"9/11 and the incompetence excuse", good summary piece

[moodforaday]

I have no idea who the author is and I don't think I've ever been to the website before, but I like to look at the message, not the messenger, so:

9/11 and the incompetence excuse: Could a bunch of sociopathic screw-ups really pull off the crime of the century?
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2818.shtml

Many who deny government complicity in 9/11/01 maintain that some of the best evidence against official involvement in the crime of the century lies in the Bush administration's unbroken record of sheer incompetence, an argument bolstered by the perception that key members of the administration, notably The Commander Guy, spent that entire day running around like headless chickens.

On the contrary, they did no such thing. Rather, the administration was highly competent and enormously successful that day -- they just had different criteria for success than would sane people. And they've been highly competent ever since. You just have to adjust your standards for evaluating success, then view the past six years through the PNAC/neocon lens. Let's review some of their primary accomplishments -- on 9/11 and in the six eternal years since:

They got the entire world to believe that a ragtag organization called Al Qaeda, fronted by a seriously ill guy in a cave armed with only a laptop and a phone, managed to orchestrate an unbelievably complex plan that had involved years of planning and training, much money, split-second timing and ridiculously good luck.
(...)

Literally overnight, they and their mass media cheerleaders turned a quasi-literate simpleton who was already tanking in the polls into an heroic "war president" who enjoyed the approval of more than 90 percent of the American public and the support of just about the entire world community.
(...)

They got the entire world to believe Condi Rice when she perjured herself at the 9/11 Commission hearings by saying, "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."
(...)

Nothing new, but a good summary. The incompetence argument always irks me the most, because it assumes, without evidence, "good intentions" on part of people whose entire lives demonstrate the opposite.

Interestingly, this idea may be gaining some traction. Vanity Fair has an article out that looks at Iraq from this PoV - not as a failure, but as the intended result, competently achieved. The article is not online yet, but excerpts are here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2665314

[nebula]

1. When you understand what their true goals are

then they (the neocons) have been totally competent in achieving them.