True words, Pinch. How many of you have ever seen a REAL Intelligence Report? I suspect, not many. There is a ton of information that comes in "across the wires" and some of it is quite scary. It has to be ACTIONABLE or it's just taken as a "ho hum" by virtually everyone. It's not an easy job by any means and looking for a "scapegoat" is counter productive, IMHO.
Moderated Legitimate 9/11 Questions
- Thread starter T.A.M.
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True words, Pinch. How many of you have ever seen a REAL Intelligence Report? I suspect, not many. There is a ton of information that comes in "across the wires" and some of it is quite scary. It has to be ACTIONABLE or it's just taken as a "ho hum" by virtually everyone. It's not an easy job by any means and looking for a "scapegoat" is counter productive, IMHO.
Bin Laden's bodyguard identified them to Ali Soufan.
TexasJack
Penultimate Amazing
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If the FBI and the CIA were able to be on the same page, there would have been no attacks, end of story. "Perfect Soldiers" and "The Looming Tower" are important reads. Hindsight is 20/20, and I agree with Reheat that the feeling at the time is that it could never happen, so security was not on its toes at the airports, etc.
Improvements and lessons have been learned, and thankfully, knock on wood, the US has not been attacked since.
Improvements and lessons have been learned, and thankfully, knock on wood, the US has not been attacked since.
BigAl
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The FBI, the CIA and the NSA had leads on many of them in the summer of 2001. Read Spying Blind and Amy Zegart. In the summer of 2002 I heard a presentation by a private investigator with good connections to the Three-Letter-Agencies who described how they broke the case in minutes from the credit cards used to buy the tickets and expanded the case very quickly from there.
Not preventing at least some of the hijackings took a special kind of incompetency.
Trick question?
They flew on planes and were seen at the airport; they left a trail just like Tim McVeigh.
I saw them on an airport camera.
Are you serous? This is easy to do. The crew made phone calls and identified who the terrorist were. OOPS, that was a secret...
The FBI had thousand of agents working 911; do you think they can find people who boarded jets and left behind evidence of their existence. They figured it out quickly.
Not a good question.
BigAl
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True, but the FBI didn't even try. If one FBI analyst had looked at all 12 cases that were in files in 12 offices, it would have been obvious that someting important was in the works and FBI. NSA and CIA could have focused on it and probably prevented some of it.
It didn't happen.
He provided the first damning testimony. It was public and on live TV. It was a political blockbuster. He was the first one to say (to the 9/11 victims' families) "Your government failed you, I failed you." I think that was the memorable quote.
Rove's people then started spreading rumors that he was gay, an alcoholic, etc.
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BenBurch
Gatekeeper of The Left
When was the version of the PATRIOT act that was passed into law actually written?
I know somebody who drafted large parts of the original PATRIOT act, but that was totally replaced with a an entirely different law in a rather shady legislative move.
I know somebody who drafted large parts of the original PATRIOT act, but that was totally replaced with a an entirely different law in a rather shady legislative move.
"allow" is a tricky word here. Read Shenon's book. It is a real insight as to how the commission worked, didn't work, tried to work, was made not to work.
If the commission wanted to get either of them on the record, with no evoking of "Executive Privilege", then they had to do it that way. There was also tremendous pressure not to be seen as partisan either way in an election year, and setting the scope on Bush or Cheney would have been seen as such. As well, you had Zelikow working, to a degree, political interference.
Read the book...a real good read.
TAM
Audible Click
The gap in the plot
I just want to say that it's so nice to read a rational discussion in this forum. Thanks T.A.M. for starting this thread.
How do you keep this thread from drifting into the political forum?
If you find out how to solve 911 before it happen try to bottle that method and use it to prevent the next accident, robbery, murder, secret plot, or other things you can solve. That is the elixir which would earn the million dollar challenger right here on JREF.
If you find out how to solve 911 before it happen try to bottle that method and use it to prevent the next accident, robbery, murder, secret plot, or other things you can solve. That is the elixir which would earn the million dollar challenger right here on JREF.
ElMondoHummus
0.25 short of being half-witted
A very good question, interlinked to mine on the Saudi/Pakistani Connection. The commission was vague in this area. I do, to a degree, understand their rationale (that no one single source was responsible, neither with enough influence to be singled out), but I am not satisfied with it.
TAM
I thought much of it was untraceable. If we presume that Bin Laden used the normal sources of funding that he did for his Afghanistan efforts, then as I recall from books like Wright's Looming Tower (you read that one too, as I recall) much of that dough came from Islamic charities, and many were undocumented. If I remember things correctly, that is; I admit, I may be confusing my books, plus many of them I've only read once.
Of course, there's also something to be said about covering up some sources to avoid embarassing certain people. Another thing I recall from various books was that a few (not all; certainly not the oldest) of the Bin Laden brothers were sympathetic with OBL's activities, and funnelled him some of their own money.
The truth is probably a mix. I'll bet that some sources are well enough known to take to court if they were in the US, while others are inferred at circimstantially but pretty solidly, and others yet are merely guessed at. I'm fully willing to bet that it's some mix of that.
Mr.Herbert
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"allow" is a tricky word here. Read Shenon's book. It is a real insight as to how the commission worked, didn't work, tried to work, was made not to work.
If the commission wanted to get either of them on the record, with no evoking of "Executive Privilege", then they had to do it that way. There was also tremendous pressure not to be seen as partisan either way in an election year, and setting the scope on Bush or Cheney would have been seen as such. As well, you had Zelikow working, to a degree, political interference.
Read the book...a real good read.
TAM
Hi Tam,
Great thread! It's about time for this and a nice change.
I have to disagree with you to an extent regarding your above post. If the Commission was to push the issue to have W testify alone, he would have had to. Evoking his executive privilege in my opinion would have been political suicide. He would have been labeled as uncooperative.
He was questioned about this very subject at a press conference. If you haven't seen it, it is pretty comical:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMQ62P45Abc
So yes, this too is one question that I feel has yet to be answered to my satisfaction. I am interested in the book and will put it on my list.
ElMondoHummus
0.25 short of being half-witted
ULR:
I, of course, have no practical knowledge of rules/regulations/precautions wrt airline cockpit intrusions, however, I would say we need to examine the history of cockpit intrusions in the past.
Is there a history of cockpit intrusion, and if so for what purpose? Was it a common phenomenon, or something that was so rare as to not warrant any practical changes?
A good question...Do you think in a post 9/11 world, that the airlines have sufficiently addressed this issue?
TAM
I thought Mary Schiavo had brought this exact issue up during the Regan administration. I'll try and find some past mention of her and this topic, but I could have sworn that she was campaigning for secure cockpit doors during the 80s when all those flights were in the news for being hijacked by Palestinians and sympathizers to their side of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
True, it wasn't common, at least here in the US, but do we know what the mindset was for foreign carriers? I admit, that's somewhat drifting from topic, but I vaguely recall much heat verbally about airline safety against hijackings due to all those Middle Easterner-committed hijackings I mentioned above.
Also, again, I thought I recalled Schiavo excoriating the mindset of the industry and government at the time towards securing the cockpit. On the other hand, presuming I recall this correctly, I don't want to push a meme that she was right and everybody else was wrong; it'd be too easy but intellectually lazy for me to say that resistance to safety improvements was due to greed on the industry's part. There might - must, even - have been some legitimacy to whatever objections they raised.
And also, like you said:
Exactly true. It's possibilities like this that should get everybody thinking about what constitutes good safety measures, and distinguish that from what merely sounds good. From what I understand, the prevailing attitude is less to secure the plane itself, but to make sure hijackers don't get on it in the first place.
Yes. I very distinctly recall that the prevailing mindset back then was to sit back and let the terrorists take you wherever they were going, because once they were done railing at the cameras and got their butts to their destination, they were finished with you. So true, there were indications of the upcoming attacks, but I know that if you would've gathered a focus group of 100 people prior to 9/11 and gave them a list of possibilities, a 9/11-style attack would have rated the scariest but among the least likely possibilties. We are ALL susceptible to interpreting past performances as indicating future results, whether in investments, gambling, or predicting tragedies, and that's exactly what we did prior to September 11th.
I don't even know if I'd call it arrogant. More like overly comfortable. But, that's simply my opinion.
I think that is the trap we want to avoid. This thread was not started in order to come up with the missing solution that would have 100% prevented the attack. I think it is a place to discuss legitimate questions over what areas were lacking, which people, IF ANY, dropped the ball in such a way as to make them culpable, at least in part, for the failure to prevent the attacks.
The one area I think RedIbis and I agree, is that many in the Bush admin. got off easy in terms of termination of position/employment. Despite all that we know now about who dropped the ball, let alone what we may not know, no one that I can recall, in the Bush Admin, was fired for 9/11. Is that fair...is that appropriate...I dunno, but I think unlike 95% of the crap that gets discussed here, these questions actually have some merit.
Was this the true 9/11 Conspiracy. A conspiracy to cover the asses of those in power at the time of the attacks?
TAM
Yes, these thoughts (that you have expressed) were mentioned in Shenon's book as well, and I am sure in the end, the WH was thankful that the commission did not press the issue. I think it was a compromise that some were happy with (Kean, Hamilton, Zelikow, Bush Admin) and others less so (Goerlick, and many of the others).
TAM
Homeland Insurgency
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Did the said perpetrators really do it just because they hate our freedom?
Because of all of the vulnerabilities and varying scenarios, simply securing the cockpit prior to 9/11 without also implementing better security in other areas would have been pointless. Once someone was on an aircraft and determined to hijack it, getting into the cockpit pre-9/11 would likely have been successful no matter how secure it was.
The REAL problem with security was AIRPORT SECURITY or screening of passengers. It was a joke in the US!
Anyone who flew in either Europe or Asia in the pre-9/11 period knows exactly what I'm talking about. Security was much more realistic and much more thorough outside of the US.
Think about what the attitude of passengers would have been had REAL SECURITY been implemented in US Airports. People complain loudly (even now), so it's easy to imagine what the uproar would have been if stricter security measures had been implemented then.
As with any kind of security, it needs to be a multi-layered approach. Securing the cockpits was only one item out of many that needed to be done. Hopefully, it's a lot better now in all respects to ensure the safety of the flying public....
The REAL problem with security was AIRPORT SECURITY or screening of passengers. It was a joke in the US!
Anyone who flew in either Europe or Asia in the pre-9/11 period knows exactly what I'm talking about. Security was much more realistic and much more thorough outside of the US.
Think about what the attitude of passengers would have been had REAL SECURITY been implemented in US Airports. People complain loudly (even now), so it's easy to imagine what the uproar would have been if stricter security measures had been implemented then.
As with any kind of security, it needs to be a multi-layered approach. Securing the cockpits was only one item out of many that needed to be done. Hopefully, it's a lot better now in all respects to ensure the safety of the flying public....
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