[backhoe]

Thanks for looking, and feel free to copy this and send it far & wide... FYI--

-Talk radio & the Web...coming up to speed--

[Peach]

Last night on one of the evening broadcasts (sorry don't remember which one - was channel surfing to see just how bad the coverage of this story was going to be) - the anchor re-played Dick Cheney on the Tim Russert show stating there had been a lot of intelligence chatter that something big was going to happen. It's not like this was hidden from anybody.

[gov_bean_ counter]

The report — titled the "Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?" — noted that a terrorist linked to al Qaeda, who was arrested in the Philippines in 1995 and later convicted for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, had suggested that such a suicide strike by a jetliner was possible.

The report was prepared for the NIC, which is made up of a dozen senior intelligence officers who assist the U.S. intelligence community in analyzing threats and priorities.

"Ramzi Yousef had planned to do this against the CIA headquarters," the report said.

Mr. Clinton yesterday said he knew about the dangerous potential of bin Laden, but discounted the suggestion that the 1999 analysis should have alerted his administration to the possibility of a terrorist attack on the scale of the September 11 attacks.

"That has nothing to do with intelligence," Mr. Clinton told the Associated Press while in Hawaii on a two-day stopover on the way to East Timor. "All that says is they used public sources to speculate on what bin Laden might do. That doesn't have anything to do with what the intelligence people, the CIA or the FBI, tell the administration."

The implications of this line of thinking are chilling. Does anyone think that a position paper on national security threats contracted by intel agencies would only use information in the public domain? These folks get high level clearances and see it all to make their threat assessments. If Clinton had ever met with his National Security team he may have understood this.

[ventana]

The one thing that differs from eight years ago when the Democrat pitbulls could sink their teeth into a political scrap of their likeing is they had ultimate media support and no opposition.

Today we have in our arsenal: Rush; Sean; Fox Television and FreeRepublic and stalwarts here like you. Plus Bush is canny. I don't always like the things he's done but he's canny. The court of public opinion is not so easily swayed by the court jesters this time around. V's wife.