I only heard a very broad overview of this story, so tell me if anyone else has heard this.

I heard that today or yesterday The New York Times put out information that said that in 5 months before september 10th, the Bush administration got 52 (FIFTY TWO) warnings of Osama Bin Laden and Al Q. had plans to hijack passenger planes and use diffrent methods to make a grand explosion or something. When you get 52 reports saying this...

And apparently C Rice's second in command I guess, the one right under her, was breifed about these things. Yet before her acceptance by Congress she said that we had no way to know it would happen. 52 reports and no way to know? Also, this report was apparently brought out 48 hours after her acceptance.

Remember, this is all I heard. If someone else actually read this article, please bring it on here, and let us all read it. Then lets start another debate on it I guess.

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Do not believe out of fear, or for the fact you grew up in a religon. Believe what your heart tells you is right.
-C. Payette

that got the reports. They never acted. I'm not sure Bush even knew. The government is pretty big you know, despite the party of small government being in charge.

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Where are we going? And why am I in this handbasket?

"The government is pretty big you know, despite the party of small government being in charge."


heheeh I realized that the idea of small government is a myth as soon as your "town" becomes a "city" and so forth. The US government could stop the monetary problems it faces but that would require spending LESS money....


and the government doesn't do that and won't do that..


even if the libertarians become the majority.

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I was banned from godlike productions... and loved it.

That's not exactly what the NY Times story said. I read it this morning. First of all, there really wasn't anything new in there. All this stuff, I've heard before. But it did confirm that any warnings that the Bush administration had was appropriately passed on to the FAA and to the airlines. I believe that's what they said all along. But again....they were very non-specific as to where and when and how.

I certainly didn't see how this warranted a front page story. Other than it looks like someone is hard at work looking for something that they think might tamp down Bush's rising approval ratings.

BTW, here's a link to the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/10/po.../10terror.html

(It's NYTimes....so you may have to register. But it's free)

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"This is a time for a national imperative not to fail in Iraq." Condoleeza Rice, January 11, 2007

The times article and other articles about clues that could have been read and understood in the same Monday morning quarterbacking as trying to prove how Clinton failed to "get Bib Laden". They are both bogus, and those who engage in it are just partisan speculators.

It just so happens that I have recently been reading a rather thick book about the hearings based on the Pearl Harbor investigation. Some partisans blame Roosevelt. Others blame the Admirals and Generals. Some blame our intelligence gathering services. Sound familiar ?

When you look at the reasons why pearl Harbor happened from a Monday morning quarterback perspective you see a lot of reasons. There was arrogance in that many Americans including the pols and the military did not think that the "Japs" had the "smarts" to hit us. Some did not think that Japan had the equipment to fight with us. Some believed that the Japanese were all too short and had bad eyes so how could they see anything to bomb us or shoot at us.

The lunatic fringe believed that Roosevelt set us up and let the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor so we could enter the war. Does that sound familiar.
Isn't there a lunatic fringe in this country that thinks Bush let 9/11 happen so he could attack Iraq.

I've said before and I'll say it again: there is no president, past or present, that wouldn't have moved heaven and earth to save our country from 9/11 had they been able to. And that includes Bill Clinton, IMHO.

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"This is a time for a national imperative not to fail in Iraq." Condoleeza Rice, January 11, 2007

...and it's our job to hold the government to a higher standard so they don't happen again. Unfortunately, the line between accountability/improvement and partisan "Monday morning quarterbacking" becomes far too blurred. Instead of using a horrible disaster as a political device, we should be finding out WHY this was allowed to happen and fix any problems. Ideally, politics would be removed from something as crucial as national security.

The intelligence service screwed up. Officials didn't act on a number of warnings. The list goes on. There was no grand conspiracy and implying that there was one impedes our efforts to genuinely improve the government's capability to stop future attacks.

Relentlessly blaming an official is not good--but neither is letting them get off the hook.

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Proudly a "South Park Republican"

When Andrew Card, Bush's press secretary, said in the days after 9/11 that the Bush administration had had no warning WHATSOEVER about the threat of a terrorist attack on the US, how can anyone defend that statement as anything but a lie.

And isn't it incredible that it took nearly a year to find out that there was at least one or maybe a few warnings, another year before the Aug. briefing Bush received entitled "Osama Bin Laden threatening terrorist attack by hijacking" and now over 3 years before we find out that there were more than 50 warnings between April and Aug. That's quite a few dots not to be able to connect.

The cynical have noted that this section of the 9/11 Commission report may have been intentionally delayed by the administration, while the rest was published in July.

Two months after an election - what is that odour in the air?

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"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."

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"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."