_sabotage_ wrote:Ok, so what could the warnings have told him had he bothered to take note or follow up on them?
From CNN
President Bush's daily intelligence briefings in the weeks leading up to the September 11 terror attacks included a warning of the possibility that Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network would attempt to hijack a U.S.-based airliner, senior administration officials said Wednesday.
NYTimes
The White House said tonight that President Bush had been warned by American intelligence agencies in early August that Osama bin Laden was seeking to hijack aircraft but that the warnings did not contemplate the possibility that the hijackers would turn the planes into guided missiles for a terrorist attack.
As reported in the respected German daily Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung (FAZ) on Sept. 14, 2001 the German intelligence service, the BND, warned both the CIA and Israel that Middle Eastern terrorists were planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture.
In August 2000 French intelligence sources confirmed a man recently arrested in Boston by the FBI was an Islamic militant and a key member of Osama bin Laden s Al Qaeda network. The FBI knew the man had been taking flying lessons at the time of his arrest and was in possession of technical information on Boeing aircraft and flight manuals, as reported by Reuters on Sept. 13.
According to a story in Izveztia on Sept. 12, Russian intelligence warned the USG that as many as 25 suicide pilots were training for missions involving the crashing of airliners into important targets.
In an MSNBC interview on Sept. 15, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that he had ordered Russian intelligence to warn the USG in the strongest possible terms of imminent assaults on airports and government buildings before the attacks on Sept. 11.
CBS News, May 16, 2002:
“President Bush was told in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks that Osama bin Laden's terrorist network might hijack U.S. passenger planes - information which prompted the administration to issue an alert to federal agencies - but not the American public.”
“On July 5, 2001, according to a recent Washington Post article, the White House called together officials from a dozen federal agencies to give them a warning.
“‘Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon,’ the officials were told by the government's top counterterrorism official, Richard Clarke.
“Clarke considered the threat sufficiently important to direct every counterintelligence office to cancel vacations and get ready for immediate action, the Post reported.”
So it seems clear he knew that:
1. An attack was coming,
2. It involved planes.
3. It was soon.
Correction:
0. There were many intelligence reports from US and non-US agencies making a large variety of claims about a pending attack in the US and beyond; however, I cherry picked a few intelligence reports (without citing them) in order to provide my crafted vision of a fine line of intelligence reports that conform to my strongly held beliefs.
Therefore,
1. An attack was coming,
2. It involved planes.
3. It was soon.
But this what was happening from the decision-makers' viewpoint:
1. An attack may be coming.
2. It may involve planes.
3. It was likely to be soon--whenever that would be.
4. So,
presumably* resources were prioritized to deal this possible attack by having the relevant agencies handle it (NSA, CIA, FBI)---which unfortunately bungled it, thus contributing to the occurrence of 9-11, as The Looming Tower carefully explains.
*"Presumably" because I assume the executive ordered this to happen. Had he said, "Don't worry about it, all you employees of the state," then where's the smoking gun? Where are the CIA agents saying, "Gee, we could've stopped 9-11, but Bush told us not to"? (Because that never happened--unless we believe that all the individuals involved in government and in close enough proximity to this event could magically remain silent, and that no profit-seeking freelancer could penetrate this surreal cloud of secrecy).
Intelligence is not a crystal ball--no matter how hard you try to pound it into one.
You're viewing a scenario with the benefit of hindsight, and inappropriately applying that hindsight into the past by creating a phoney stream of select reports which confirm your viewpoint. That's not a good argument.
