability of capitalism and that is very damn scary. The problem with the rich having most of the money is that it takes that money out of circulation. Depressing the economy on which capitalism is based. As the gap between have and have-not's grows, we will look less to the middle east for violence and see it more on our homesoil, homegrown. To be honest that scares me more that Al-Queda...

[Mibbitmaker]

Except that it was Al Quaida that declared this war (in 1996, no less!), and waged it; technically with the Tanzania bombings and the attack on the USS Cole (I admit I didn't see it as War at the time, but even then I knew an alive Osama bin Laden was too dangerous in this world), but in its most blatant form on 9/11.

I put the blame for the 9/11 snafu squarely on the intellegence agencies. I think it's wrong for the left to blame Bush, and just as wrong for the right to blame Clinton. The Dems showing cahones would be in their willingness to criticize Bush on lrgitimate stuff like ruining the environment (just like with school vouchers, I was thrilled to see the Alaska digging idea voted down in Congress). And the GOP DID exploit 9/11 for fundraising with that picture, and they should be ashamed. If Clinton tried that sort of thing, the republicans would run him out of town on a rail.

And I strongly criticize Ashcroft (and Bush by extention) for going against liberties in 9/11's wake. And Cheney recently sounding like Vietnam-era Nixon/Agnew was uncalled for. For the flag-shaking right as well as the peacenik left (the latter I'm usually with), this is NOT Vietnam.

[3peanuts]

The repressive mood in the air during those (and these, I think) days is something that still makes me feel very uneasy (or upset, choose the term that fits you).

I mean: where did Bin Laden take money to do what he did?

We are paying his war day after day. This consideration doesn't make B.L. a saint, but what about us? What about our Governments?