Reply #10: Preventing 9/11...

[Nuff]

I've thought a lot about this, but I can only get so far. We lived in San Diego in the mid 1990's. We, in fact, had one of the groups of hijackers living within a mile or two of us in Clairemont, though we did not know it at the time. They had moved into the area in the mid-late 1990's. So, as we approach 2001, they had laid their plans, completed their flight schools, bought their plane tickets, and were in the last stages of carrying out their plan.

At this point, how could Bush have prevented it from happening?

No one knew these muslim men were going to do what they did. There were not laws to eavesdrop on them, intercept their mail, discover their plans. They hadn't acted as anything but normal consumers at their flight schools, so they could not have been followed, wiretapped, or scrutinized there.

There were no provisions for profiling, detaining, or imposing strictures on muslim men--even if they had suspicions that these particular men were planning something monsterous. There were no provisions for searching them more thoroughly the day they flew--or even knowing that they did plan to fly that day and that passengers needed better searching for weapons.

To my knowledge, there was not adequate informants or infiltrators that had intelligence on them--and there was no way to know who they were, what they planned, when they planned it, and how they were going to carry it out. Any measures then that could've been taken to target them, spy on them, scrutinize them, detain them, interrogate them, investigate them and their flight schools are the very things today that are being labeled egregious violations of our civil rights/their civil rights.

How could Bush have prevented what they did on 9/11/2001? Was there something that Bush should have been doing that could have stopped them? Was there some laws protecting our safety that were ignored? Was there some intelligence on a specific plan that was read, but not believed? Did it have no action taken on it? Where was the negligence of the administration? What didn't Bush/Cheney/Rummy/Wolfie/Ashcroft etc. not do? What did the CIA/FBI not do that they should've done? What should the Pentagon and our military done that it did not do? What laws existed to protect us from the very thing that happened that were not acted on?