Has anyone listened to the news this morning? The white house is now admitting that the CIA did notify them, in August, that Bin Laden had plans to hijack planes. This is certainly a change from the silly “Oh I’m so surprised, how could this have happened?” reaction they feigned, and expected us to swallow. Somehow they "forgot to mention this amidst all the hullabaloo in the past 8 months. Hmmmmm what else will eventually be revealed?
Hey numbnuts, do you know many credible terrorist threats per day the government received pre-Sept 11? I should have figured it would have been your dumb ass that would have come on here and said: “Oh yeah I bet they knew all about it.” Right.
Man, gotta’ love those armchair quarterbacks. Yeah, it was mentioned that Bin Laden’s gang might try to hijack planes (along with the 10,000 OTHER potential terrorist and national security threats brought to the President’s attention EVERY DAY). And that’s ALL that was brought to his attention – in no more detail than that. Oh, and this country has been after Bin Laden (albeit not aggressively enough until recently) for many years. Don’t believe me? Ask Bill Clinton. But the media is LOOOOVING the opportunity to write misleading headlines like, “BUSH KNEW!” No, he DIDN’T know, you fucking liars! STOP writing twisted, misleading stories! (And now the conspiracy theorists will all start to whirl in unison, until a loud buzz can be heard from the underground . . . . ) Some people need to grow up a whole lot.
I have a few things to say: Okay, fine, they may have had a tip about hijacking planes, but they didn’t know the date of it. Blaming the White House or the FBI for that is stupid, everyone can have great hinsight 20/20 if they want to. Also, this is getting so much attention because the fucking liberal left wing wants to look like the good guy…why you ask? Elections are coming and they want to put on a pretty face for the camera. God damn liberals…I like how they are trying to cause such a stir with those pictures that are being sold for the GOP fundraising too, such bullshit…oh okay, now the Dem’s want to be all high and mighty and pretend to care more about the constitution, huh? Whatever, if that were the case then they would have been a little more supportive of the gov’t when we were impeaching that scumbag Clinton during the whole Lewnisky thing…fucking liberals, so hypocritical. If anyone wants to challenge me I’m ready to debate.
I seriously doubt ‘they knew all about it’… but they seemed to know that Bin Laden was very powerful and tended to carry out his threats. Perhaps they should have taken it more seriously.
At the same time, thousands of planes take off every day in this country, if the CIA only knew 'planes would be hijacked' they wouldn't have benn able to do a whole lot anyway.
My point was and still is…this is the first time in 8 months that they have even admitted that they received any tips relating specifically to bin laden and hijacking planes…all along it was “How in the world could this possibly have happened??? We’re sooooooo surprised…blah blah blah” The change in tune after 8 months is whats interesting…
Get with the program…all politicians lie…we just have to wait till the trut(whatever it is) comes out.
I usually try to avoid insults on this board, but this time I will make an exception. You are a complete ass. Your utter stupidity boggles the mind. Have a nice day, moron.
Alright boys and girls, here is the poop from someone who has “been there”. If is likely that the CIA notified the White House of the possibility of a “hijacking” in August. They most likely told them of there was a chance of a hijacking in Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun and Jul too. Every morning the President gets a security briefing from the CIA, every day the White House recieves tons of paper work. So yes, someone has though up this scenario and presented to the White House. They have also though up and presented a thousand other scenarios too. How do I know? Because thats what I did for a living for years.
Lion, what would you have had the president do?
Using the following information, that terrorist may hijack a civilian aircraft in the US on any day at any time.
Now remember that the CIA and FBI really don’t talk that much. So that is the only information you can use. You don’t know where. You don’t know when. “What are you going to do hot shot?”
PS - Enjoy the “Sum of All Fears” in threaters soon.
Lion you once again astound my with your ignorance. Jesus man get a life. You have nothing better to do than search for holes in the sky then do us all a favor and try it from the bottem of the sea. Oh yeah and forget your scuba gear for us… hmmm.
Lion, I have to give you credit. You are always standing out there alone. I can’t tell if you are just playing Devil’s advocate for the sake of debate (I hope so) or if you really believe this drivel that you write (God help us). You are either very brave or very foolish. Guess what, I have heard that terrorists are planning to bomb shopping malls. I have also heard that terrorists are planning to attack embassies. I have also heard that terrorists are targeting oil refineries. I have heard that terrorists are trying to smuggle bombs into airports.
Are you starting to get the point? It doesn’t stop me from shopping. I continue to fly first class. When I go abroad, I always allow the American embassies to treat me to dinner. I always inspect my refineries. You need specificity. You need credible evidence. Not just rumors and threats. Yes, it’s difficult. Yes, we need to use more human intelligence abroad. Yes, this human intelligence may include criminals. No, we can’t shut down the airports for every threat. If we become paralyzed by each threat, we lose. Do not respond with something like Bush knew all about it and allowed the attack to occur for the sake of popularity. If you do, I hope you come down with a bad case of viral gastroenteritis. Do not respond that we should have tightened airport security because of these threats. We should have tightened security anyway regardless of threats. I try to anticipate each of your responses, but somehow you always manage to slink beneath my argument and come up with something slimy that I haven’t thought about.
Dank, you are my kind of person. I love a good, no-nonsense anti-Clintonite. I feel your pain. We had to suffer through eight years of corrupt government. However, the good people prevailed. Now we can trust our leaders. We know there will not be scandle. We know that President Bush sought the Presidency to do right. We know that he did not seed it for aggrandizement. Keep it up Dank. We are with you.
Just one thing to say to you Lion, you very ignorant!
I find it interesting that the point of the post was how “the nature and context of information changes” and the person in who posted gets attacked for [a]blaming Bush for knowing [b] commenting that the CIA/ FBI should respond immediately to every threat [c] just about everything else that could be considered a liberal conspiracy against the conservative order.
Whether or not you agree with Lion [and judging by the truly tragic amount of personal attacks I guess you don’t huh?] his point is valid - the nature of the information coming from the White House has changed. Forget all the other rhetoric and conspiracy bullshit you are all appearing to attach, it’s an accurate
re[presentation [now, how you “interpret” that changed message is something else entirely].
“If you do, I hope you come down with a bad case of viral gastroenteritis.” Ouch, trust me, that’s no fun.
I heard last night from a long service CT state trooper that every officer is on overtime July 4th because of the threat of an attack on a nuclear facility on that day. Happy 4th!!
“…the nature of the information coming from the White House has changed” What information has changed? That they knew 9-11 was going to happen? They didn’t. The nature of the memo has been known about for months. I’ve never seen the White House deny that hijackings were never a threat. By the way, these weren’t run of the mill hijackings. The plane were actually used as weapons. What lion is doing is taking a memo proposing a scenario, based on non specific info, that Osama might have terrorist hijack planes on a non specified date and using it to say that “Bush knew 9-11 would happen” Sorry, but the connection is not there. Did you honestly think the intelligence community doesn’t plan against hijackings? The problem is, the memo had nothing to go on. Nothing. It was vauge, non specific, and spoke of hijackings (remeber what we used to consdier hijackings). Sort of like the threats upon threats that come in day after day. Do you honestly think that was the only hijacking scenario they got in that month.
Some things in life are just inevitable, and everything happens for a reason. Sometimes we don 't know the reason. What is important is what we have learned? How many people can use the tragedy to remind them how short and precious life is? If that is one thing I can take away from it, or you, or anyone else, then it is certainly taking a horror and turning it in to a positive thing.
So Bush had a warning, how many warnings do you think we have had in the past? What was he supposed to do? These people brought down the WTC and four planes armed with fucking box cutters. There were no bombs and no guns. Preventing this attack was not as simple as watching for the sweaty arab guy on the plane! No matter how many warnings we get it will be impossable to stop every attack.
It really is amazing the amount of personal attacks that have been posted. The facts of the matter are…
After 9/11 when the govt adopted its surprised attitude we had our first discussion on this. I posted that I didn’t buy that they didn’t know anything about the attacks and everyone argued that of course they didn’t know. I postulated that the escalation of the retaliation to a full scale war on terror was based in part on many other factors including the desire to acquire a more secure position with respect to the oil in the middle east. I also posted that I suspected that the war on Afghanistan had been in the planning stages before 9/11 and that 9/11 happened conveniently as a launch point for the war.
I never said that bush knew that thousands would die and he ignored it for his own benefit. As it turns out…they did know more than they at first let on. It also turn out that the FBI had some of the facts and the CIA had some and they were not able to connect all the dots. Fine …that explanation makes sense to me. Don’t tell me that they didn’t know anything. They knew that ramsey yousef while in custody bragged of plans to crash planes in to the Eiffel tower and the CIA…the FBI knew that a large number of middle eastern men were enrolling in flight schools, they knew that mousawi(sp?) wanted to learn how to fly a commercial airline but not how to take of or land. They knew a lot of shit. Like I said their tune has changed.
Now we get warnings yellow days, green days whatever the fuck…now they can determine which threats are more credible than others?…did that magically happen overnight? Or course not so the argument about the number of threats really is just smoke given that they know which ones are more important than others. Nothing like this ever happened before so despite having all this info in their hand we were caught with our pants down. We need specificity? I guess we are all fucked then …unless we are lucky enough to have an attacker who is nice enough to tell us when and where he will attack , how, and faxes us pictures of his face.
Is the thing about the oil so far fetched? They govt would never exploit and opportunity like that? Whatefver… you may agree or disagree. Were they planning a war on Afghanistan(because it hosted binladen, or to liberate the poor afghanis to do good in the world???) before 9/11? We will see. Does the fact that I have the above views make me ignorant, stupid, a dumbass, mind boggling and a candidate for disease? Whatever… I’ve been called worse.
Also, think of it this way: We, as citizens, do not have a clue as to how many terrorist threats/tips we recieve on a DAILY basis. Now just imagine if the gov’t were to all of a sudden to propose that they are going to notify the public about every terrorist threat? What do you think would happen?? That would lead to the worst situation possible, everyone would just stay home and our nation would be paralyzed with fear, right? That would be exactly what these cowardly jihadists want, and we can’t let that happen. BTW thanks PumpkinPie for the vote of confidence, I never realized how much I hate Clinton until I got done with college and out in the real world(I went to a liberal arts college where everyone had to be totally PC and made me lose sight of my real political ideology), and nothing makes me happier than to see that someone shares atleast some of my beliefs. Another thing, this whole picture sale thing by the GOP is also being blown way out of proportion, don’t you agree? I mean, if this is such a “big” deal, then why didn’t the left wingers cause such an ordeal when Clinton and Gore were accepting MILLIONS from the Chinese?? I don’t see the dem’s pursuing that, do you? Also, if you want to blame the Bush administration for not protecting us from the terrorism on 9/11, don’t forget that the problem with these terrorist assholes began w/Bubba and his cabinet not taking action way back when…oh wait, I forgot, they bombed an aspirin factory…that really helped.
Lion, the intelligence community in this country and all the different agencies involved (CIA, FBI, NSA, etc.) are INCREDIBLY badly organized and their level of communication amongst one another is HORRID. There were many hints, as you’ve mentioned, as to what might have been in the works by Bin Laden’s gang (and some that you didn’t mention), but not enough to really point to what would ultimately happen on 9/11. Is it starting to look more and more like the intelligence community dropped the fucking ball? Yeah, I think so. However, would I go so far as to say to them (CIA, FBI, etc.), “You should’ve known?” No, I don’t think I’d go QUITE that far. Hindsight IS always 20/20, and their job is REAL hard. We couldn’t realistically expect Bush himself, with the 1,000 threats per day that he probably sees in his briefings every morning, to shut down all air traffic as soon as he heard about a nebulous hijacking threat, now could we? Did it turn out, as we’re learning now, that Bush WAS planning an all-out assault on Al-Qaeda prior to 9/11? Yup. He got the preliminary plans for that on SEPTEMBER 9TH, but hadn’t actually had time to review them and sign off on them before 9/11 happened. I, for one, say “BRAVO” to him having been planning to destroy Al-Qaeda even before all of this happened!!! It’s something, by the way, that Clinton should have been MUCH, MUCH more ballsey and proactive in doing, especially after the embassy bombings in Africa and the USS Cole incident! I guess that history has proven the Bush administration’s foresight RIGHT, albeit they weren’t quite quick enough.