9/11 Chair: Attack Was Preventable

Stating that 9/11 was unique, except that it was not averted despite various indications it was under way, is clearly false.

If you were in charge, what would you have done that was politically possible to do?

I agree with what you say. Terrorist hijacking airliners was know great revelation...and while using them as guided missiles would've been a change, there was still no specific details on targets or times. This was a known concern from as early as 1998 under Clinton and yet know major policy directives were ever initaited to deal with this possibility. In fact, Gore's own Airline Security Commission, formed after the explosion of TWA flight 800, ignored recommendations to improve airline security. And no further changes were even implimented after this new concern was brought to light.

If liberals think the actions in Iraq were preemptive, an attack on Afghanistan "prior" to 9/11 would've have certainly been described as reckless and a war-crime. And even if we look at the preemptive actions that would've been needed to stop this attack within America, the liberals would've been the first ones objecting to it. Can you imagine the outrage if Bush had grounded all airflights prior to 9/11, not knowing how long this policy would have to remain in effect?
Considering this was a known possibility since the late '90s...and no date or time was ever established, the expectations of an attack are nearly incalculable. What if Bush had decided to profile certain Arab-men between the ages of 18 and 35, singling them out for extra attention? Hell, we attempted to do this "after" 9/11 and Bush was met with resistance from every left-wing organization, claiming racism.

Even if every airport security screener was searching for weapons, boxcutters, prior to 9/11 weren't a prohibited item. The hypocrisy and inconsistency from the Left is just staggering. The truth is, those who despise the Patriot Act for its expanded governmental power, would've had to embrace some of its provisions if 9/11 was to be stopped. Prior to 9/11, FBI/CIA intel sharing, disputes over jurisdictional searches and inter-agency turf wars prevented the government from working together. Some of these changes never would've have happened "prior" to 9/11, since "after" 9/11 we still have many who object to it.

If liberals really want to get to the truth of why 9/11 happened, they need to look no further than their own political leaders who have incrimentally disabled he intelligence community in this country. From the Church (D) hearings in the 1970's up until Robert Torecelli's (D) policy of disengagement from "questionable contacts," the Democrats have deconstructed our intelligence services. Combine this with a systematic defunding of human resources and a simplistic reliance on "technology," and what you had/have is an America left defenseless against aggressor nations. It was only a matter of time before we paid the price for their incompetency.

It's also unfortunate, but living in a free-country allows those who would do us harm the ability to use our very freedoms against us. Hell, the Israeli's...a very small country, live everyday knowing they are going to be attacked and yet there isn't a lot they can do.

Sounds like another Joe Wilson

So, again, Hal1950, what's your opinion?

Hey Mr. Kean! You know what else was preventable? WWII, WWI, The Civil War, The Revolutionary War, etc, etc, etc. Everything could be preventable if you can foresee the future with enough time to change the course of events. Heck even your own life could have been prevented if your old man had the foresight to have worn a condom.
Hindsight is always 20/20/

We got hit with 9/11 because Clinton was no longer in place to coddle Yomama to keep the drug routes open...like in Bosnia and Afghanistan...or to hand over the USS Cole for revenge for Egyptair to procure Mubarak's help with those stalwart representatives of peace, the PLO...but he left a *legacy* of George Tenet, an Islamicized state department, a stacked court system, ie., he who owns judges rules...a whole sh*tload of middle management bureaucrats who owe Clinton whatever he asks for...the Rhodes Scholars the pig organized to oppose the War on Terror via A.N.S.W.E.R....and an undaunted bunch of Marxists in Congress who have turned this country into wormwood for the Madrassas loving Saudi Wahhabists and Marxist ideology.

YES IT COULD HAVE BEEN PREVENTED

Bill Clinton's refusal to accept Bin Laden's
Bill Clinton's refusal to accept Bin Laden's
Bill Clinton's refusal to accept Bin Laden's
Bill Clinton's refusal to accept Bin Laden's
Bill Clinton's refusal to accept Bin Laden's
Bill Clinton's refusal to accept Bin Laden's
Bill Clinton's refusal to accept Bin Laden's
Bill Clinton's refusal to accept Bin Laden's
Bill Clinton's refusal to accept Bin Laden's
Bill Clinton's refusal to accept Bin Laden's
Bill Clinton's refusal to accept Bin Laden's
Bill Clinton's refusal to accept Bin Laden's
Bill Clinton's refusal to accept Bin Laden's
Bill Clinton's refusal to accept Bin Laden's

Of course it was preventable. We could have armed pilots and sealed cockpits years ago.

Of course, people would have thought that was paranoid.

Coud'a, shoud'a, would'a. Hell, If, if ands or buts were candy and nuts, oh what a Merry Christmas we would have!

Thank's to Dandy Dan Meridith for that one!

Amen brother. Without airplanes millions of people would be alive today! And the folks who built steamships and railroads would still have their jobs.

BTW, I saw an article by one of the ususal leftist communlnists who made the points that the world would be better without the airplane since it led to nuking Japan. (the illogic of his getting there makes Rube Goldberg's designs look senisble.)

Yes, almost anything is "preventable" in hindsight Mr. Keane. Mr. Bush had only to ground all aircraft flying inside of and to & from the US on day 2 of his administration and then the flying of airliners would have been prevented. Of course terrorists could still have hijacked an airliner flying to south america and flew it to New York city or DC.

Sorry Don. (Dan=DON)

Pearl Harbor was preventable. If only people had put all the clues together and add up 2 and 2.

Many blame Roosevelt for allowing Pearl Harbor to happen.

Very well put.

http://search.yahoo.com/search?va=Breitweiser+victim+fund&ei=UTF-8&fr=my_bot&n=20&fl=0&x=wrb

A "mind-numbingly boring" propaganda film
A 9/11 widow reviews last night's Showtime film about President Bush's actions on and after that fateful morning.

By Kristen Breitweiser

Sept. 8, 2003 |

The film "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis," which premiered Sunday night on Showtime, is a mind-numbingly boring, revisionist, two-hour-long wish list of how 9/11 might have gone if we had real leaders in the current administration. This film is rated half of a fighter jet -- since that is about what we got for our nation's defense on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

Despite the title, the film only budgets approximately 10 minutes to the actual morning of 9/11. Most of the movie is spent cataloging the myriad cabinet-level debates as to whether to declare "war" against terrorism and how to effectively sell that to the American people.

It is understandable that so little time is actually devoted to the president's true actions on the morning of 9/11. Because to show the entire 23 minutes from 9:03 to 9:25 a.m., when President Bush, in reality, remained seated and listening to "second grade story-hour" while people like my husband were burning alive inside the World Trade Center towers, would run counter to Karl Rove's art direction and grand vision.

Remember the aircraft carrier photo-op? Bush is a man of action; in fact, he is an action hero. Except, of course, when it really counts, like in those early morning hours when this country was under attack and our Commander in Chief was drinking milk and eating cookies with second graders. Can you imagine one of those second-graders years from now when they are asked where they were on the morning of 9/11? They will simply say, "I was sitting with the President reading him a story."

Donahue Interviews
9/11 Widow Kristen Breitweiser
Gutsy and incisive performance from a woman with a mission

DONAHUE: Probably wanting to know what’s going on with Mom. That’s -
OK, so here you are. You know you’re not alone. Nothing anybody’s going to say is going to ever make you feel better. You got to hold up. You’ve got a daughter you got to worry about, all the rest.

But as the days go on-do I understand this, that-you know, and you start to put yourself together here, was it an anger that you felt?

BREITWEISER: I think what really initially started was I saw the picture of the president in, I think it was “Newsweek” or “Time” magazine, and I read the caption. And the caption said, you know, “Andy Card telling the president about the second plane.” And then I read that he proceeded to read for 25 minutes to the 2nd-graders. He was in a Sarasota school that morning for a reading program.
And I read it again, and I thought it was, you know, misreported. And it wasn’t, and I got upset. I said, you know, this nation was under attack. It was clear that we were under attack. Why didn’t the Secret Service whisk him out of that school? He was on live local television in Florida. The terrorists, you know, had been in Florida. I mean, we find out that out now. He was less than 10 miles from an airport.

NOW with Bill Moyers.
9/11 Widows Speak
9.12.03

"You have President Bush out there saying that he wants transparency and accountability on behalf of Fortune 500 CEOs. I would like some transparency and accountability on behalf of, you know, President Bush and his workers, who were the individuals that failed my husband and the 3,000 other people that day."
- Kristen Breitweiser, Sept. 11 widow
(Quoted on DU)

"Why would the House Republicans give the screening companies a get-out-of-jail-free card at the last minute?" asked Kristen Breitweiser of Middletown, N.J., whose husband, Ronald, died in the trade center and who has been considering a lawsuit against the screeners.

"The families are outraged by this," Ms. Breitweiser said. "We were down there lobbying last week and trying to make the case that this will hurt us, but they did it anyway. It's just a slap in the face to the victims."

Widows' Walk

In the depths of their grief, four World Trade Center widows get the political education of a lifetime.

By John T. Ward

March 2003

What really got Breitweiser back to her feet, though, and energized hundreds of other victims' survivors was the Victim Compensation Fund that Congress authorized just ten days after the attacks. Lawmakers, attempting to keep the already-teetering airlines in business, had crafted a $15 billion bailout. The law effectively precluded survivors who accepted an award from the fund from suing the City of New York, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, or any other agency. To offset that elimination of legal remedies, Congress drew up, in roughly 24 hours, the outlines of a fund to compensate them for their losses, with no dollar limit on awards.

The fund soon would come to be viewed as arbitrary and unfair. With varying degrees of bile, victims' family members began challenging rules that were being established for the fund by Kenneth Feinberg, a Washington lawyer named by Attorney General John Ashcroft to oversee it. Among the challengers was Casazza. With Breitweiser's help, she wrote the Justice Department a four-page letter detailing reservations about the rules and got hundreds of other survivors to sign it. Placitella, a Colts Neck neighbor of Casazza's, had urged her to write the letter at a meeting in his office during which Casazza, Kleinberg, and Van Auken sat sobbing. Afterward, he says, he was stunned at the focus and strength the women seemed to gain from the effort.

"Within seven or eight weeks of the attack, there's this transformation that is extraordinary," he says. "Remarkable. They were like tigresses protecting their young."

So when hearings came up at the state Assembly in early December on a bill to allow lawsuits for mental anguish in wrongful-death cases, Placitella asked Casazza to testify in its favor. Kleinberg and Van Auken, too, made the trip to Trenton. Their unscripted stories about their children's pain brought some legislators to tears. The bill eventually was shelved, but for Kleinberg the trip was revelatory. "All of a sudden my mindset was different," she says. "We were in a wrongful-death situation." That led to the realization that, under the airline bailout law, not only would there be no way to hold the carriers responsible financially for any failures on their part, but there would also never be any discovery, the fact-finding process in civil litigation, to determine who, if anyone, had left open the door to the terrorists.

Through the winter, the widows became immersed in the battle over the fund. But as spring approached, the tide of public opinion began to turn against them. Feinberg announced the final rules for the fund in March and said that the average settlement (before deductions for other money awarded) would be $1.85 million, $200,000 higher than previously estimated. When survivors continued to object to the nuances of the fund, they were blasted. An editorial cartoon depicted September 11 widows as greedy and self-absorbed. Comments posted on a Justice Department Web site started to take on a "get a job" tone. "We can't get our message heard," Kleinberg says, "because people hear money and they think greedy, and they don't realize that our motives are pure."

I was against this commission to begin with.

The blame, if any is to be addressed, belongs squarely on the Clintoon administration for allowing bomb after bomb to be detonated by these Islamo freaks without any response other than lobbing a half billion dollars worth of missiles at a camel and a empty tent. (this was done not for Bin Laden, but for a media diversion to help with scandals in the oval office)

So how can this commission help protect America?

The answer is that it was never intended to protect anything. It is nothing but a fishing expedition to find some sort of wrongdoing in the Bush administration.

In reality, the buck was passed by Clinton. He wiped his butt with it first.

From the Church (D) hearings in the 1970's up until Robert Torecelli's (D) policy of disengagement from "questionable contacts," the Democrats have deconstructed our intelligence services

Concur

The problem is in the press quoting Mrs. Breitweiser. The victims of 9/11 – the organized families and survivors which are probably already incorporated – are not the aggrieved parties in terms of legal actions, beyond a civil wrongful death action they are welcome to file against OBL or any of his facilitators. There is a good reason that it is U.S. vs. ____ or The State of California vs. O.J. Simpson – we do not have a private system of justice – a crime against a citizen is a crime against the state.

The victim’s families seem to think they have the right to determine things like the architectural design of a successor building to the twin towers or to memorials to 9/11. As if the misfortune of their loved ones conveyed upon them some kind of special veto power over public investments and public policies, which are rightfully decision to be made by the public and their representatives.

Although it has been just over two years – in some ways this seems to have the kind of cult aspect that has developed over the JFK assassination over 40 years. In their grief and anger these folks are going to find someone in government to blame and the press will be their facilitators because it makes for good drama and they like the idea of doing damage the Bush Administration.

The article suggests that there is something implausible about a National Security Advisor knowing something that was written 10 years earlier in an internal FBI report. I find it plausible that you could find plenty of information that is in FBI reports from even 1 year or 1 month ago that a competent, qualified National Security Advisor does not know. Information abounds – requiring that Condoleezza Rice know all of this information or be judged incompetent and suitable target for the survivors’ wrath is absurd.

With Democrats failing to do damage to Bush on the conduct of the Iraq War – and with the capture of Saddam – you have to expect that they will exploit any detail in the 9/11 investigation. It is to be expected. What’s shocking is that Kean would chime right in.

Open all records now or else we will have another Watergate or worse.

Welcome to FR.

What did the President know, and when did he know it, eh? Nice try, weasel bear.

You are one who would blame our President first, then make excuses for the perpetrators. It's all Bush's fault that we were attacked, etc. This line of reasoning is falacious and you know it.

It would seem to me, and I think most Americans, that the 9/11 attacks may have been preventable in a truly academic sense but not in a realistic sense.

The intelligence agencies receive dozens and sometimes hundreds of "hits" a DAY regarding potential threats. How is it possible, without basically shutting down the country infinitum, to prevent any and all attacks. At the time, the plane into a building scenario seemed like one of those check boxes on a list of possible terrorist scenarios. Without HARD and UP TO THE MINUTE INTELLIGENCE, it is virtually impossible to stop a DETERMINED and COORDINATED attack. Ask the Israelis...

As others have asked, the real question shouldn't be was 9/11 preventable but rather was 9/11 reasonably preventable?

If the president, any president, had taken the necessary measures to avert such an attack before it actually happened during the period before 9/11 and did not present HARD EVIDENCE to the nation, the population would have gone nuts!! Today is a different world of course.

I find it unimaginable for any leader, Democrat or Republican (or whatever), to have the capability to ALLOW an attack that has the potential to kill 1,000's or tens of 1,000's without taking action. However, I fully admit that the procedures and the infrastructure to HELP PREVENT such an attack, via COMMUNICATION between agencies and the capacity to collect and decipher HARD INTEL, did not readily exist prior to 9/11. That fact is due to many factors, many of which have already been mentioned here.

If we are to take the argument further, let's consider this: Many experts - and citizens - expect to see a weapon of mass destruction detonated in an urban area in the not so distant future. I'm 36, and I'm regretably certain that such an event will happen within the next decade thanks to the available technologies and determination of some of our enemies. So, since we are reasonably sure that a WMD attack will eventually happen, wouldn't the prudent course of action be to begin evacuating all metropolitan areas and disperse our populations to the countryside? Without HARD EVIDENCE/INTEL, doing so would be perposterous. You get my point.

My $0.02...

One of the memes from the left is that 9-11 could have been prevented.

That is a crock of shit. I will tell you why.

9-11, like Pearl Harbor before it, took advantage of an America off its guard and at peace. We were thinking peacefully, and were also aware that terrorists were out there plotting against us. Like most people, we were quite willing to let things be until it was too late. Human beings simply do things that they have always done, until compelled to change by events.

It is easy in retrospect to connect the dots. The problem is, one can only do that in retrospect.

Be Seeing You,

Chris