oopsie!

[rone]

Could the Bush Administration actually be responsible for the London bombings? (Yes, the site's advertising is so strident that it makes Al Franken look like Mr. Rogers, i know, but try to ignore that while you read.)

Comments

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

I did hear about how they accidentally leaked an important operative's identity last year. It's not inconceivable that this was a consequence of that.

The possibility of failing to stop an attack is but one reason the identity of operatives should be, and ususlly is, a closely guarded secret. With that in mind, it's probable that Khan wasn't their ONLY operative in al Qaeda. He's just the one they dropped the ball on.

[nothings.livejournal.com]

but:

As a result of the heightened security alert, the media dug into the story to find out what the heightened alert was based on, and they got a hold of Mr. Khan's name and made it public.

So you could blame the media, in some sense. At least enough that the media aren't going to call attention to it. Although I think I saw a report somewhere else that the administration had actually named his name.

[wisn.livejournal.com]

Thread on Metafilter (http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/43501) which is easier to read, both in the executive-summary sense and the visual-noise sense.

Given this

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

and Rove's involvement in the Plame affair, how long before it's no longer preposterous to suggest that the Administration was complicit or possibly directly involved in 9/11?

Re: Given this

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It's not preposterous to suggest it, but I haven't seen any actual evidence apart from "cui bono?" reasoning and old family connections with bin Laden's estranged relatives, and some bizarre claims that are contrary to abundant evidence (that the Pentagon plane didn't exist, that there were actually no hijackers at all and the planes were electronically controlled).

If you're suggesting that the administration's general incompetence at running the country and political bloody-mindedness contributed to the Sept. 11 attacks (as seems to be the case here), I think that's already clear to anyone with eyes to see.

Re: Given this

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Sure, those guys were going to head back to Afghanistan for reassignment had Gore been elected.

I mean

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

more specific complicity--deliberately ignoring foreknowledge, deliberately botching intervention--as suggested in The New Pearl Harbor and Fahrenheit 911. Their stretching of "appearance of impropriety"-type observations into questions of culpability was pooh-poohed as preposterous, baseless accusations. How long before public perception of them changes from preposterous to merely unlikely?

On a different but related note, I forget whether it was Randi Rhodes or Laura Flanders that I heard last summer talking about a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan threatening Taliban representatives with war in July 2001 if Afghanistan didn't agree to the Unocal pipeline. I never got around to following up and looking for news stories about this, but the conspiracy theorists seem to have plenty to say about "carpets of bombs or carpets of gold." Since my immediate reaction to seeing the towers in flames was "What the hell has our President gotten us into?" I find it really frustrating that our news media have had nothing to say about this in four years even though the Grauniad (http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4262511,00.html) reported something like it less than two weeks after the attack.

[omarius.livejournal.com]

I take this kind of thing with a brick of salt.

1) The world is big and populous
2) Hindsight is 20/20
3) Our governments are comprised of people, much like Red Hat Society chapters and commmunity college administrations. They're not illuminati. The illuminati aren't even illuminati. Fnord.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I definitely don't think of it as a conspiracy. It's simply gross incompetence.

[glitter-ninja.livejournal.com]

OK, so I think you've read my journal long enough to know that I am no fan of Bush (any of 'em) or his cronies.

But, I have to wonder, just how difficult is it to distinguish between a legitimate threat and a false alarm? I know two people who work(ed) in government who couldn't tell you what their job was, and without getting myself closely watched by Big Brother, they are both incredibly intelligent people. I suspect most people in that line of business are.

So, are all these intelligent people not good enough at their job? Or is the information interpreted correctly but there is some partisan bickering that makes El Presidente not trust the information he receives? Or is the government actually stopping 99.9% of these attacks and just by virtue of the sheer number of attacks, some get through?

I want to say it's incompetence, but we aren't ever told enough to really know if it is or not.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

All those intelligent people are still bound by the politics of their bosses (i mean internal politics, not conservative/liberal politics). And i'd be willing to let this go as a fluke, except, of course, that there's a pattern and a history of gross incompetence already.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think there are a lot of smart and competent people in the government; I know some. The problem is that smart people who tell the truth frequently get overruled, defamed or squashed by a bunch of complete tools at the very top of the hierarchy who prefer to trust their own fantasies. There is a real distrust of empirical evidence and qualified expertise.