Quote:
Originally posted by lordjeebus
The terrorists themselves are not the focus of investigation; rather it is our government that needs to be investigated:
Did US have intelligence that could have prevented it?
If so, did the Bush Administration ignore such information?
If not, how did our intelligence-gathering agencies fail?
How much did we know? Why didn't we know more? Why didn't we act on what we did know?
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From the article, it appears that the answers were:
yes,
absolutely,
our intelligence community didn't push as hard as they should have,
quite a lot,
because we rely too heavily on sigint and not enough on human intelligence and because the folks we have looking at the sigint speak better Russian, German, and Chinese than they do Arabic and Pashtun,
and, finally (and this is purely my speculation), because it was politically inconvenient to act on what information there was, what plans were in place to deal with this kind of information were drafted by an administration that had been roundly excoriated by the members of this administration and most of their most ardent supporters for the better part of the previous decade, the current administration misunderestimated the nature of the threat, and, possibly (I am not accusing, but I see no reason to believe that they are above this) they were of the opinion that a terrorist attack on this country would be the very thing to jumpstart their dead in the water political agenda, never dreaming that what was coming down the pike would make Oklahoma City look like somebody hitting the neighbor's dog with a bottle rocket.
Yeah, that about covers it.