Conspiracy Theory for you. 9/11.

[gstudios]

Ok, last night when I got home, I saw this story on a local News stations', web site. And this morning, it was reported on BBC. It appears that, President Bush, HAD been informed of a possible attack, with airplanes. Although, they did not even think that the planes would be used as Missiles.
Makes you really wonder, what their ultimate goal is.

From: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/wor...00/1991689.stm

Members of the United States Congress have demanded to know whether the government was given enough information to head off the 11 September attacks.

Their comments come after the White House acknowledged that President Bush was told a month before 11 September of a plot to hijack American planes by Osama Bin Laden.

The revelation has put the White House on the defensive to explain why stricter security measures were not taken and why the public was not informed.

Senate Majority leader Tom Daschle, a Democrat, said he was "gravely concerned", and asked President Bush to hand over to congress all the information he received.

"Clearly there is a lot more to be learned before we can come to any final conclusion... but it clearly raises some very important questions that have to be asked and have to be answered," he said.

"Why did it take eight months for us to receive this information? And secondly, what specific actions were taken by the White House in response?" Senator Daschle asked.

Senator Richard Shelby, the Republican vice- chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee was also critical of the White House.

"I believe and others believe if it had been acted upon properly we may have had a different situation on 11 September," Senator Shelby said

The White House said on Thursday that it will co-operate with congressional investigations.

'Appropriate action'

But the White House insists took "all appropriate action" in response to the warnings of attacks on the United States it received last summer.


Bush: Warned of "general threats"
Beginning in May and
continuing throughout the summer, the government received heightened reports on threats to US interests and territory, most of it focused on threats abroad, said Mr Fleischer.

"As a result, several actions were taken to button down security," he said.

The information was passed to the president during routine intelligence briefings and the "appropriate agencies" were notified, he said.

But no public warning was given.

The US intelligence community has already been heavily criticised for its failure to detect warning signs of the 11 September suicide attacks on New York and Washington.

The attacks, which saw hijacked aircraft flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, are believed to have been carried out by Bin Laden's al-Qaeda terror group.

BBC Washington correspondent Justin Webb says the timing of the White House admission is significant, as a congressional committee is about to start hearings into intelligence failings before 11 September.

The White House did not want to be put on the defensive with leaks about what the president knew, our correspondent says.

Flight school warning

The White House has denied that a memo last July from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Arizona office could have prevented the attacks had it been acted on.

The memo is reported to have warned that groups like al-Qaeda might have sent students to flight schools in the US, but none of the people identified in the document had any connection with the attacks.


The al-Qaeda network is thought to be behind the 11 September attacks
Even though the memo
was reviewed, the FBI did not take any action on its central recommendation - that flight school records and visa applications by foreign students be cross-referenced.

And the agency did not connect the memo with the case of Zacharias Moussaoui, a Frenchman of Moroccan descent who was arrested in August after seeking flight training in Minnesota - and saying he was not particularly interested in learning to land aeroplanes.

Mr Moussaoui is facing trial in the US, accused of conspiring with Bin Laden, the hijackers and others to commit the 11 September attacks.

The FBI Director, Robert Mueller, has repeatedly said he wished agents had acted more aggressively in putting the Arizona and Minnesota leads together.

Following the attacks, the FBI is to create a special counter-terrorism unit to oversee all its terrorism investigations.

[valheru]

A government can't possibly act on every single threat they hear about cause for every legit one they'll hear of thousands of bogus ones. I know people are given the job of sifting through them all and prioritising them but still how would the public have reacted if restrictions/security on air travel that have been put in place since 9/11 were put in before that because of a suspected threat?
There would have been uproar cause of all the extra delays etc.

No, I don't think the U.S. government can be held responsibe for those attacks in any way.

Val

[The Old Man]

"The Government" is so huge, with all it's various departments, divisions within departments, sources of information, pipelines for info transmission, "FOUO", "FYEO", "Need to know", and the list goes on... I can be irritated that the various clues, hints and "general warnings" did not find a common action-officer table in time to prevent the attack. In the next breath, I can understand that the "process" at the time did not particularly lend itself to the sorting of wheat from chaff and the melting of the dirt and ore into something better than brass but less than gold that could be used by enforcement. In particular, if the Pres (whoever he might have been) did lock down all the airports, send agents to all the flight schools with arrest warrants (yeah, just try to get one on the info they had and the laws they had to work with prior 9-11...) ... well, just fill in the blanks, folks, he'd have been accused of imagining boogymen running amuk, it would have all died down with a laughing stock smell and the enemy would have quietly put their plan in motion after the next election. IMHO, although i can wonder why the "Agencies" couldnt' get their s#yt together, blaming our government, it's field agents, agencies, or our president for the tragedy is no different than blaming the girl for being raped and murdered because she was walking home from school. Put the blame where the blame belongs, we're supposed to be able to think without prejudice, not like self serving politicians or talking heads!

[debwalin]

With all of the reports and warnings and crap that we have now been exposed to, I understand completely how this could have been overlooked. It's a terrible tragedy, and I'm sure some will try to profit from the governments "oversight" that they feel led to this.

My question remains the same now as it did on 9-11: How in God's name can you "be ready" for a bunch of sorely misled men to fly airplanes into buildings? It is the type of thing that happens in movies and novels, perhaps, but no one saw it coming in real life. If the president had locked down airports, and issued mass warnings, they would have been ignored, much as they are now, and everyone would have raised all kinds of hell, just like they are doing now about the new security measures in place at airports.

It is a lesson that we learned very much the hard way, and I hope we HAVE all learned it, although I fear as time passes, it is already being forgotten.

Deb

P.S. Shouldn't this be in the Cosmos forum?

[Specter6]

Terrorist info is a lot like the logs you maintain on your firewall's activities. Sometimes there's just nothing going on. Sometimes your overwhelmed with info.

But there are times when there are so many things going on you can't keep up with them in real-time and have to deal with the situations as it is possible, then find out there was nothing to worry about in the first place. Or in the worst case scenario, don't get to spend enough time on a certain piece of info and it comes back to haunt you.

With a government as large as ours and the petty politics that go on, I'm surprised they accomplish anything at all most of the time.

[retfarcratS]

Bush did not know. I cant believe the slant the media is putting on this...First the picture...now that did not work, so now they(the BIG SCARY MEDIA) needs to find another avenue to try to diminish our Presidents worth.

Leave him alone and focus on what is really important...The Robert Blake story!

[Tedob1]

i know bullshit when i see it, well most of the time, and that artical reeks of it

[draziw]

Why do these self-righteous bastards always have to seek to place blame on someone living or in-power?!? Ok, fine, the Whitehouse may have had some sort of warning... but, do you have any idea just how many sort of warnings they get on a daily basis?!? And, last I looked, the President's office wasn't the one that was in charge of National Security or the tracking of terrorist activities... but, well, I could have been living in some sort of temporal warp all this time or something equally ridiculous.

Leave Bush alone... if he had been jumping up and down in front of God and everyone that many months ago about some imminent attack, how many people want to bet that people would have just thought he finally lost it and alzheimer's or some other "senior disease" (or drug-induced stupor) was just kicking in to high gear?!?

Either way, it's a no-win situation, no doubt.

[JRoc]

I don't find the conspiracy really. They didn't have enough credable information to prevent or understand what the attack was.... Nothing much to it.... I don't blame them at all.

[rcgreen]

Hey, they covered up the truth about
Pearl Herbor for forty years, blaming
it on local army and naval commanders
when roosevelt knew the night before
that the japanese embassy had already
received instructions to deliver the
declaration of war.

http://www.flash.net/~manniac/pharbor.htm