Now we find British intelligence warning American intelligence of "Flying Bombs", two years before 9/11.... drip, drip, drip...
[url]http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020609/1/2zc6b.html[/url]

So, I ask: Why mention it? Let's just say that the federal gov't listened to every warning it got and took the necessary steps to neutralize the threat as they understood it. Would [b]that[/b] have made a difference? No, because in order to prevent the 9/11 attacks the planes would have to have been kept on the ground.

I'm no apologist for the federal government - they've screwed the pooch too many times in the past - but I think that nothing short of "time, place, flight number, passenger name, seat number" would have been able to prevent the 9/11 attacks from happening.

What else should they be expected to say??

Taking the many warnings together should have precipitated some action on our part that would have disrupted the plan.


Please........

i agree that there's a high probability that nothing could have been done to stop it, but as we learn more and more about this tragedy it becomes evident that our intel services failed us badly.

we apparently got warnings that terrorists were planning "flying bomb" attacks, then we heard theyre getting flight training, then we had rumors that something was up for september.

i'd like to think someone would be following these suspected bad guys around and watching them, after all isnt that what the fbi is paid for? it seems our shiney shoe guys were outsmarted by a bunch of so-called "raghead camel-jockeys", and that offends me.

lurker, check my post on the FBI bonus's. You are correct about the "shiney shoe guys". It seems the field agents were trying to do their jobs, but were prevented from doing so by higher ups... The same one's who get the bonus's and promotions!!

Without specifics, the only thing that could have reliably disrupted the plan was the grounding of all airliners. How long could we have kept them on the ground? A day? A week? A month? Would the hijackers' plans have truly been foiled, or would they simply have scheduled the same attacks for when commercial air travel was again permitted? If they learned enough to fly the aircraft in flight school, they learned enough to train others to fly the aircraft on a one-way trip - others who wouldn't have their names on any lists. So let's say that Moussawi and the other 19 hijackers in his posse all got captured on Sept 11 2001 because the fedgov acted on intel it received - does this mean we'd have been any safer in the future?

I agree that the gov't should have acted on the intel it received - but to have all of this come out now strikes me more as Monday-morning quarterbacking and inter-agency blame-shifting and finger-pointing than anything else. And who's to say the enemy isn't smart enough to swamp our intel agencies with mostly false reports, makign it even less likely that they'll concentrate on one of the genuine ones? The gov't would need far more than the 60K, 80K, or however many "armed gov't agents" it has to follow up on all these reports.

I just get tired of hearing all the people who say "the gov't is under no obligation to protect us - the Supreme Court said so!" turn around and say "why didn't you protect us?!?!" in response to the 9/11 attacks. Not to mention the liberals and their media flunkies who speak out against profiling, yet demand exactly that when they ask why the gov't didn't stop this.

How about paying attention to their own field people and other sources? HQ got plenty of warning that something was up. I am sick of the "Monday morning QB" stuff. Somebody or sombodies screwed up big time, and heads should roll! What happened to accountability?? Do you want the same people making decisions now as did then?/ I don't. When an employee screws up, you take corrective action.


The Supreme Court has NOT said the govt. is under no obligation to protect us from foreign attack. The Constitution and founding documents seem to demonstrate the opposite is the case....

The [b]only[/b] thing that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks, other than the grounding of all commerical aircraft, would have been if the gov't had somehow gotten the flight numbers, times, passenger names, etc, of the hijacked aircraft and hijackers. We've known since 1996, when the Filipinos caught and tortured an Islamic terrorist involved with the 1st WTC bombing, that there were plans to use US airliners as bombs by flying them into buildings. do you have any idea of how many flights there are every day in the USA? And of how impossible it would be to ensure that [b]no[/b] terrorists get on [b]any[/b] of them? El Al can do it because El Al only has a minuscule percentage of the number of flights that American airlines do.

I'm not saying that the people who ignored these warnings shouldn't be punished - they should, and severely. If a military officer was to do these same things, he'd be charged with dereliction of duty. I [b]am[/b] saying that none of the warnings we received were specific enough to have made a real difference. If 10 diffeent people come up to me and tell me "Hey, NH2112, someone's out to get you! I don't know who, or when, or where, or how, but you're a marked man" it's not going to do me much good. I suppose I could just investigate every person I've ever come in contact with, but that'd take too long and wouldn't help me if the person out to get me was someone I'd never met - I need specifics, man!

Using this logic, it would seem to me that the security we have put in place since 9/11 would not prevent the same thing from happening now...Where in NH are you from, I was raised in Mass. part of the time in Ipswich, not far from Salsbury Beach. They still have the roller-coaster there?

I don't think today's security [b]would[/b] prevent someone from commandeering an airliner and flying it into a building. He might not be able to get on board with a knife of any kind, but I don't think too many people would rush him even if he had no weapon...sad but true. I'm not so sure that I believe the USAF will be able to stop an airliner, either, unless it happens to be heading for a high-priority target - there are too many airliners in too much sky, and not enough fighters to cover all of them. All in all, I think today's security measures are more to give the American public the feeling that the gov't is doing something to protect them, than to actually provide that protection. Of course, confidence is an important thing, and the economy would be badly damaged if people weren't confident enough to fly for business, pleasure, etc. But what's the one [b]real[/b] thing that's come from the Homeland Defense office, after 9 months and millions or billions of dollars? A color-coded 5-step terror warning system! Smokey the Bear has been using the same kind of system to warn of forest fire dangers for decades now!

I agree, I didn't say what we are doing will work...it won't! Maybe it's not supposed to.....nawwww, they'd NEVER do that....
What about Salsbury Beach??

Salisbury Beach....I've never been there. I live in southwestern NH, about 20 miles west of Manchester, and I'd guess Portsmouth is about 75 miles away so Salisbury is probably closer to 100 or so.