Could 'Second-Guessers' Have Prevented 9/11?

The Chicago Sun-Times ^ | March 29, 2003 | Dennis Byrne

[bolobaby]

Bravo. Oh, God. Bravo. Excellent. What else can be said?

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

See this:

"Rate the 9/11 Commission so far" ( Poll needing attention Freepers )

[oceanview]

one good argument I use on Dem people I know:

- If Gore were elected president, would he have been able to stop 9/11? most people say NO (even the Dems are honest about this).

- If Bush 41 and Dole had served Clinton's two terms, could that have stopped 9/11? On that one, even the Dems are willing to muster a reluctant MAYBE.

case closed.

[EQAndyBuzz]

Bush would have done something. And he would have been criticized by the ACLU for violating peoples rights by creating long lines at airports. The RAT Senate would have gone ballistic and the NYSlimes would have written an editorial.

Newsweek, Time and the other liberal rags would have had Bush's picture on the cover with the headline, "FACIST?" Network news would have ended all regular coverage to bring this to the American people. There would be a congressional investigation into what Bush did to prevent the attacks.

Nations around the world would condemn our foreign policies and demand that we change our leadership to become more inline with the UN.

So instead, you have eight years of Clinto that did nothing and what happens? See above.

[Bush Cheney]

This whole subject is moot in my opinion. Just about every major disaster could have been prevented in one form or another. The first WTC could have been prevented. OKC could have been prevented. WW1, WWII could have been prevented. Unless you have a genie in a bottle, you have know way of knowing these things are going to happen. Unless, of course, you take drastic measures to prevent them in the first place. Nobody thought that a passenger airliner had to be a flying tank. Taking appropriate prevention and having the insight to know that terrorists may have been trying to gain entry into the cockpits would have been a good first step. But these sort of things have to sift their way through congress first. IMO, congress is the biggest blame for all this, because most of the time they can't get anything done unless there is money or a bribe involved.

[FRgal4u]

xcllnt article -

before 9/11 - do any of these finger pointing critics would allow a pre-emptive attack on the taliban? an attack w/o UN approval? an attack w/o congressional approval? an attack w/o any allies?

Had Bush attacked the taliban in March 2001, and we got 9/11 still, how many of the "blame America first" crowd will come out and say, see, Bush is at fault, he should not have attacked the taliban, and now everybody hate us because we act over Afghan.

Look at the current situation about the Iraqi war, these media critics still find it difficult to swallow the fact that the war is just (with 17 UN resolution, congressional votes, 36 nations actively participating, clear removal of Saddam as a threat ever!) in the post 9/11 world. Can you imagine what all the folks will write and "b*tch" about before 9/11 for all the measures in the patriot act, airport checks blah blah.

This is the kind of offense the Bush team must make aggressively, right here right now. Playing defense is fine, but playing offense is how will ultimately win this game.

The president should make a major speech on this issue, by pass the media filter, do it while he has 57% approval on his handling of WOT. He can't afford to wait because I fear
tthe media elite will try all the tricks to get the approval numbers down.

jmho.

[dmz]

Well, to look at it another way, and I'm sure to take a few body blows for suggesting this, but here goes anyway.

Our government has told us that we have averted terrorist attacks since 911 because of the high level of attention the terrorists are getting.

It stands to reason that some of the averted attacks were beyond the planning stage and into the operational stage.

Therefore, it also stands to reason that 911 could have been averted with the same amount of attention before those attacks that we now are giving the terrorists.

Logic, like hindsight, seems to be 20/20. If only we'd known that we needed to pay that much attention to them, eh?

[vpintheak]

This whole commission is a waste of time and money. Everyone knows that the reason 911 happened is because of an evil bastard, and maybe our intelligence wasn't up to snuff. All this commission is looking like is an attempt to assign blame. Everyone should take responsibility and we should move on and kill the remaining cowardly murderers that are left.

[vpintheak]

This whole commission is a waste of time and money. Everyone knows that the reason 911 happened is because of an evil bastard, and maybe our intelligence wasn't up to snuff. All this commission is looking like is an attempt to assign blame. Everyone should take responsibility and we should move on and kill the remaining cowardly murderers that are left.

[grania]

I agree with you that nothing was going to stop planes from being smashed into buildings until planes were actually smashed into buildings.

That being said, I was shocked that these non-citizens could get on the planes without a background check. Besides that, there was an awful lot of squelched talk about the possibility that TWA 801 (?) had been shot down by terrorists. People were removed from even this site for trying to demonstrate that was a likely scenerio.

I don't see how you can blame either administration or political party, though. "The people got fat and lazy" and all of that.

[FRgal4u]

you have a point, but the key is, will the public, the aclu crowd, the media critics will even allow the kind of measures we have today pre-9/11? Even if we know an attack is coming on 9/11, I doubt anyone would agree the measures we are taking now without any kind of major public outcry. Remember the big complain on air travelling pre 9/11 were delays.. image we have to screen everybody's shoes just because there are "potential intel" report of an attack is coming?

hindsight is 20/20. Judging from the media reaction now on the 9/11 commission and the critics on the Iraqi war, I fear at least 40% of this country still don't get it. Maybe a biological 9/11 or worse will wake them up.

[AngieGOP]

The media and liberals have calling Bush and Ashcroft fascists since the Patriot Act went into effect. You are correct in your assessment that the media/liberals would have raised holy hell if anything along those lines would have gone into effect prior to 9/11.

[sonofatpatcher2]

I'm still waiting for Dick Clarke to say he is sorry for Pearl Harbor and the sinking of the Titantic...

[iopscusa]

I think that if there is a guilty party (for 9/11)the first one is the former President and his need to keep the issue of Terrorism out of sight for his own survival in office.
And the second guilty party is the Gore campaigns refusal to accept defeat, thus delaying the new administration in taking office.
The third guilty party is the Congress for striping our intelligence and military services of key abilities and resources.

[tessalu]

I think that probably very few Americans understood the evil and the hatred of Islam for all men not of their ilk.
I certainly did not understand then that there could be men so evil as the 19 suicide bombers who flew the planes into the buildings. For this reason, I am not going to place the blame for this on either the Clinton Adminstration or the Bush Adminstration.

The Islamics are laughing as we, here in America, try to pin the blame for this on someone here. Obiously, both Adminstrations, let the suicide bombers into this country, which should never have happened. All of the terror has been caused by Islamics, so put the blame where is belongs, and not on each other.

In the face of this evil, and in face of the hatred for our nation and it's people, we need to stand united, bound by our common past and our great love for our country.

God bless America!

[bolobaby]

Dirty bomb... NYC... not too many casualties, but it makes the place unlivable for the next 50 years. That might open some eyes when the liberal elites get ousted permanently from one of their roosts.

The only scary question is: where do they relocate to???

[Sender]

You're right, even if Bush had a document stating that airline hijackings were planned to fly into buildings during that timeframe, the only way he could have tried to prevent them would have been to implement draconian security in advance of 9/11...and the public would NOT have accepted that. No way. Unfortunately, experiencing the horror of 9/11 or another terrorist attack on US soil was the only way the public ever would tolerate the kind of security that could have prevented it in the first place.

All these liberals calling for Bush's head would have gone positively ballistic if Bush or Ashcroft had proposed Muslim profiling or tweezer searches or email snooping in the absence of 9/11. They would have called Bush a fascist, or maybe compared him to Hitler! Oh, that's right, they did anyway.

[FRgal4u]

holy crap...if a dirty bomb goes kaboom in nyc, it probably won't kill anyone, but imagine the panic. I bet those media chickens will cry in a fetal position and blaming everything on Bush. I still remember those media chickens were so "scared" by any tiny grains of white powder immediately after the anthrax incidents.

Seriously, the media elite is making me sick to the bone, and I doubt these folks will relent in one way or another. Who knows how they react if we get hit again, but boy, I don't even want to think.

[Milligan]

Who killed 3,000 people? Terrorist. How many minutes did it take to commandeer those jets?