How many people would have to cover up Ignored Intelligence?

[Undesired Walrus]

Let's imagine Bush and Cheney heard about this event coming, and indeed did know that a horrific and sudden attack would kill many thousands of civilians.

Are we still in staggering numbers here?

I hate to keep playing Devils Advocate, but I think a lot of that will be needed around here in the coming days.

Could the Commission still be in the dark? NORAD? CIA?

How many people are we saying here?

[SDC]

Let's imagine Bush and Cheney heard about this event coming, and indeed did know that a horrific and sudden attack would kill many thousands of civilians.

Are we still in staggering numbers here?

I hate to keep playing Devils Advocate, but I think a lot of that will be needed around here in the coming days.

Could the Commission still be in the dark? NORAD? CIA?

How many people are we saying here?

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Bush and Cheney are both, by virtue of their positions, surrounded all? much? of the time. (Makes me think of the Russian euphemism for going to the restroom: "going where even the czar goes on foot.") How would they hear it but their secretaries, assistants, secret service (remember Clinton and Monica?), and god-knows-who-all not hear it?

Or read it. Do they read anything which isn't vetted/ reviewed?

[JAStewart]

Too many. End.

Yeah, if would have come from a secretary or something. Bush doesn't sit there intercepting talibanic messages, thats the CIA's job.

So right there you could have the CIA head, Bush, the secretary & Dick.

[Sabrina]

Speaking from experience, if we're talking strict LIHOP and not some degree of MIHOP, my guess is it could be possible; note, please, that I didn't say "probable", I said "possible". I can't be certain of the numbers, given that each intel agency would have a division dedicated to counterterrorism (even before 9/11 IIRC) that could potentially receive intelligence that might lead to 9/11 being discovered (and even if they didn't have one, there's still the all-source analysis divisions), so you have to cover 16 intelligence agencies, say an average of 50-100 people per agency in a counterterrorism division, the OUSD(I), the OSD, the VP and Pres, key members of the Cabinet and their respective offices, and possibly toss in some of the higher-ups in the military...

Well, let's put it this way. In my opinion, it's more possible than a MIHOP scenario, especially if you're arguing strict LIHOP (i.e. nothing other than the government being potentially aware of an upcoming terrorist attack and deciding to do nothing about it), but you're still looking at around two, maybe as high as three thousand people needing to be aware of at least part of it. The issue arises when the attack happens and you have all those people who were aware of the possibility that you either have to pay off or kill or "seduce to the dark side" in order to keep them quiet about what was decided, because I can just about guarantee you that very few people in government service would keep silent about something like this when you have the possibility of being more famous than Deep Throat and the potential of millions in book or movie deals (or both).

[Sabrina]

Too many. End.

Yeah, if would have come from a secretary or something. Bush doesn't sit there intercepting talibanic messages, thats the CIA's job.

So right there you could have the CIA head, Bush, the secretary & Dick.

You're forgetting the "grunt" intel analysts who would have received the intel to begin with. Intel's typically interpreted at the GG-08 to GG-14 levels, IIRC (those are equivalent ranks to various military officer ranks, although I'm not positive of the exact correspondence). Just thought I'd point that out. :D

[SDC]

Fine, you're being rational about a general question, but the specific one in the OP referred to just Bush and Cheney. (And not their wives, dogs, kids, close assistants, secretaries, evil mentors, secret service types...) I'll bet dollars to donuts that B&C never, ever, hear or read anything which a number of others haven't heard or read.

Granted, I argue from ignorance. My one interview for an intelligence job, after about 30 seconds, turned into a pleasant time-filling chat about the weather because it was obvious that I wasn't destined for that, uhm, destiny.

[defaultdotxbe]

I'll bet dollars to donuts that B&C never, ever, hear or read anything which a number of others haven't heard or read.
i agree, any information that reaches the president would have to pass through dozens if not hundreds of subordinates first, so they would all know about it, it would just be too many people to be plausible

on the other hand you could consider LIHOP at the field agent level, but a conspiracy that doesnt reach to the highest levels of government isnt very interesting, now is it?

[Undesired Walrus]

You see, we often regard the Moscow apartment bombings as almost perhaps a MIHOP, and the recent murder of Litvinenko as an almost certainty, and that lasts for many, many years without ever being discovered.

But then again, there is always the floating 'We all know he (Putin) did it' around professional people rather than just mindless kooks.

[SDC]

You see, we often regard the Moscow apartment bombings as almost perhaps a MIHOP, and the recent murder of Litvinenko as an almost certainty, and that lasts for many, many years without ever being discovered.

But then again, there is always the floating 'We all know he (Putin) did it' around professional people rather than just mindless kooks.

I'm not sure whether you meant to say this, but one point about Putin is exactly that he was KGB, and the Litvinenko stuff was very much KGB style.

To those who argue "well Geo H.W. Bush was CIA," there is a big difference. Putin was career.

[Undesired Walrus]

I'm not sure whether you meant to say this, but one point about Putin is exactly that he was KGB, and the Litvinenko stuff was very much KGB style.


How so? Interested.

[BenBurch]

Depends on what level it was ignored at.

Much of what low level analysts come up with is ignored, or appears to be ignored to them. We have the famous case of the FBI agents filing memos about strange people in flight schools to prove that. The people making the reports were upset, but were obviously used to being ignored.

The question really becomes "Can the CIA really depend on its lower-level career staff not to come forward if they had the smoking gun on 911 and had it spiked by a political appointee?"

[Sabrina]

Fine, you're being rational about a general question, but the specific one in the OP referred to just Bush and Cheney. (And not their wives, dogs, kids, close assistants, secretaries, evil mentors, secret service types...) I'll bet dollars to donuts that B&C never, ever, hear or read anything which a number of others haven't heard or read.

Granted, I argue from ignorance. My one interview for an intelligence job, after about 30 seconds, turned into a pleasant time-filling chat about the weather because it was obvious that I wasn't destined for that, uhm, destiny.

Really? I read UW's post as "how many people in addition to B&C would there have to be in order to carry off a LIHOP scenario" personally. I find it a little difficult, but not impossible to believe that B&C wouldn't have known ANYTHING about it and instead it was carried out "below" them, so to speak, but if they knew about it, there's no way subordinates didn't. And speaking from my own experience, I know intelligence begins at a relatively low level in the government, therefore you have to take all of those people into account as well, plus you'd have to deal with the military (perhaps just the Air Force, but I don't know; I find it hard to posit a scenario that wouldn't include the Joint Chiefs of Staff of all the branches) and the Cabinet members who have undersecretaries that deal with intel (I don't believe, although I'm not positive, that the SD is the only one, but I've worked directly for the OUSD(I) in the past, so I know they exist). That being said, you are absolutely right that everything that B&C get is vetted by numerous levels in order to ensure that only the most recent and relevant intel/news gets to them. If it ain't relevant, it likely gets left out until and if it becomes relevant.

[Darth Rotor]

If the info that linked certain bits together was special, compartmentalized intel, I'd say less than a dozen people need to be in on it to close off a narrow bit of pre attack input.

That assumes that a single or a few bits of info in highly compartmentalized collection/source streams is all that was available to go on.

Big assumption. Otherwise, as noted.

DR

[SDC]

Really? I read UW's post as "how many people in addition to B&C would there have to be in order to carry off a LIHOP scenario" personally. I find it a little difficult, but not impossible to believe that B&C wouldn't have known ANYTHING about it and instead it was carried out "below" them, so to speak, but if they knew about it, there's no way subordinates didn't. And speaking from my own experience, I know intelligence begins at a relatively low level in the government, therefore you have to take all of those people into account as well, plus you'd have to deal with the military (perhaps just the Air Force, but I don't know; I find it hard to posit a scenario that wouldn't include the Joint Chiefs of Staff of all the branches) and the Cabinet members who have undersecretaries that deal with intel (I don't believe, although I'm not positive, that the SD is the only one, but I've worked directly for the OUSD(I) in the past, so I know they exist). That being said, you are absolutely right that everything that B&C get is vetted by numerous levels in order to ensure that only the most recent and relevant intel/news gets to them. If it ain't relevant, it likely gets left out until and if it becomes relevant.

I guess I was reading UW literally, in that he just refers to B&C. No doubt I was being too literal. It is silly to think about the two of them kicking back on a Saturday night (let us say), chatting about how many widows and orphans they've dispossessed during the past week, puppies and kittens they've boiled, etc. "I know," whinnies the POTUS, "let's blow up some things!" The VP sneers: "And I know just the buildings..."

Aha! I just figured out that SD = Sec Defense. But OUSD... Out of Uniform Sec Defense? Ornery Uninformed Sec Defense? Ordinarily Ukelele-playing....?

[SDC]

How so? Interested.

Quickly, without any research: Well, Putin was a KGB officer, that's no news, he was I think a protege of Andropov. I think he had a desk in East Germany. There is a general consensus view that Putin's ascendancy is a kind of triumph of the old Soviet intelligence bureaucracy.

As for poison, the most notorious case, I think, was that of Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident, killed in England in 1978: look up the "Umbrella murder." He was killed when poison was injected into him with ... an umbrella point.

More recently, in post-Sov days, there has been the poisoning of the Ukrainian PM candidate, Yushchenko, which led to the "Orange Revolution" in 2005.

One characteristic of the KGB style seems to be gruesome, unsubtle, obvious poisoning. Sending a message? Yushchenko didn't die, but he was severely disfigured.

I'm going to a conference this week where I may meet a bookseller who takes spiteful delight in the laudatory literature in Russian about Putin which is appearing nowadays. I'll see what he's got.

[Sabrina]

I guess I was reading UW literally, in that he just refers to B&C. No doubt I was being too literal. It is silly to think about the two of them kicking back on a Saturday night (let us say), chatting about how many widows and orphans they've dispossessed during the past week, puppies and kittens they've boiled, etc. "I know," whinnies the POTUS, "let's blow up some things!" The VP sneers: "And I know just the buildings..."

Aha! I just figured out that SD = Sec Defense. But OUSD... Out of Uniform Sec Defense? Ornery Uninformed Sec Defense? Ordinarily Ukelele-playing....?

:dl:

Sorry, that just seriously cracked me up.... *giggles*

Office of the Undersecretary of Defense. Specifically, Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. OUSD(I). OSD is Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Pardon my acronyms; I sometimes forget that not everyone here works in the government. *sheepish grin* :blush:

[GreNME]

Speaking from experience, if we're talking strict LIHOP and not some degree of MIHOP, my guess is it could be possible; note, please, that I didn't say "probable", I said "possible".

Good enough for me! Nine-Eleven was an inside joooooob...

Okay, seriuosly, though, Sabrina (and SDC) has the numbers right on eyes such information would pass before hitting the desks of the POTUS or the VeeP. Information like this, even if in pieces, isn't likely to have been able to stay bottled up this long. Just the fact that mishaps in reaction, threat assessment (like the Aug. 6 memo), and intelligence gathering have come to light since 2001 that give the public a little bit of the pitcure to how far the government's pants were down haven't given any indication that there was distinct knowledge pointing to the actual operation that took place on 9/11.

People talk. The best way to keep a secret between three people is if two of them are dead.

[JMarshall]

As for poison, the most notorious case, I think, was that of Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident, killed in England in 1978: look up the "Umbrella murder." He was killed when poison was injected into him with ... an umbrella point.


The tip of the umbrella held a small, extremely small, very very small (Just to get my point across), dimpled sphere. The dimples of the sphere held Sarin, the tip acted like a syringe planting the sphere just under the surface of the skin, it would feel like nothing more than a bug bite.

Back to the question though:

Though I have very limited experience with intelligence (LOL It almost seams like I'm admitting to being an idiot...), I have been involved in a couple of instances. What I have seen is that there is always lower level personnel involved, whether Govt Grade personnel, or Military personnel, you have to always assume you aren't the first to see the information. To put a number to it, I would have to say upwards to a couple thousand... As to reasons no one would come out with the information, I can't personally think of any. Granted there are times when someone knows something that is in fact classified, and doesn't talk, but the circumstances are very different. I don't talk about classified information I may or may not have seen, because the information could be used by our enemies. On the other hand, if someone knew the government was allowing so many lives to be lost they would, in my eyes, have a duty to talk.

Again my reply is based on very limited knowledge and experience in the matter...

[Slayhamlet]

You see, we often regard the Moscow apartment bombings as almost perhaps a MIHOP, and the recent murder of Litvinenko as an almost certainty, and that lasts for many, many years without ever being discovered.

But then again, there is always the floating 'We all know he (Putin) did it' around professional people rather than just mindless kooks.

I agree about the Moscow bombings, and I myself am not convinced that that was an inside job at all (though I'd say it's still infinitely more probable than 9/11 MIHOP). The Litvinenko poisoning, however, is quite different since it is not claimed to be conclusively solved by anyone and has no seemingly probable "cover story" as a false-flag type operation would have. But of all the theories floating around about the poisoning, the involvement of the Russian intelligence agencies is by far the most convincing for the simple fact that there are so few other suspects who would have the motive and the means to pull it off. Plus Litvinenko himself suspected them. Of course, none of this means Putin was necessarily involved.

[R.Mackey]

OK, my turn.

I don't buy LIHOP, any variant of LIHOP, and I'll tell you why.

LIHOP is inherently more difficult to prove either way. We're speculating about what people knew, not what they did, and so it's harder to find evidence one way or another. We accept this.

In Lawrence Wright's excellent The Looming Tower and numerous other places, we read about dedicated CIA and FBI agents named Michael Scheuer, John O'Neill, and Dan Coleman among others. These folks were focused on bin Laden, long before the rest of us were. They ultimately couldn't figure out what was going on in time, not having access to all of the evidence they would have needed. But they were perhaps closer than anyone, at least closer than anyone that I've read about.

We also accept that the intelligence services of the United States don't work terribly well. This is no reflection on the individuals therein. Any bureaucracy runs at a fraction of its theoretical potential. The Government, in general, is a clumsy, stinky beast. Everyone knows this. Plato knew this.

Suppose LIHOP is true. That would mean that someone in power knew much more than these agents did. Who is this mystery person? How was this knowledge gained? Whomever this person is must have somehow stumbled upon the motherlode of information, despite being nowhere near as focused as they were, and escaping all mention afterwards. But more importantly, they must somehow have failed to hear about this.

But there's more. LIHOP requires that they were prevented from hearing about this. They weren't taken seriously enough by their superiors, if I read the stories correctly -- so why would they have been singled out? How could this blackout have been inflicted upon them without their knowledge? It couldn't have been an accident.

If we try to do it the slick way, i.e. put in seemingly innocuous procedural roadblocks and cultural hurdles to stymie them, then the person doing this must have known a lot more than they did. These things take time to implement. Whomever allegedly carried out this kind of interference -- essential to the LIHOP hypothesis -- must have known about the plot from the very beginning.

I simply don't buy it. What emerges in the story of John O'Neill and his fellow agents is the story of a man searching frantically for a needle in a haystack, but who could only get to half of the haystack. This is entirely Business As Usual in any government agency. LIHOP requires that they were blocked, subtly and skillfully, and that requires an absolutely incredible prescience and influence on the part of whomever blocked them. Not only blocked them, but only just blocked them -- allowing them to get dangerously close to unraveling the plot -- and did so with such gentle finesse that they never even sensed it.

Ridiculous.

MIHOP, by the way, fails the same test, and fails it more spectacularly. For MIHOP to be true, they all must have been totally barking up the wrong tree the whole time. Or liars. Or in on it.

This is just another example of how conspiracy theories tend to "inflate" upon examination. All the assumptions the conspiracy folks make have consequences. Eventually, the weight of these consequences brings the whole theory to a catastrophe of illogic and self-contradiction.

I don't doubt for a moment that the Government needs fixing, or that there's a healthy amount of buck-passing and butt-covering in the investigation that followed. But this is NOT the same thing as accusing the Government or anyone in it of being complicit, either actively or passively, in the murder of thousands. Those accusations are totally out of line, and those making them on such scant basis should be deeply ashamed.

[beachnut]

Depends on what level it was ignored at.

Much of what low level analysts come up with is ignored, or appears to be ignored to them. We have the famous case of the FBI agents filing memos about strange people in flight schools to prove that. The people making the reports were upset, but were obviously used to being ignored.

The question really becomes "Can the CIA really depend on its lower-level career staff not to come forward if they had the smoking gun on 911 and had it spiked by a political appointee?"
You are paid to come forward; and if you thought some terrorist were going to cut throats, kill pilots, and take planes you would make it KNOWN. I would.

I have stopped stupid acts. If you KNEW 9/11 was going to happen, you could stop it yourself! Period. I do not care what level it was at, you could stop 9/11 if you had known the real details. Okay who knew? This leaves LIHOP down to LIHOPBOP

LIHOP By One Person - I know who it was! - UBL (he told us we were target many years ago)_

It looks like we ALL Let it Happen, WALIHOP, I have proof, UBL told us he was coming to kill…
I wonder why that Serb forgot to kill me when I was in Italy? I was told they could and may try to kill Americans. What happen? Why did the Serb forget to kill me? UBL told us he was going to kill Americans as he could; Why did you forget it?

[gumboot]

Let's imagine Bush and Cheney heard about this event coming, and indeed did know that a horrific and sudden attack would kill many thousands of civilians.

Are we still in staggering numbers here?

I hate to keep playing Devils Advocate, but I think a lot of that will be needed around here in the coming days.

Could the Commission still be in the dark? NORAD? CIA?

How many people are we saying here?



I've often argued that MIHOP requires a much bigger cover up than LIHOP, for the simple reason that in a MIHOP situation the Government has far less control over who might be exposed to the plot.

-Gumboot

[Jonnyclueless]

OK, my turn.
Who is this mystery person?

He looka like-a man.

[chillzero]

but...but....but... in the movies ... one lone interpreter would have heard the information, and not wanting another colleague to take the praise spoke alone to his team leader, who told him he was mistaken, and fobbed him off with some speech about not causing panic from an over-active imagination, so the interpreter guy takes a day off work and goes to visit the Whitehouse, and slips away from the tour to catch the POTUS in a rare moment alone - smelling roses in the garden, perhaps... and the POTUS has a nearby guard shoot the interpreter on the pretense that he is trespassing and just threatened the POTUS, who then walks away with the information on a slip of paper, which he later burns, smiling and rubbing his hands together with glee thinking about a new term in office over 3 years later due to all the oil he will not get because he can declare war on the terrorists because he knows their fiendish plan.

(but, because the good guys always win....)
Meanwhile, in a nearby city, the interpreter's girlfriend .. no, no... ex-wife.. it's always an ex-wife with unresolved emotional issues (and she'll most likely be Dylan Avery's sister, or cousin, so she can turn to him to reveal the dasterdly story to the masses afterward) ...is looking quizzically at her answering machine, trying to make sense of the message he left her as he drove to Washington.... etc etc...

:boggled:

Isn't life just like the movies????? :eek:


How so? Interested.
Perhaps a new thread?

[JMarshall]

but...but....but... in the movies ... one lone interpreter would have heard the information, and not wanting another colleague to take the praise spoke alone to his team leader, who told him he was mistaken, and fobbed him off with some speech about not causing panic from an over-active imagination, so the interpreter guy takes a day off work and goes to visit the Whitehouse, and slips away from the tour to catch the POTUS in a rare moment alone - smelling roses in the garden, perhaps... and the POTUS has a nearby guard shoot the interpreter on the pretense that he is trespassing and just threatened the POTUS, who then walks away with the information on a slip of paper, which he later burns, smiling and rubbing his hands together with glee thinking about a new term in office over 3 years later due to all the oil he will not get because he can declare war on the terrorists because he knows their fiendish plan.

(but, because the good guys always win....)
Meanwhile, in a nearby city, the interpreter's girlfriend .. no, no... ex-wife.. it's always an ex-wife with unresolved emotional issues (and she'll most likely be Dylan Avery's sister, or cousin, so she can turn to him to reveal the dasterdly story to the masses afterward) ...is looking quizzically at her answering machine, trying to make sense of the message he left her as he drove to Washington.... etc etc...


Espionage, murder, thrills, lost love, hmm, throw in some NC-17 sex scenes and you've got a smash hit! I wonder if Avery has thought of this one yet?

[DavidS]

The tip of the umbrella held a small, extremely small, very very small (Just to get my point across), dimpled sphere. The dimples of the sphere held Sarin, the tip acted like a syringe planting the sphere just under the surface of the skin, it would feel like nothing more than a bug bite.

Details, details... the poison used in that assassination was not Sarin, but ricin.
Sarin was used in the Tokyo subway attack.

[JMarshall]

Details, details... the poison used in that assassination was not Sarin, but ricin.
Sarin was used in the Tokyo subway attack.

Ah, right you are, too many poisonings in my head to remember all of them perfectly... I bow out of that one respectfully...

Espionage, murder, thrills, lost love, hmm, throw in some NC-17 sex scenes and you've got a smash hit! I wonder if Avery has thought of this one yet?

I just became enlightened... All of the conspiracies, Revolutionary War, Pearl Harbor, JFK, Watergate, Illuminati, Free Masons, John Lenon, Moon landing, 9/11, all of them to bring forth a NWO... Not New World Order, No Writers Organized, don't you see it was all planned out so that one day the movie industry would be free of the Writer's Guild! It all makes so much sense now!:boggled::boggled::boggled:

[BenBurch]

You are paid to come forward; and if you thought some terrorist were going to cut throats, kill pilots, and take planes you would make it KNOWN. I would.

Exactimundo!

[Jonnyclueless]

Jack Ryan would never have let this happen.

[thesyntaxera]

In light of all the warnings that preceded the event I am left to wonder why nothing happened at all. Sure, you can explain away some of the ignorance as mishaps as I am sure some are. The question is how many warnings do you need to get before you start a plan of action?

If Bush really wanted to use terrorism as a pretext for war or some "sinister global agenda" why didn't he take advantage of all the intelligence beforehand and use it as spin fodder? He could have created the same climate before the attacks, prevented them, and then used the thwarted threat to push the agenda any way.

Also, where is the division line between handling a situation poorly and criminal negligence?

[LashL]

Jack Ryan would never have let this happen.


True, but NWO Kitty would have pretended to let it happen only to foil the tinhatters who would later argue that it did actually happen, even though it didn't, and would never, in a thousand years, have let it happen in such a way that he/she (have we determined the gender of NWO Kitty?) would ever be actually implicated in it.

NWO Kitty rocks. And rules. ;)

[David Wong]

In light of all the warnings that preceded the event I am left to wonder why nothing happened at all. Sure, you can explain away some of the ignorance as mishaps as I am sure some are. The question is how many warnings do you need to get before you start a plan of action?


That sounds great, until you ask people to nail down what the plan would have been. People seem to think the "airliners as missiles" threat was the only one on the desk in 2001. It wasn't. Remember, the foreign threat story that dominated when Bush took office was the incident with the American spy plane and the Chinese pilot (now all but forgotten). You had North Korea out there, along with all sorts of stories about cyber-terrorism, etc.


Also, where is the division line between handling a situation poorly and criminal negligence?


There's a lot of people calling for that for Bill Clinton, for failing to act on the Al Qaeda threat for years before Bush took office. But you don't want that to become the standard. You'll have every wartime president up on trial. FDR because he didn't prevent Pearl Harbor, Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs... you don't want that. It's a bad way to govern.

[gumboot]

In light of all the warnings that preceded the event I am left to wonder why nothing happened at all. Sure, you can explain away some of the ignorance as mishaps as I am sure some are. The question is how many warnings do you need to get before you start a plan of action?


You have to look at the threats closely though. People are fond of citing Richard Clarke's claim that the system was "blinking red" in the months prior to 9/11. And yet the much coveted August 6 security briefing (which Clarke prepared) is not the motherlode that Conspiracy Theorists claim. For starters it's talking about a three year old threat. Secondly, it's vague to the point of uselessness. Thirdly, it suggests law enforcement are on top of it, and there's nothing really to worry about.

Essentially this "system blinking red" consisted of:

"Well three years ago this terrorist guy said he wanted to attack us, and we think he probably still wants to attack us, somehow, and the FBI's working on it."

I've read the memo. That's essentially what it says, as far as Al Qaeda goes. What "plan of action" is Bush, or the CIA, or FBI, or anyone else supposed to produce from that completely worthless piece of information?

-Gumboot

[Sabrina]

I could tell you what they came up with for a plan of action. It's called, "let's sit and wait until we have more concrete information to go on", or, alternately if you're into short and sweet titles, "Observe and Document".

The plain fact of the matter is that, in hindsight, this stuff is obvious; looking at it from a pre 9/11 perspective, however, not so much. Intel analysts can only make educated guesses at best, IMO (and I intend to BE one of them as a civilian and have in fact done intelligence analysis in the past for my unit, so you understand I can make that distinction), so going as far as calling it criminally negligent that they missed the signs means that you'd essentially be blaming every intel analyst for not having the power to read minds from thousands of miles away. If we were to find people in the government criminally negligent for failing to spot the connections, you'd end up imprisoning somewhere between a quarter to half of the intel analysts who worked with the information, not to mention their bosses all the way up the chain to the President most likely. Who has the time and ability to replace that many people fast enough to be able to do any good? It's prohibitive at best, insane at worst. No, the best course of action is to do exactly as the 9/11 Commission recommended, which is to make the effort to integrate the intelligence community so failures of communication (which contributed greatly to missing the connections) are minimized and agency interaction and information-sharing is maximized. Finding people criminally negligent, IMO, does nothing to help security efforts and EVERYTHING to harm it, as you are targeting the people who, up until that point, had been entirely successful in providing for the security of this country, and have been successful (so far) since in doing the same.

[thesyntaxera]

If we were to find people in the government criminally negligent for failing to spot the connections, you'd end up imprisoning somewhere between a quarter to half of the intel analysts who worked with the information, not to mention their bosses all the way up the chain to the President most likely.

Yes, yes...but what about on the day of the attacks? I know there was an investigation, but how does it pan out that so many aspects of our national defense were out to lunch on the same day and this series of crucial failures gets little or no indepth coverage...there was plenty of coverage of people attempting to cover their own A$$es at the top level. I realize that there were people held accountable in a sense, but to my knowledge there is no clear explanation available online or elsewhere as to the extent and reasoning behind the failures and who was responsible each step of the way.

So, to pose the question again, where is the line between criminal neglect and just plain old disregard? If they were waiting to see how it panned out that day, how long do you have to wait until it is considered criminal nelglect.

Do you think that if Bush and Cheney would have had a public hearing on the matter the idea of criminal neglect might have gotten more attention? I just seriously cannot fathom the level of incompetence that would be required to ignore all of the red flags that morning...it has to be monumental.

[Sabrina]

The red flags for just that morning? Could you name a few?

Let's not forget, we're talking about a span of about TWO HOURS here. Considering the odds, the response we did get was flat out astounding. The FAA landed over four thousand planes with no accidents or incidents within approximately five hours, and NORAD and the military had a plan and coverage of the airspace in place within six or seven. When you consider that the whole purpose of the attack was to surprise us and catch us with our pants down, that sort of response is more than astounding; it's monumental. In actuality, I don't believe there was any major negligence by any agency of the US Government ON THE DAY OF 9/11. If you want to argue negligence PRIOR to 9/11, I could debate that (although I wouldn't go so far as to call it CRIMINAL necessarily), but on the day of? Could you please elaborate on what exactly you think we were negligent about that day specifically? I'm honestly curious to know where this argument is coming from. Please and thank you. :)

[dudalb]

For anybody who has studied Pearl Harbor and the Warnings before the Japanese Attack, it is a case of deja vu all over again.
In both cases there was never a smoking gun that gave exact details of the attack..

[JMarshall]

For anybody who has studied Pearl Harbor and the Warnings before the Japanese Attack, it is a case of deja vu all over again.
In both cases there was never a smoking gun that gave exact details of the attack..

BINGO!

[BenBurch]

The red flags for just that morning? Could you name a few?

Well, in hindsight... IIRC, One of the plotters from the 1993 WTC bombing was to be sentenced that morning right next to the WTC plaza.

That maybe just possibly is the reason the hijackers chose that day.

And that would have been a good reason to increase security.

At the court house.

[Sabrina]

IIRC, there was some discussion about them choosing 9/11 because of the symbology of the numbers; 911 being our emergency code and all. But there was also speculation about there being no significance to the day at all; that they had a window of time to execute their attack in and simply happened to choose 9/11. Let's not forget, the flights they were on were regular flights, IIRC; they occurred on a fairly regular basis, so in reality, the hijackings could have occurred at any time after the hijackers deemed themselves trained enough to carry it out. But, of course, we have no evidence for any of this, since they're dead and we can't ask them their motivation for choosing that day. I'm still curious to know, though, what thesyntaxera saw as red flags that we should have noticed for that morning. Hope I get an answer soon, although I'm sure he's busy with life stuff, so no rush; the question will be here when he gets back.

[Trakar]

In Lawrence Wright's excellent The Looming Tower and numerous other places, we read about dedicated CIA and FBI agents named Michael Scheuer, John O'Neill, and Dan Coleman among others. These folks were focused on bin Laden, long before the rest of us were. They ultimately couldn't figure out what was going on in time, not having access to all of the evidence they would have needed. But they were perhaps closer than anyone, at least closer than anyone that I've read about.

We also accept that the intelligence services of the United States don't work terribly well. This is no reflection on the individuals therein. Any bureaucracy runs at a fraction of its theoretical potential. The Government, in general, is a clumsy, stinky beast. Everyone knows this. Plato knew this.

Suppose LIHOP is true. That would mean that someone in power knew much more than these agents did.

This would seem to be dependent upon what you mean by LIHOP.

If those in charge merely defunded and defocussed the defenses, they certainly wouldn't have been able to predict precisely what came of their efforts, but they could be fairly certain (given the available warnings and evidence) that anything that did happen would be of a nature that could be used to push a much more aggressive foreign policy of adventurism while distracting away from domestic failures and promoting authoritarian agenda.