Where have you read them?
The unclassified versions online; I don't recall the website at the moment, but I will endeavor to locate it. It will have to wait until I'm at home, however.
This was being done. On a fairly constant basis. Or did you forget the 70+ investigations by the FBI into terrorism, or the Al Qaeda investigative cell of the FBI? What do you think they did?
2. Harden border secutiry
3. Hardn airplane security
4. Toughen airport security
5. Toughen cockpit doors
Ah hindsight... the preeminent weapon of the twoofer.
Newsflash: If we had done ANY of these PRIOR to 9/11 there would have been a giant uproar throughout the country. I actually agree with you on this, mjd (whoa, there's a shocker) that these should have been in place regardless of any threat, but you'd find that I'm in a distinct minority if you could go back in time and poll people prior to 9/11 about these measures. You might recall that the TSA didn't even EXIST prior to 9/11; security measures were undertaken by the airlines themselves or the individual airports. It wasn't federally run, to my understanding. I might be wrong; I suppose the FAA could have been nominally in charge of it, but regardless I HIGHLY doubt anyone would have stood for the level of security we have now in our airports back then without a darn good reason, and the nebulous warnings received by the intel community weren't enough.
6. Kill OBL when offered/have him handed over when offered
7. Make sure NORAD is on red alert,given 6th august.
just a few things. I have said all thse many times
Number six... yeah, that was possibly a mistake on our part, at least when it comes to killing him. Given what I know of the Taliban, I rather doubt the offer of turning him over was serious, however. Regardless, that one I can't fully disagree with; however, I don't believe that killing OBL would have stopped the 9/11 effort in its tracks. Al Qaeda is now and has always been a fairly "fragmented" group, and I'm of the opinion that OBL was not fully necessary to carrying out the plot. Even if we had killed OBL, Al Qaeda might very well have latched onto him as a martyr and become even more fanatically committed to carrying out the fatwas he issued against the US, and it might just as easily have turned out worse than it did.
As for number seven... what, EXACTLY, would that have accomplished, pray tell? NORAD's mission has always been focused outward, to air threats coming from overseas; how does this help deal with aircraft that have been hijacked WITHIN US borders? Not to mention, looking over the unclassified text of the 6th August PDB (located here:
http://www.agonist.org/annex/pdb.htm), I see nothing that pertains to NORAD's mission at the time and is certainly no excuse for placing them in FPCON Delta, a condition, I might add, which is never intended to be maintained for more than a week or two at a time, given the difficulty in carrying it out. (Note: Red alert, or Force Protection Condition Delta, can be defined on any military website; just do a search) Those sorts of conditions are never meant to be maintained for weeks at a time, which would have to have been done if they implemented it right after August 6th, as you would have liked.
Anything else? Because I have to be honest, that list you gave; it's pretty useless, except in hindsight, or was already being done. The only two any different are the last two, and even they are questionable in terms of their usefulness.
