Bush Knew More About Bin Laden's Plans Than We Realized

[airdata]

They were running 'hijack' training drills at the same time as the actual hijacking. Clearly they were aware of a threat.

Or you can go tin foil hat and talk about how convenient it was that air defense was tied up at the one moment in the last 100 years that somebody attempts such a coordinated 'attack'.

 

[JKing106]

Uh, some of "we" knew most of this years ago. Anyone with a computer and time to kill could find any of this information. Those of us who don't rely on Fox, AM radio, and "conservative" blogs, that is.

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

Let's not forget less than two months prior AG Ashcroft was pulled off of commercial flights.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/07/26/national/main303601.shtml
I think it's pretty obvious that warning bells were starting to sound but the admin was too tone def to take any real action. See ignoring of Richard Clarke as well.

 

[blankslate]

This is why Vice President Cheney's lame attempts to try to get some credit for the killing of Bin Laden are disgusting.

At least President Bush has the common decency to not make very many public statements if any at all.

Vice President Cheney... what a douche.

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

Both Cheney and Rice have exposed themselves as either flaming self-aware hypocrites or deluded fools with their criticisms of Obama and his foreign policy. It's infuriating to me that anyone still gives two shits about what they have to say on the matter.

 

[MrColin]

Some people do, as this mass-fear tool is even in airports. It's incredible fvcking stupid for the reason you mentioned. It will never ever be on green or blue. Just another way to make sure we're all sufficiently scared.

I disagree. It could be downgraded to green after a nuclear holocaust.

 

[JEDIYoda]

This is dumb - nobody dropped the ball more than Clinton. Osama declared war on US in 1998. The camps were well known. Osama was offerd to Clinton and the offer was declined. Its well known Clinton's FBI was directed toward the "vast right wing conspiracy" because it had more political advanatge for the stain-maker. Incinerating women and kids like at Waco was more important than keeping track of Islamic lunatics yelling out loud "Here we come!!". Bush was a dope for keeping Clinton's CIA director ( the one who said Iraq WMD was a "slam dunk"). The Bush admin was a few months old. If they knew somehting then Clinton's feckless crew knew even more.

No your response is dumb..maybe even dumber.....
You post no links or proof....all you say are things like -- it`s well known...lolol

Oh..I am sorry -- you don`t need links or proof when it`s well known..lolol

 

[woolfe9999]

In the intelligence world, there is a lot of noise and a little signal. The trick is separating the signal from the noise because we don't have the resources to act on all the noise and we do not want to be alarmist all day, every day. It's easy after the fact to criticize the government for not recognizing what later turns out to be a true signal. Yet do we know how often various admins receive warnings of similar magnitude and urgency but do not act upon them because they do not deem them credible, and it turns out they really were just noise?

The real question is here, were these warnings, and the evidence which backed them up, sufficiently convincing that we should deem the Bush admin. negligent based on what they knew at the time, as opposed to what we know now? I think we're going to need to see the full spate of now classified documents before we can make that judgment. Some day the history books will write a verdict on this, once all the information is public and sufficient time has passed such that we can have critical distance and less partisanship and emotion to cloud our collective judgment. I prefer to wait until then.

On a side note, I don't think the Times should have published this story on 9/11. It's their right to do so, but I would have opted to publish it on a different day. In my view, 9/11 is for honoring the dead.

 

[blankslate]

This is dumb - nobody dropped the ball more than Clinton. Osama declared war on US in 1998. The camps were well known. Osama was offerd to Clinton and the offer was declined.

It's not as simple as you made it out to be....
http://www.infowars.com/saved pages/Prior_Knowledge/US_met_taliban.htm

The Clinton administration did not begin seriously pressing the Taliban for bin Laden's expulsion until the August 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, and injured 4,600.
The bombings were "a seminal moment," changing Washington's view of the Taliban, an administration official said. The attacks convinced U.S. policymakers that Omar was no longer simply interested in conquering Afghanistan, but that his protection was allowing bin Laden, a longtime friend, to engage in terrorist ventures abroad.

Publicly, the Taliban said they no longer knew where he was. Inderfurth now says the United States interpreted such statements "as an effort to evade their responsibility to turn him over."


Others, however, say the cryptic statements should have been interpreted differently. Bearden, for example, believes the Taliban more than once set up bin Laden for capture by the United States and communicated its intent by saying he was lost.


"Every time the Afghans said, 'He's lost again,' they are saying something. They are saying, 'He's no longer under our protection,' " Bearden said. "They thought they were signaling us subtly, and we don't do signals."

Why would the Taliban be cryptic when it came to this?


from the same article

Some Afghan experts argue that throughout the negotiations, the United States never recognized the Taliban need for aabroh, the Pashtu word for "face-saving formula." Officials never found a way to ease the Taliban's fear of embarrassment if it turned over a fellow Muslim to an "infidel" Western power.

I looked for the actual washington post link and found this page which has the article title but not the text of the article...


http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A3483-2001Oct28&notFound=true


odd.

 

[Matt1970]

That Bush knew more about Bin Laden isn't a surprise, but its also not proof of evil or incompetence. Hindsight is 20\20


Now that we know that 9-11 was a plan, we can go back through all the data and find references but its always been hard to find the real data within all the noise. Every day tons of people say they're going to blow up\destroy\ kill famous landmark\person. 95% they say it in jest. 4.9999999% of the time they're talking out of their ass. maybe .00000001% they actually mean it.

This. There are thousands of threats all the time. And this is a prime example:

How many times did we see the alert level get raised and nothing happen and now we are sick of looking at this thing. They don’t even show it on TV anymore.

Now we can all sit around in a circle jerk and blame Bush for what looks like evidence he ignored, and then have the same for Clinton, or we can look at what we all Ignored.

1993 the WTC were bombed. It proved they intended to act on their threats and even revealed one of the main targets they were after. We did basically nothing. There were also the 1998 U.S. embassies and in 2000 the USS Cole were attacked - we did very little.

After 1993 we should have been at war with al-Qaeda but because nobody died, we really didn't care that much.

 

[sandorski]

In the intelligence world, there is a lot of noise and a little signal. The trick is separating the signal from the noise because we don't have the resources to act on all the noise and we do not want to be alarmist all day, every day. It's easy after the fact to criticize the government for not recognizing what later turns out to be a true signal. Yet do we know how often various admins receive warnings of similar magnitude and urgency but do not act upon them because they do not deem them credible, and it turns out they really were just noise?

The real question is here, were these warnings, and the evidence which backed them up, sufficiently convincing that we should deem the Bush admin. negligent based on what they knew at the time, as opposed to what we know now? I think we're going to need to see the full spate of now classified documents before we can make that judgment. Some day the history books will write a verdict on this, once all the information is public and sufficient time has passed such that we can have critical distance and less partisanship and emotion to cloud our collective judgment. I prefer to wait until then.

On a side note, I don't think the Times should have published this story on 9/11. It's their right to do so, but I would have opted to publish it on a different day. In my view, 9/11 is for honoring the dead.

Speaking of which. Remember the arguments for DHS being made? As time goes on, it seems even the "Need" for DHS was based on a completely fabricated lie(s).