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i'll give this a shot, shani....
i do not think that the americans were looking for the group that carried out the attacks--i think the entirety of the group that planned the attacks carried them out--the group was on the planes.
think about it: if you were going to carry out an action like that, how would you do it? you would want to create a new organization made up of people without particular significance (in terms of visible political pasts, say)--you would want it self-contained--and you would want to be very very careful about communications. the logistics would be easy to manage, it seems to me. funding could easily be generated internally, if the planning was long-term enough.
if that scenario is the case, then the attacks themselves could not have been prevented, and another, organized in a similar manner, could not be prevented. no amount of "security" is going to help prevent an action by a group you are not looking for. the state is not omniscient. it is not some all-knowing father-figure. it is a bureacratic apparatus.
if that is true--and i frankly havent seen anything to contradict it that i find in the least persuasive---then there are a series of problems that arise.
1. the bush people had to construct a coherent narrative in order to fashion a response. what i really fault them for are the choices they made in the making of this narrative, the narrative itself and how they have used it.
fundamental to this narrative is the spectre of al qeada.
i think the bin laden group unnecessary if you are looking to explain the attacks.
i think the bin laden group provided the bush squad a convenient signifier around which to fashion a story that is primarily therapeutic rather than factual.
once the bin laden group got introduced into the story, everything about the past that involved the bin laden group changed, became charged with meanings that are in fact the result of the story itself. these meanings have to do with the story itself--in light of this story, clinton made choices that resulted in x or y outcomes--but these outcomes are a function of what happened afterward and were irrelevant at the time they happened. and i think that what happened afterward, insofar as bin laden et al are concerned, is the story that the bush administration chose to elaborate in the period immediately following the attacks.
that is why i do not attribute much significance to the matters that you raise in your post above.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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