Many people knew something was cooking and that airliners were going to be used. The Phoenix memos prove that. They just didn't take the simple precautions that would have prevented those acts of terror.
Well, thank God we've learned from our mistakes and we now strip search granny at the airport while allowing anyone to stroll across the southern border. /s
Our government had just come off the Clinton Rock Star train where all security departments were in an state of the noncompliant Gorlick/Clinton/Reno/Albright WALL - no one would take the fall - certainly not Sandy Berger. Gore's refusal to give up and admit defeat left the country in limbo for far too long. The Bush administration was not up and running and when it did take over, too many Clinton people were left in key positions and continued to obstruct to save their sorry rears. America took last place as Al Gore would have them do anyway had he won.
Give me a break. That coulda - woulda - shouda thinking is worse than useless. Hindsight being 20/20. And what precautions could have been taken, that Americans would have submitted to?
Yeah, Kathleen Parker wrote about what such "precautions", taken in a pre-9/11 world, would have gotten us:
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New York — President-elect John F. Kerry's rise to the nation's highest office came as little surprise following almost four years of remonstrations against President George W. Bush for his bizarre attack on the defenseless people of Afghanistan.
Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, was the right man for a nation outraged by the Bush administration's pre-emptive war, which, it now seems clear, was based on highly speculative intelligence that Saudi Arabian-born terrorist Osama bin Laden was planning an attack on the U.S.
Absent absolute proof of such an imminent attack, Bush's Sept. 10 bombing of Afghanistan earned him international condemnation and, in all likelihood, an indictment in coming weeks. United Nations (U.N.) Secretary-General Kofi Annan, appearing last night on Larry King Live, said the U.N.'s International Criminal Tribunal likely would bring charges of genocide against the president.
Bush also faces federal charges at home for his baseless arrest of 19 foreign nationals, many of them native Saudis, whose "crime" was attending American flight schools. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has joined the American Civil Liberties Union in a joint suit against both Bush and former Attorney General John Ashcroft, charging racial profiling, unlawful arrest, and illegal search and seizure.
Kerry's campaign mantra - "You go to war because you have to, not because you want to" - clearly resonated with Americans as they tried to make sense of Bush's September 10 attack on Afghanistan. Neither the president, nor National Security Adviser Dr. Condoleezza Rice convincingly defended their actions during the recent "9/10 Commission" hearings, which Congress ordered in response to public outcry.
The commission's purpose was to try to determine what compelled the president to launch a war against Afghanistan. What kind of intelligence suggested that such an act was justified?
The main target of the attack was bin Laden, friend to Afghanistan's brutal Taliban regime, as well as al Qaeda training camps in that war-ravaged nation. Al Qaeda, an international terrorist network, has been blamed for numerous attacks on U.S. interests, including the USS Cole bombing, which killed 17 sailors.
Even though Bush's military campaign was successful in ending the oppressive Taliban regime, bin Laden apparently escaped and al Qaeda continues to flourish.
Some intelligence sources speculate that bin Laden's operatives may be trying to secure weapons of mass destruction (WMD) from Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Even though Saddam continues to send money to the families of Palestinian terrorists and is believed to have programs for developing WMD, Kerry says he is committed to containing Saddam through continued sanctions and the U.N. oil-for-food program.
In any case, experts say that intelligence about Saddam's WMD program are just as speculative as was the intelligence that prompted Bush to attack Afghanistan. The man credited with sounding the alarm on bin Laden and al Qaeda was Richard Clarke, a counterterrorism expert who has served four presidents, including Ronald Reagan, George H. Bush and William Jefferson Clinton.
In a January 25 memo to Dr. Rice, for instance, Clarke urged immediate attention to several items of national security interest: the Northern Alliance, covert aid, a significant new '02 budget authority to help fight al Qaeda, and a response to the USS Cole.
At Rice's and Clarke's urging, Bush called a meeting of principals and, after "connecting the dots," decided to wage war against Afghanistan. What did the dots say? Not much, in retrospect. Apparently, the president decided to bomb a benign country on the basis of "chatter" that hinted at "something big."
With no other details on the "big," and by weaving together random bits of information from a variety of questionable sources, Bush and company decided that 19 fundamentalist Muslim fanatics would fly airplanes into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon on 9/11.
Under questioning by the "9/10 Commission," Clarke denied that his memo was anything more than a historical overview with a "set of ideas and a paper, mostly." The bi-partisan commission concluded, therefore, that Bush's "dot-connecting" had destroyed American credibility and subjected the U.S. to increasing hostility in the Arab-Muslim world.
Last week, Saddam Hussein and Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat joined French and German leaders in condemning Bush and urging American voters to cast their ballots for regime change in the U.S. Kerry was the clear response to that call.
In a flourish of irony and the spirit of bon vivant for which president-elect is widely known, Kerry gave his acceptance speech from Windows on the World, the elegant restaurant atop the World Trade Center's Tower One.
Please give me some simple realistic examples....that would have stopped 9-11.