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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: unclewest who wrote (33689)	3/10/2004 5:56:40 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793868

What hurt was our inability to see it coming and our inability to respond prior to the attack due to massive cuts in our intel gathering folks and an unwillingness to react to the gathering threat by the clinton administration. I think that Clinton and Co had all they needed to know to take out Ben Ladin, but not the will. If they had done so, I think 911 would still have happened. It sounds to me like the idea for 911 came from some terrorists who went to Al Qaeda for help. These guys would have pulled it off anyway. It wasn't a shortage of people and money that stopped us from finding out about 911. It was the lack of imagination to see it as a real threat.

To: unclewest who wrote (33689)	3/10/2004 9:15:00 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793868

What hurt was our inability to see it coming and our inability to respond prior to the attack due to massive cuts in our intel gathering folks and an unwillingness to react to the gathering threat by the clinton administration. I don't know that budget cuts were the salient cause of our intelligence problems. The intel folks were just doing their own thing in their own way--inertia. The government "reinvention" program didn't cover the CIA, I don't think. Any more money would likely have been spent doing more of the same. The shortfall was more imagination than money, methinks. In any event, the gathering threat wasn't seen by either the previous or the current administrations so I don't think that singling out one of them is convincingly apt in this case. The first WTC attack, the 2 embassy attacks, an attack on a warship, the Khobar towers attack and TWA 800 were reasons enough to take definitive action. Definitive action, sure, but do you really think that if 9/11 had instead been just another Cole-type incident that it would have triggered a war with Iraq? Maybe, given the history with Iraq, but I don't know that another incident along the same lines as before would necessarily have triggered a paradigm shift on our end. ...if only the Muslim militants had continued these attacks and not attacked the WTC for a second time? IMO, it was the extraordinarily dramatic nature of the WTC attack that got us off the dime. I can't say that another WTC attack like the previous one would have done it.