OK MQ:
I have narrowed this down to three possibilities. Either you don’t actually read these things and just regurgitate the summaries that these kooky organizations send you, you are so emotionally excited because these things tend to agree with your pre-held conceptions that you convince yourself of their accuracy even if you do read them, or you are not smart enough to recognize the ridiculous assumptions that are necessary to jump from your facts to your conclusions. I’m leaning toward a mix of the first two, as you seem like a fairly intelligent person.
Firstly, as was pointed out above, one cannot take “the government” as a monolithic actor. Apply principles of public choice theory and transaction cost economics, along with a the understanding that individuals within the government will act in their own self interest. Agencies do not always work together. People within agencies do not always work together. And almost never does any one individual possess all the relevant information attributable to “the government,” especially at one time, and especially before any particular threat has become recognized as a clear and present danger of great magnitude.
Then consider the turnover between administrations, especially at the top positions. When one is beginning at a new position, it is impossible that that person will have the institutional knowledge of that institution within his or her own personal knowledge. Now consider that the turnover at the top level of management of governmental agencies between administrations is near 100%.
For an analogous example, I have been at my job for almost a year and a half now. I am staffed on various “client teams,” and am responsible for various aspects of servicing those clients. Yet I do not even begin to have a working knowledge of what is in our files for all of those clients – and I would not go looking stuff up and reading through the files for things unless I had some specific goal in mind (i.e. something I knew was there, was told was there, or knew must be there). If there is a memo in the file that warns of some contingent possibility of something going wrong that was placed there by another junior associate who is no longer with my firm, and who did not even immediately precede me, I will have no idea it is there. And our files do not even begin to compare in size and scope to the files of government agencies, although ours are better organized in general.
Now, let’s apply this background information to your list of facts concerning the Bush Administration and 9/11 – but I’ll add a few of my own. There had been turnover at the top of the FBI at least 3 times from the beginning of your timeline until the end. The turnover at the CIA had been greater. There had been three different administrations, with various heads and deputy heads of state, defense, etc., throughout the timeline. And the transitions between administrations were from various parties [Anyone remember the removal of the “W’s” from all the White House keyboards? Might it be conceivable that the leaving officers might not be ultra-enthusiastic of helping to transition their replacements?]. This is an aspect of a democratic republic that leads to great inefficiencies.
Now, a lot of the facts on your list consist of identifying that at various times intelligence officers had noted the possibility of airplane hijackings. What is not noted anywhere are all the other contingent possibilities that have been identified. I am quite certain the intelligence agencies have spent time thinking about all sorts of possibilities for terror attacks, from chemical agents in the water supply to suitcase bombs to bioengineered viruses. Many of these have never been carried out, but I’m certain that many have been considered by terrorist groups. I’m certain there exists evidence of terrorists attempting to obtain all sorts of nasty stuff for various nefarious purposes. The possibility of a hijacked airplane being used as a missle was just one among many dangers about which there was institutional knowledge of its possibility. Imputing that knowledge to any certain member of the administration is highly speculative, and very improbable. Not to mention that even if such factoid were contained in some brief presented at some fixed point in the past as a speculative possibility, one could easily imagine a person forgetting such fact.
Then there is your information concerning knowledge of an attack around the time of 9/11. Firstly, all the entries concerning information before “early September” are so ridiculous as to barely merit attention. For instance, the idea that, if the U.S. had been following a suspect outside the U.S. on August 29, 2001, had intercepted a certain communication and decoded it as a reference to a date, with no further context, they might have known this was a date for an attack. Please. All the others are similary preposterous. Even after that, there is much speculation as to the content of unreleased intelligence materials from various governments, the references to which are purposefully oblique.
However, the overall idea that it was known an attack might occur around that time would also not trouble me. While people are focusing upon evidence that there was some sort of warning of some sort of attack being planned that was linked to airline hijackings around this time, there does not seem to be further knowledge concerning the details of that attack – at least none that worked its way up the chain. This was already covered in the blow up concerning that FBI memorandum on the flight-school attendees, and further covered in testimony that investigations of certain suspects were dropped due to lack of evidence and civil liberty concerns. This was one of the reasons the Patriot Act was passed.
Finally, with regard to evidence of knowledge of an attack, this has to be taken in the context of the speculative nature of intelligence information. It is not the same as a scientific of courtroom fact. [As people should also consider when interpreting actions based on intelligence information concerning Saddam’s WMD’s, although in that case people apparently want to spin it the other way.] Surely, if one examined the record, there would be numerous previous occasions where there was evidence of a planned attack where nothing happened. Since the advent of the alert system, I can think of many times when we were put on alert and nothing happened, such as the speculation concerning attacks on a bridge. Conspiracy theorists like to apply 20/20 hindsight, but one must remember that those acting at the time in evaluating the attack would treat the ones that turned out to be false and the ones that turned out to be true in similar fashion, as the quality of the information from which they were working was similar.
I do not know why one would expect that the Bush Administration would shut down all airports based on the information it apparently had, or take other such action, when no one seemingly cares that this sort of preventative action had not occurred previously and has not occurred since, irrespective of any speculation concerning attacks. The only way to have prevented the attacks, based on the limited information that some sort of attack was planned in the general time frame would have been to shut down all flights to and from the U.S. for the days speculated – and then afterwards as well, whenever such a threat came up again.
So, to link the various threads of your conspiracy theory, you need to take the highly speculative and improbable fact that a certain, speculative contingency worry was in the specific knowledge of administration higher ups at the time in question, and then presume that these same people were also privy to the various pieces of lower-level information that were shown to have not been pushed up the chain, along with other pieces of information that may or may not have been known [including some ridiculous assumptions from your list – just go back and read the ones earliest in the timeline]. From there, you need to assume such pieces of information were put together, and that a decision was made to allow the attacks to procede in order that certain unnamed defense companies with unknown ties to administration officials [whether to the same individuals to whom the above knowledge is imputed is unclear] might benefit. And all the while keeping this conspiracy a secret – so all the various people with knowledge must have been in on it and not have been bothered by that whole treason thing.
Finally, as all your facts are apparently easy to access and pulled from the public record, why didn’t anyone put them together beforehand? Was it a vast conspiracy on the part of investigative journalists to give them a story to publish later? Imagine the prestige available for someone who put together all those facts ahead of time and then held off in order to publish later and prove to the world what had happened. Definitely a Pulitzer, and all the fame and money attached to uncovering such a story. I’m definitely seeing a possible journalist conspiracy here among the authors of your sources… Hmmm…
Repeat after me: Conspiracy theories are ridiculous.
