DU'ers have forgotten about the lessons we learned on 9/11

[King Coal]

We are in a war on terror. We have to spy on people to see if they're bad. We have to detain people if we think they're up to no good. And if they may know something, we need to get it out of them in any way possible.

[Burma Jones]

1. Sieg Heil.......n/t

[JuniperLea]

2. Good deal! Let's go after the King of Terror!

G W Bush. The most dangerous man alive today.

[Democrats_win]

3. I thought we attacked them there so we didn´t have to do that here.

[King Coal]

4. And, yes, we also need to not forget the lessons we learned

from the war on Christmas. Which is?

[ET Awful]

5. The main lesson we learned on 9/11 is how incompetent Bush is when

it comes to anything requiring an actual functioning brain.

[Roaming]

6. If eavesdropping on some suspected terrorists will prevent

another 911, I'm all for it. It seems to have worked so far--nothing has happened since 911...

[stillcool]

7. What would have been really nice...

would have been if the Bush Administration allowed our intelligence agency's to do their job...BEFORE 9/11.

See No Evil: What Bush Didn't (Want To) Know About 9/11
TomPaine.com
Saturday, March 1, 2003

FBI Document 199I

What we did discover was serious enough. To begin with, from less-than-happy FBI agents we obtained an interesting document, some 30 pages long, marked "SECRET." I've reproduced a couple of pages here (figure 2.1). Note the designation "199I" -- that's FBI-speak for "national security matter." According to insiders, FBI agents had wanted to check into two members of the bin Laden family, Abdullah and Omar, but were told to stay away by superiors -- until September 13, 2001. By then, Abdullah and Omar were long gone from the United States.

Why no investigation of the brothers bin Laden? The Bush administration's line is the Binladdins (a more common spelling of the Arabic name) are good folk. Osama's the Black Sheep, supposedly cut off from his Saudi kin. But the official line notwithstanding, some FBI agents believed the family had some gray sheep worth questioning -- especially these two working with the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), which the file labels "a suspected terrorist organization." ....

No matter how vile WAMY's indoctrination chats, they are none of the FBI's business. Recruitment for terror, however, is. Before 9/11, the governments of India and the Philippines tied WAMY to groups staging murderous attacks on civilians. Following our broadcast on BBC, the Dutch secret service stated that WAMY, "support(ed) violent activity." In 2002, The Wall Street Journal's Glenn Simpson made public a report by Bosnia's government that a charity with Abdullah bin Laden on its board had channeled money to Chechen guerrillas. Two of the 9/11 hijackers used an address on the same street as WAMY's office in Falls Church, Virginia.

The "Back-Off" Directive and the Islamic Bomb

Despite these tantalizing facts, Abdullah and his operations were A-OK with the FBI chiefs, if not their working agents. Just a dumb SNAFU? Not according to a top-level CIA operative who spoke with us on condition of strictest anonymity. After Bush took office, he said, "there was a major policy shift" at the National Security Agency. Investigators were ordered to "back off" from any inquiries into Saudi Arabian financing of terror networks, especially if they touched on Saudi royals and their retainers. That put the bin Ladens, a family worth a reported $12 billion and a virtual arm of the Saudi royal household, off-limits for investigation. Osama was the exception; he remained a wanted man, but agents could not look too closely at how he filled his piggy bank. The key rule of any investigation, "follow the money," was now violated, and investigations -- at least before 9/11 -- began to die.