Reply #143: 911 Commission says more terror attacks likely

[Jack Rabbit]

From the San Francisco Chronicle
Dated Sunday June 20

Overriding concern: more terror attacks
Al Qaeda strike a question of when
By Marc Sandalow, Washington Bureau Chief

Washington -- Perhaps the most alarming finding of the commission examining the Sept. 11 attacks, after more than 1,000 interviews, 16 months of investigation and 12 public hearings, is the broad consensus that those who struck in 2001 are poised and determined to kill again.
The commission heard chilling recounts last week of the moments leading up to the murderous crashes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside.
They also heard from numerous experts who testified that the al Qaeda terrorist network remained a dangerous threat, as well as disturbing details of earlier schemes to pump poison into air conditioning systems, crash airplanes onto crowded city streets and take over a Russian military installation in order to fire a nuclear missile at a U.S. city.
"It may strike next week, next month or next year, but it will strike,'' a top official at the CIA's counterterrorism center identified only as "Dr. K'' told the panel.

Read more.

I repeat the thesis expressed in several posts above:

Since Saddam had no terrorists ties, the invasion of Iraq in no way addressed the problem of international terrorism. Either Mr. Bush and his aides are completely incompetent or they cynically used the September 11 attacks as a pretext to invade Iraq for reasons other than those given.*

In any event, the invasion was and the continued occupation** is a waste of human lives, time and money. That invading Iraq would do nothing to address the problem of terrorism was one among many predictions of the political Left that have turned out to be correct. Among others are that the occupation would be met with a popular resistance movement that would require brutality to even attempt to subdue, that Mr. Bush's aides would behave more in a manner consistent with colonial than democratic principles, that American credibility would suffer and that world public opinion would continue to scorn the US as a consequence of the invasion.

We must therefore conclude that the Left was right. Anybody who says otherwise either does not know what he is talking about or is deliberately obfuscating the facts.

*The cynical use theory is the better one. If Bush and his people had any real confidence that the data they had before actually supported a case to invade Iraq, they would not have constituted the OSP in the Pentagon in order to discard inconvenient bits of intelligence and make ambiguous bits of intelligence sound less ambiguous than the facts warranted.
**The occupation will continue after June 30. The authority being given to the interim government under the arrangement with the CPA is not sovereignty. In terms of sovereignty, it fails the duck test.