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Suppose Gore had won?

The Great Zaganza said:
Counterfactuals are always tricky. Maybe Gore would have stopped 9/11 ...
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Extremely unlikely. All of the pilot hijackers and several of the "muscle" hijackers were already in the country prior to the election. For all the blather about forewarnings, there really was very little that was actionable up top. You'd have to make unsupportable assumptions that folks lower down on the ladder (career people, not political appointees) would have made different decisions under a Gore administration than they did under Bush.
 
Brainster said:
Extremely unlikely. All of the pilot hijackers and several of the "muscle" hijackers were already in the country prior to the election. For all the blather about forewarnings, there really was very little that was actionable up top. You'd have to make unsupportable assumptions that folks lower down on the ladder (career people, not political appointees) would have made different decisions under a Gore administration than they did under Bush.
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That's probably true. But it's pretty clear that the CIA sat on information about the hijackers that the FBI might have been able to act on if they had seen it, and Gore, being much more of a believer in the idea of government than Bush, might have directed the two agencies to start working together.
By mid-summer of 2001, the CIA was repeatedly warning President George W. Bush and other White House officials that an Al-Qaeda attack was imminent. But Miller and Rossini say when they attempted to warn FBI headquarters that al-Mihdhar could be loose in the U.S., a CIA supervisor ordered them to remain silent.
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http://www.newsweek.com/saudi-arabia-911-cia-344693
 
9/11 could have been stopped easily. We had an FBI agent who found it suspicious that a Saudi national (or was it Egyptian?) was paying cash to learn to fly, but not land, commercial aircraft. An investigation that checked on all commercial airline flight schools would have turned up the other 3, and the plot would have been uncovered. All it took was someone high up to take it seriously.

Would a Gore administration treated this info differently? Who knows?

IXP
 
IXP said:
9/11 could have been stopped easily. We had an FBI agent who found it suspicious that a Saudi national (or was it Egyptian?) was paying cash to learn to fly, but not land, commercial aircraft. An investigation that checked on all commercial airline flight schools would have turned up the other 3, and the plot would have been uncovered. All it took was someone high up to take it seriously.

Would a Gore administration treated this info differently? Who knows?

IXP
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What stopped the plot from being uncovered was the internal politics of the FBI. The team in New York that was focused on Al Qaeda had been taken out of the loop and was no longer receiving information on suspected Al Qaeda agents. The leader of that team was forced out of the FBI due to a mistake handling classified documents. That mistake had been leaked to the press to force the resignation by an FBI insider who apparently put personal rivalries above the needs of the nation.

If Al Gore had been elected, more emphasis would have been placed on anti terrorism investigations. That may have helped keep the New York office in the loop. It may not have kept the FBI agents in Washington from dismissing the MN findings so easily and never forwarding them to the task force investigating Al Qaeda. That seemed to be based on turf wars and sexism.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
Counterfactuals are always tricky. Maybe Gore would have stopped 9/11 ...

But in any case, the candidate who won the popular vote would have won the presidency, and SCOTUS wouldn't have the taint of having picked the one they like better...
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And it is a long remembered and foul taint indeed. I am just very happy that the Florida female slime who helped engineer it got nothing out of it and turned into a figure of scorn - even among the foul brood that had supported her. And dropped her like a rancid cheese soon after!!!!!!!
 
fuelair said:
And off to hell for those who decided the way of the fool Bush!!!
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and Katherine Harris who was well repaid by the slime republickers for her help in stealing the election. She got less vile treatment than she deserved, but it was grand that it came from the foul things she helped steal the election.

But, then, when you play with ****, you get covered in it!! Keep eating it wherever you are!!!!!!!
 
IXP said:
9/11 could have been stopped easily. We had an FBI agent who found it suspicious that a Saudi national (or was it Egyptian?) was paying cash to learn to fly, but not land, commercial aircraft. An investigation that checked on all commercial airline flight schools would have turned up the other 3, and the plot would have been uncovered. All it took was someone high up to take it seriously.

Would a Gore administration treated this info differently? Who knows?

IXP
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You really think that this FBI agent had a line to people above the Director of the FBI?
 
Newtons Bit said:
You really think that this FBI agent had a line to people above the Director of the FBI?
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It's at least possible that a technologically oriented President who encouraged interagency communication might have inspired lower-level officials to play together better. And it's inconceivable to me that a President Gore would have ignored a report from the CIA titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S."
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2004/04/condi_lousy.html
 
Personally I thought of Al Gore as a bit of a twit, but his vice president definitely wouldn't be Dick Cheney. Someone profited from the massive logistical support (though not massive enough, apparently) needed to wage such a far-flung, relatively unsupported (by allies) war.
 
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