How many people would have to cover up Ignored Intelligence?

[beachnut]

Depends on what level it was ignored at.

Much of what low level analysts come up with is ignored, or appears to be ignored to them. We have the famous case of the FBI agents filing memos about strange people in flight schools to prove that. The people making the reports were upset, but were obviously used to being ignored.

The question really becomes "Can the CIA really depend on its lower-level career staff not to come forward if they had the smoking gun on 911 and had it spiked by a political appointee?"

You are paid to come forward; and if you thought some terrorist were going to cut throats, kill pilots, and take planes you would make it KNOWN. I would.

I have stopped stupid acts. If you KNEW 9/11 was going to happen, you could stop it yourself! Period. I do not care what level it was at, you could stop 9/11 if you had known the real details. Okay who knew? This leaves LIHOP down to LIHOPBOP

LIHOP By One Person - I know who it was! - UBL (he told us we were target many years ago)_

It looks like we ALL Let it Happen, WALIHOP, I have proof, UBL told us he was coming to kill…
I wonder why that Serb forgot to kill me when I was in Italy? I was told they could and may try to kill Americans. What happen? Why did the Serb forget to kill me? UBL told us he was going to kill Americans as he could; Why did you forget it?

 

[gumboot]

Let's imagine Bush and Cheney heard about this event coming, and indeed did know that a horrific and sudden attack would kill many thousands of civilians.

Are we still in staggering numbers here?

I hate to keep playing Devils Advocate, but I think a lot of that will be needed around here in the coming days.

Could the Commission still be in the dark? NORAD? CIA?

How many people are we saying here?

I've often argued that MIHOP requires a much bigger cover up than LIHOP, for the simple reason that in a MIHOP situation the Government has far less control over who might be exposed to the plot.

-Gumboot

 

[Jonnyclueless]

OK, my turn.
Who is this mystery person?

He looka like-a man.

 

[chillzero]

but...but....but... in the movies ... one lone interpreter would have heard the information, and not wanting another colleague to take the praise spoke alone to his team leader, who told him he was mistaken, and fobbed him off with some speech about not causing panic from an over-active imagination, so the interpreter guy takes a day off work and goes to visit the Whitehouse, and slips away from the tour to catch the POTUS in a rare moment alone - smelling roses in the garden, perhaps... and the POTUS has a nearby guard shoot the interpreter on the pretense that he is trespassing and just threatened the POTUS, who then walks away with the information on a slip of paper, which he later burns, smiling and rubbing his hands together with glee thinking about a new term in office over 3 years later due to all the oil he will not get because he can declare war on the terrorists because he knows their fiendish plan.

(but, because the good guys always win....)
Meanwhile, in a nearby city, the interpreter's girlfriend .. no, no... ex-wife.. it's always an ex-wife with unresolved emotional issues (and she'll most likely be Dylan Avery's sister, or cousin, so she can turn to him to reveal the dasterdly story to the masses afterward) ...is looking quizzically at her answering machine, trying to make sense of the message he left her as he drove to Washington.... etc etc...



Isn't life just like the movies?????

How so? Interested.

Perhaps a new thread?

 

[JMarshall]

but...but....but... in the movies ... one lone interpreter would have heard the information, and not wanting another colleague to take the praise spoke alone to his team leader, who told him he was mistaken, and fobbed him off with some speech about not causing panic from an over-active imagination, so the interpreter guy takes a day off work and goes to visit the Whitehouse, and slips away from the tour to catch the POTUS in a rare moment alone - smelling roses in the garden, perhaps... and the POTUS has a nearby guard shoot the interpreter on the pretense that he is trespassing and just threatened the POTUS, who then walks away with the information on a slip of paper, which he later burns, smiling and rubbing his hands together with glee thinking about a new term in office over 3 years later due to all the oil he will not get because he can declare war on the terrorists because he knows their fiendish plan.

(but, because the good guys always win....)
Meanwhile, in a nearby city, the interpreter's girlfriend .. no, no... ex-wife.. it's always an ex-wife with unresolved emotional issues (and she'll most likely be Dylan Avery's sister, or cousin, so she can turn to him to reveal the dasterdly story to the masses afterward) ...is looking quizzically at her answering machine, trying to make sense of the message he left her as he drove to Washington.... etc etc...

Espionage, murder, thrills, lost love, hmm, throw in some NC-17 sex scenes and you've got a smash hit! I wonder if Avery has thought of this one yet?

 

[DavidS]

The tip of the umbrella held a small, extremely small, very very small (Just to get my point across), dimpled sphere. The dimples of the sphere held Sarin, the tip acted like a syringe planting the sphere just under the surface of the skin, it would feel like nothing more than a bug bite.

Details, details... the poison used in that assassination was not Sarin, but ricin.
Sarin was used in the Tokyo subway attack.

 

[JMarshall]

Details, details... the poison used in that assassination was not Sarin, but ricin.
Sarin was used in the Tokyo subway attack.

Ah, right you are, too many poisonings in my head to remember all of them perfectly... I bow out of that one respectfully...

Espionage, murder, thrills, lost love, hmm, throw in some NC-17 sex scenes and you've got a smash hit! I wonder if Avery has thought of this one yet?

I just became enlightened... All of the conspiracies, Revolutionary War, Pearl Harbor, JFK, Watergate, Illuminati, Free Masons, John Lenon, Moon landing, 9/11, all of them to bring forth a NWO... Not New World Order, No Writers Organized, don't you see it was all planned out so that one day the movie industry would be free of the Writer's Guild! It all makes so much sense now!

 

[BenBurch]

You are paid to come forward; and if you thought some terrorist were going to cut throats, kill pilots, and take planes you would make it KNOWN. I would.

Exactimundo!

 

[Jonnyclueless]

Jack Ryan would never have let this happen.

 

[thesyntaxera]

In light of all the warnings that preceded the event I am left to wonder why nothing happened at all. Sure, you can explain away some of the ignorance as mishaps as I am sure some are. The question is how many warnings do you need to get before you start a plan of action?

If Bush really wanted to use terrorism as a pretext for war or some "sinister global agenda" why didn't he take advantage of all the intelligence beforehand and use it as spin fodder? He could have created the same climate before the attacks, prevented them, and then used the thwarted threat to push the agenda any way.

Also, where is the division line between handling a situation poorly and criminal negligence?

 

[LashL]

Jack Ryan would never have let this happen.

True, but NWO Kitty would have pretended to let it happen only to foil the tinhatters who would later argue that it did actually happen, even though it didn't, and would never, in a thousand years, have let it happen in such a way that he/she (have we determined the gender of NWO Kitty?) would ever be actually implicated in it.

NWO Kitty rocks. And rules.

 

[David Wong]

In light of all the warnings that preceded the event I am left to wonder why nothing happened at all. Sure, you can explain away some of the ignorance as mishaps as I am sure some are. The question is how many warnings do you need to get before you start a plan of action?

That sounds great, until you ask people to nail down what the plan would have been. People seem to think the "airliners as missiles" threat was the only one on the desk in 2001. It wasn't. Remember, the foreign threat story that dominated when Bush took office was the incident with the American spy plane and the Chinese pilot (now all but forgotten). You had North Korea out there, along with all sorts of stories about cyber-terrorism, etc.

Also, where is the division line between handling a situation poorly and criminal negligence?

There's a lot of people calling for that for Bill Clinton, for failing to act on the Al Qaeda threat for years before Bush took office. But you don't want that to become the standard. You'll have every wartime president up on trial. FDR because he didn't prevent Pearl Harbor, Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs... you don't want that. It's a bad way to govern.

 

[gumboot]

In light of all the warnings that preceded the event I am left to wonder why nothing happened at all. Sure, you can explain away some of the ignorance as mishaps as I am sure some are. The question is how many warnings do you need to get before you start a plan of action?

You have to look at the threats closely though. People are fond of citing Richard Clarke's claim that the system was "blinking red" in the months prior to 9/11. And yet the much coveted August 6 security briefing (which Clarke prepared) is not the motherlode that Conspiracy Theorists claim. For starters it's talking about a three year old threat. Secondly, it's vague to the point of uselessness. Thirdly, it suggests law enforcement are on top of it, and there's nothing really to worry about.

Essentially this "system blinking red" consisted of:

"Well three years ago this terrorist guy said he wanted to attack us, and we think he probably still wants to attack us, somehow, and the FBI's working on it."

I've read the memo. That's essentially what it says, as far as Al Qaeda goes. What "plan of action" is Bush, or the CIA, or FBI, or anyone else supposed to produce from that completely worthless piece of information?

-Gumboot

 

[Sabrina]

I could tell you what they came up with for a plan of action. It's called, "let's sit and wait until we have more concrete information to go on", or, alternately if you're into short and sweet titles, "Observe and Document".

The plain fact of the matter is that, in hindsight, this stuff is obvious; looking at it from a pre 9/11 perspective, however, not so much. Intel analysts can only make educated guesses at best, IMO (and I intend to BE one of them as a civilian and have in fact done intelligence analysis in the past for my unit, so you understand I can make that distinction), so going as far as calling it criminally negligent that they missed the signs means that you'd essentially be blaming every intel analyst for not having the power to read minds from thousands of miles away. If we were to find people in the government criminally negligent for failing to spot the connections, you'd end up imprisoning somewhere between a quarter to half of the intel analysts who worked with the information, not to mention their bosses all the way up the chain to the President most likely. Who has the time and ability to replace that many people fast enough to be able to do any good? It's prohibitive at best, insane at worst. No, the best course of action is to do exactly as the 9/11 Commission recommended, which is to make the effort to integrate the intelligence community so failures of communication (which contributed greatly to missing the connections) are minimized and agency interaction and information-sharing is maximized. Finding people criminally negligent, IMO, does nothing to help security efforts and EVERYTHING to harm it, as you are targeting the people who, up until that point, had been entirely successful in providing for the security of this country, and have been successful (so far) since in doing the same.

 

[thesyntaxera]

If we were to find people in the government criminally negligent for failing to spot the connections, you'd end up imprisoning somewhere between a quarter to half of the intel analysts who worked with the information, not to mention their bosses all the way up the chain to the President most likely.

Yes, yes...but what about on the day of the attacks? I know there was an investigation, but how does it pan out that so many aspects of our national defense were out to lunch on the same day and this series of crucial failures gets little or no indepth coverage...there was plenty of coverage of people attempting to cover their own A$$es at the top level. I realize that there were people held accountable in a sense, but to my knowledge there is no clear explanation available online or elsewhere as to the extent and reasoning behind the failures and who was responsible each step of the way.

So, to pose the question again, where is the line between criminal neglect and just plain old disregard? If they were waiting to see how it panned out that day, how long do you have to wait until it is considered criminal nelglect.

Do you think that if Bush and Cheney would have had a public hearing on the matter the idea of criminal neglect might have gotten more attention? I just seriously cannot fathom the level of incompetence that would be required to ignore all of the red flags that morning...it has to be monumental.

 

[Sabrina]

The red flags for just that morning? Could you name a few?

Let's not forget, we're talking about a span of about TWO HOURS here. Considering the odds, the response we did get was flat out astounding. The FAA landed over four thousand planes with no accidents or incidents within approximately five hours, and NORAD and the military had a plan and coverage of the airspace in place within six or seven. When you consider that the whole purpose of the attack was to surprise us and catch us with our pants down, that sort of response is more than astounding; it's monumental. In actuality, I don't believe there was any major negligence by any agency of the US Government ON THE DAY OF 9/11. If you want to argue negligence PRIOR to 9/11, I could debate that (although I wouldn't go so far as to call it CRIMINAL necessarily), but on the day of? Could you please elaborate on what exactly you think we were negligent about that day specifically? I'm honestly curious to know where this argument is coming from. Please and thank you.

 

[dudalb]

For anybody who has studied Pearl Harbor and the Warnings before the Japanese Attack, it is a case of deja vu all over again.
In both cases there was never a smoking gun that gave exact details of the attack..

 

[JMarshall]

For anybody who has studied Pearl Harbor and the Warnings before the Japanese Attack, it is a case of deja vu all over again.
In both cases there was never a smoking gun that gave exact details of the attack..

BINGO!

 

[BenBurch]

The red flags for just that morning? Could you name a few?

Well, in hindsight... IIRC, One of the plotters from the 1993 WTC bombing was to be sentenced that morning right next to the WTC plaza.

That maybe just possibly is the reason the hijackers chose that day.

And that would have been a good reason to increase security.

At the court house.

 

[Sabrina]

IIRC, there was some discussion about them choosing 9/11 because of the symbology of the numbers; 911 being our emergency code and all. But there was also speculation about there being no significance to the day at all; that they had a window of time to execute their attack in and simply happened to choose 9/11. Let's not forget, the flights they were on were regular flights, IIRC; they occurred on a fairly regular basis, so in reality, the hijackings could have occurred at any time after the hijackers deemed themselves trained enough to carry it out. But, of course, we have no evidence for any of this, since they're dead and we can't ask them their motivation for choosing that day. I'm still curious to know, though, what thesyntaxera saw as red flags that we should have noticed for that morning. Hope I get an answer soon, although I'm sure he's busy with life stuff, so no rush; the question will be here when he gets back.