Cite that Tenet KNEW, beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was AQ, BEFORE even the second plane hit? Any indication that he KNEW it was a COORDINATED attack, and what the scope of said attack was…BEFORE the second plane hit, or even shortly after? My understanding is that they didn’t KNOW who was behind the attack with a reasonable certainty for days or even weeks after the attack. You saying Tenet held out on them or just knew more than everyone else??
But again Mombo, even saying for a second that Tenet DID know that it was AQ beyond a shadow of a doubt, what good does that information do WHILE the attack is happening? Unless you are saying Tenet knew all the particulars (which he didn’t), it doesn’t matter WHO is attacking…not right then. WHat matters is determining exactly whats going on, what the scope of the attack is. Later is when its good to know who is attacking…and they DID figure that out and went after them (after due deliberation) in Afghanistan. Up to that point the administration did an adaquate job…after that we won’t go into.
You keep babbling about him ‘getting informed’…care to explain in your own words and in your own mind exactly HOW the president GETS informed? Do you suppose he’s out there with the raw data trying to figure out whats going on and analysing it all? Care to comment that all of Bush’s staff were sitting idle while Bush read his book? What the hell do you think they were doing?? Or do you suppose it would have been helpful as they tried to make sense of what was going on if Bush would have been hovering over their backs, wringing his hands or bellowing for ANSWERS…RIGHT GOD DAMN NOW!! Got to know who to nuke fellas!! What do you suppose GW could have been gainfully employed in doing for those 30 min (I heard it was 5, but thats neither here nor there) when NO ONE KNEW WHAT THE HELL WAS GOING ON NOR THE SCOPE OR EVEN DIRECTION OF THE ATTACK WAS? He was as gainfully employed looking calm and presidential during that time while the peoples whos jobs it was collected the information, summarized it and put it into a form to present to him, as rushing out to do nothing but wait for people to get that info to him. You dont seem to understand this.
I’ll ask you again…take charge and do what exactly? What COULD he have done that he didn’t do? What would YOU have done?
-XT
I would have tried to figure out what to do. I wouldn’t have fiddled around while Rome burned. Again, the objection being made is that Bush wasn’t leading the effort. Stop weasling.
Weasling ehe? LMAO. Thats the pot calling the kettle black. Ok, so you’ve tried to figure out what to do…and your conclusions are?? You would have simply not fiddled while Rome burned. Very helpful suggestions, but I’m unaware Bush in fact either plays the fiddle or was actually fiddling…nor am I aware that Rome was burning on 9/11…I thought it was New York. And this translates to exactly what as far as actions go?? Want to be a bit more specific on what YOU would have done…besides not fiddling of course…
You would have tried to figure out what to do? I think that really is the crux of the whole thing. Nothing can be done, if you aren’t fully informed of a situation. Let me re-phrase that… Nothing should be done, if you aren’t fuly informed of a situation. And as numerous people have been trying to explain: the president gets informed of situations through his sources/aides.
I think people are just too quick to persecute Bush, on this subject. What could have Bush done, while all this was happening? Are you picturing the president striding into a dark room, illuminated by hundreds of LEDs and computer screens, and demanding “We need to identify find the sons-of-bitches who did this. I’ll bet it was Osama, and his gang.” Of course, the role of the POTUS will be played by David Caruso, as he is the only actor who can pull this sort of role off (ummm… because it’s complete fallacious).
So you’re expecting Radar O’Reily to come in at this point and hand Bush the orders to shoot down the plane? I can just see how this would play out:
Radar: Excuse me for interrupting you, sir, but I need you to sign these forms.
Bush: Okay, Radar, what are these forms for?
Radar: Oh, they’re just proclaiming today to be National Read to Children Day.
Bush [squinting]: Then why does it say, “Authorization to shoot down civilian aircraft in US airspace due to national emergency” across the top of them?
Radar [blushing]: Uh, I’m sorry, sir, I must have grabbed the wrong forms. I’ll be back in a minute with the right ones.
The SS kept Bush parked at the school for very good reasons:
1.) They knew where he was and that the immediate area was secure.
2.) They needed time to get the VP to a more secure area, and one where there was medical care available since Cheney has had several heart attacks and if the President gets whacked during a time of war, you don’t want the VP going “tits up” because there’s no one around to perform CPR.
3.) They needed time to establish “ultra secure” communication channels between the people who had an idea of what was going on, and people who could give the orders which determined who lives and dies.
4.) They needed to make sure that they had a reasonable idea of what was going on and what was causing it to happen so that they could inform the President and his staff. Had the events of 9/11 occured because someone managed to hack into the GPS navigation system of those planes (yeah, I know, you’d figure that the pilot would look out the window and notice that the building in front of him was getting awfully close and do something about it), putting more planes into the air, even military ones, might have done more harm than good.
5.) They needed time to plan the “extraction” scenerio. No doubt, up until 9/11 the SS’s main concern with protecting the POTUS was from snipers, with the Cold War well-over by this point, the possibility of a large scale attack on US soil seemed pretty remote. Plus, since this type of attack had never been used before in the US, they couldn’t simply dust off the old “Yank the big guy out of the photo op because the Soviets are launching nukes” plans and hope that they worked. (Would you want to be the official who gave the order to have the President yanked out of an area and sent to another area where he was promptly killed? I know I wouldn’t.)
IAC, this is all just pissing in the wind, not only because there’s not a damn thing which can be done to correct those mistakes, there really wasn’t a helluva lot that could have been done had Bush given the orders to shoot down planes the moment he’d been told of the first crash. Fighters would have to be scrambled (it’s not like there’s anti-aircraft batteries on rooftops in every city), after their targets had been selected, their pilots briefed (should they fire as soon as they see the plane or should they attempt to make contact with those in control of the plane first?), planes fueled and armed, and by that time, it would still have been all over.
Two F-16 jets were in the air and attempted to intercept Flight 97 which crashed in PA. They made it there just after the plane crashed into the ground. Had they gotten there any sooner, it wouldn’t have changed things because those jets had been on a training flight and were thus unarmed. Perhaps the sight of those planes outside the cockpit windows of the airliner would have inspired the hijackers to surrender, but I doubt it.
Ok, this just really bugs me. We can all probably agree that the linked site where the timeline appears is not pro-Bush. However, not only does the timeline often contain several links to different sources to back up one statement, these sources run the gamut in ideology from left to right, up/down, fiercely biased/entirely apolitical and even include hyper-partisan right-wing rags like The Washington Times and The Boston Herald. There are also numerous links to government web sites, such as www.whitehouse.gov. By my rough estimate, there are around 600 links in that timeline to source material.
Yet you still blithely dismiss it as a “psycho conspiracy theory timeline”. Amazing.
Can someone just explain to me what would pass muster as an acceptable timeline, considering its high relevance to this debate?
Ehm, maybe the fact that after every single entry there is an editorial section wondering aloud if there was a conspiracy? The page is unavailable due to bandwidth reasons right now, or I’d grab a few quotes, but really, when you’re looking for an impartial basis to make judgements on, do you really want things like “Why didn’t Bush leave now, unless he knew?” or “Why would the planes land, unless they were being kept from completing their mission?”
I wasn’t criticizing the accuracy of the timeline - as far as I could tell it is accurate to the second and very well referenced - I was questioning the editorialization within it. Are you also going to take the Radar O’Reilly interview above as literal?
Still more weasling. Stop trying to pretend that the question of whether there was anything worth doing is relevant and address the issue of why the president wasn’t doing anything. There’s nothing a ship’s captain facing a tidal wave in shallow water can do but it’s still deriliction of duty for her not to be at the helm in an emergency. That’s called an “analogy” by the way. Look it up.
This is the same Red Herring that xtisme is waving about madly hoping that no one will notice he doesn’t have a leg to stand on. A leader could have led the effort to respond. Bush didn’t. Does that surprise you?
That’s the thing-- a leader can only lead, when something can actually be done. I can’t think of anything, I repeat anything, that the president could have done during this.
Also, I can’t believe that you’re saying that xtisme doesn’t have a leg to stand on, when you are saying things like:
If there was nothing the president could do, then I would think, logically, we shouldn’t expect the president to do something.
You are seriously deluded, if you think you are scoring points here with this tripe. You’ve yet to address any of the issues or arguements brought up, other than calling me a weasel. I have said that the president WAS doing what he was supposed too…i.e. he was remaining calm and acting ‘presidential’ and waiting to act further until he knew exactly what he could and should do. I’ve said that this IS what the President is supposed to do. YOU Mr. Pot have yet to say exactly what you think the President SHOULD have been doing…so stop calling me a weasel and try, for once, to answer the question. What DO you think he should have been doing?
As far as your ‘analogy’ goes (I looked it up…never knew what that word meant before, thanks :rolleyes: ), if the captain of the ship learns that there is a tidal wave coming in and simply acts without information, driving his ship on the rocks then is this a good thing? Yah! he acted right away, and heroically killed all his crew…way to go!! Its certainly what you seem to be implying YOU would do. As opposed to waiting, getting information from his officers so he can make an INFORMED decision and maybe saving the ship or some lives by doing so…wouldn’t want to do that, would you??
In any event, in THIS situation, the President HAD the time to think first before he acted. Ya, it was a terrible attack, but it wasn’t threatening to the nation as a whole. So instead of acting rashly (or god knows what…you still havent said ANYTHING about what you think he should have done) he remained calm and let his subordinates gather the information needed to make an informed decision. Personally, prior to 9/11 and even now I wouldn’t have thought GW had it in him…I would have EXPECTED him to go off half cocked exactly as you appearently would have. I was shocked at the time he was able to remain so calm and to act so well through the crisis, and am still amazed now…more so in fact now that we know him better and after Iraq.
My suggestion to you is, re-read the thread and see who has no legs to stand on and who does. If that doesn’t help you, try upping the voltage on your shock treatments.
Better yet…why not, instead of attacking ME, you actually answer the question thats been put to you and the few in this thread that support your idea…namely exactly what you think the President could and should have done. After all, I’ve laid out MY position that the President was doing exactly what he could and should have done…you have not. Want to give that a shot? I doubt it…
-XT
As an aside, if this is your thought process and your debate method (i.e. ‘you are a weasel!! So THERE!’) I’m thinking that 2 cents may be over charging a bit…
How so? They may have known that the grounds and area surrounding the school was secure, but they had no way of knowing if a 747 was headed straight for them. (IIRC, there was an airport within about 10 miles of the school.)
This seems a little strange to me: securing the vice president takes precedence over the Commander in Chief? Why would they have to wait for Cheney to be moved before they could move the President? Couldn’t they do both at the same time?
Aren’t these lines available on Air Force One? I thought the plane was designed so that the President could conduct a war from inside of it if necessary.
It seems to me that AF1 would be the safest place for the president at that time. Perhaps I am over-confident in the abilities of this plane, but I imagine they have ultra-high technology which would alert them if a plane was coming anywhere near them. Not to mention the fact that the hijackers were not expert pilots by any means, but those flying AF1 are. They would have far superior abililities and probably would be able to evade an attack in the air.
Is the military on the same “channel” as civilian aircraft?
If this is true, it’s dangerously careless of the SS. What if there was a fire? A bomb threat? A madman with a gun invading the school? The Secret Service must have plans for evacuating the President from any building. (Surely, they scope out the location ahead of time.)
Secondly, from what I have heard, the SS is trained in methods of protecting the President from snipers as they rush him from one location to another. After all, you never know what will happen. The Service has to have some sort of a plan for almost any situation. Moving the president from a building to a waiting car is not that extreme of a circumstance. Hell, if need be, they probably could have driven the car right up to the door.
Regardless, the President was sitting right in the middle of a bulls-eye. It was foolish not to move him as soon as it was known, or even suspected that the crash was intentional.
Nor did they need to “scare” or “traumatize” the children in order to get him out of there. All that needed to be said was that Mr. President was sorry, but he had to go take care of some presidential duties, and he would come back another time. They could have calmly walked from the room, and then done what needed to be done to get the President to safety.
Of course not, but it seems far riskier to leave him in a location which was announced ahead of time as a sitting duck. I doubt if the plans for yanking the Big Guy out of any situation are covered with dust-- at least I sincerly hope to Christ that they are not. Why even bother having a Secret Service if they cannot accomplish something as relatively simple as moving the President from a building into a car in an emergency? He might as well fire them and get himself a mean dog.
Yes, they didn’t know what was happening, which is even more reason, in my opinion, to get the President the hell out of Dodge. You just don’t take risks with the life of the POTUS. I’m much more comfortable with the idea of an overreacting Secret Service than one which stands around with its thumbs up its collective ass. In retrospect, I think the American people would have heartily approved of their President leaving. Even if 9/11 had somehow been averted, I cannot imagine harsh criticism because the safety of the Commander in Chief took priority over reading to children.
Lets turn it about a bit Lissa. If AQ KNEW where the prez was, why do you suppose they didn’t go after him directly? Nothing would have been such a blow as killing the president. So…why DIDN’T they go after him? Could it be that the SS is smarter than to annouce far enough ahead of time when and where the prez is going to be? Could it be that they are smart enough to secure the area? The very nature of presidential visits mitigates such well planned attacks (you mostly have to worry about a lone mad man, unless the terrorist just get lucky).
Again, you make a good arguement, but do you have anything to back it up. DID the SS try and get Bush out and were overruled? Any evidence that the SS WANTED Bush out of there immediately? Who exactly made the decision that Bush would and should stay? Was it Bush? The SS? His political handlers? At a guess, since it dealt with security, it was the SS that made the ultimate decision. Least thats how I understand the process to work. If you or the others have some cites or additional information that will shed some light on your arguements, by all means bring it out and lets look at it. I could very well change my mind here if there is evidence that Bush disreguarded the SS’s urgings to leave so that he could stay in front of the cameras for a while longer.
The point about the VP makes sense if you look at it from a PR standpoint and at the succession. Basically one of the Presidents jobs (his MAIN job IMO, as really he’s mostly a figure head of his administration) is to remain calm and in the publics eye during a crisis, looking ‘presidential’…it has a calming effect on the citizens when they can see the president isn’t worried and not running for the hills. Remember Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis? He didn’t leave Washington (mostly), even though he knew it was a prime target, and he kept giving news comferences and was in the public eye. Sure, some of that was political…but most of it was because THATS his job in a crisis.
However, if the President is at risk, then by all means the VP has to be carted off to a place of safety…to assure the succession and the smooth transition of power. In addition, frankly no one gives a shit if the VP turns tail and goes into hiding in a safe place because not many people pay much attention to the VP in any case. Where as if the Prez bolts for cover, people take notice pretty quick.
Every single entry? Are you sure? Is there one in the very first entry (5:53am)? How about the second? The 6:31am one? 6:45am? 6:50am? 7:59am? 8:00am? 8:01am? 8:13am? Should I continue?
You mean those sentences that end in question marks posing questions? The ones usually at the end of the entry? The ones that are italicized and therefore kind of jump out, making them kind of easy to just ignore? Yes I do see them. They are rather obvious.
You mean like the 8:13am one: “Does the hijacking involve all of the hijackers from the beginning, or only one hijacker who is already in the cockpit when the hijacking begins, with the rest joining in later?” This is “wondering aloud if there was a conspiracy”?
Well, if I find myself “not criticizing the accuracy of the timeline [and] as far as I could tell it [was] accurate to the second and very well referenced” then, as a timeline, of course I would use it. Wouldn’t you?
Then I guess I was way off. “[P]sycho conspiracy theory timeline” isn’t even criticism of a timeline, but merely “questioning” a small and separable part of it.
As tasty as that may be, I have no idea what a Radar O’Reilly is and must admit I kind of skipped/skimmed what appeared after your “psycho” post.
" Since NORAD was in peak form, isn’t the incredible slowness of its response times on 9/11 even more inexplicable?"
“How can Atta have been sure the bags would not be checked onto the plane unless a confederate working in the airport makes sure the bags are not loaded?”
“If this is true, why isn’t the order to scramble given when the FAA called the pilots, instead of six minutes later? And even stranger, why does it take another six minutes (8:52) for the fighters to take off, if they had been given a heads up warning to get ready? Had the order to scramble been given now, there would be plenty of time for these fighters to reach New York before Flight 175.”
“Note that supposedly he doesn’t know of the hijackings in progress, and says this two minutes before the first WTC crash.”
“Is Bush and his aides putting on a charade to pretend he doesn’t know there is a national emergency? If so, why?”
“Why are the pilots not being told of their targets? Why are they being sent out into the ocean? Why is Bush reading a book about a goat when all this is happening?”
“The only likely explanation is that these fighters are prohibited from taking off.”
“And why would Bush take off in Air Force One without fighter escort”
Should I continue?
Would you trust a neonazi timeline of what happened at Auschwitz?
Actually, the reference I made was something like “even using the psycho conspiracy theory timeline, you’re still wrong.” The fact that I bring up questions of the timeline’s authenticity (as the source that created it is obviously biased towards one viewpoint) is secondary to the fact that I could even use this biased source to point out that the theory is incorrect.
Sure, because you like trolling easy meat instead of dealing with the issue, don’t you?
Here is the President’s schedule posted March 26th:
A lot of plans can be made in a week’s time, which is a very scary thought. At this point, we know where the President will be until almost the middle of next month!
Why didn’t they go after Bush on September 11th? I don’t know. Perhaps they felt that bringing down two skyscrapers and killing thousands of people would inspire more terror than a small number plus the Commander in Chief. After all, we have plans in place in case of the death of a president. No one had plans in place in case of catastrophic chaos after planes slam into buildings.
I have no idea who decided what. All I have are suspicions, and I suspect that it was basically a situation in which everyone stood around scratching their heads, unsure of when to move or what to do.
Actually, I think that that was a lot of the problem on 9/11-- bewilderment, lack of communication, and confusion. Frankly put, they caught us with our pants down. I don’t see anything nefarious in what was done by the SS or the administration that day, but I do think the SS dropped the ball in a big way.
So, according to this, there are plans and evacuation routes thought out in advance. It’s my opinion that this was the time to utilize such plans. I feel that a certain complacency might have come into the SS, which meant that when there really was a crisis, they didn’t quite know what to do. Sure, they had planned for it, but when the proverbial shit hit the fan, they were a bit lost. They were tentative, and it could have gotten our President killed.
They should have firmly insisted that he come with them, and not really given him much choice in the matter. One of the agents should have stepped forward and said, “Sorry kids, but the President has some things he has to attend to.” Bush would have had no choice at that point, being in front of the cameras, but to follow them out of the room. He couldn’t exactly make a scene about it.
Hey, all of this is just my opinion. I wasn’t there-- I don’t know who decided what. I just don’t feel the situation was handled with the seriousness that it deserved. At any hint of a threat, the President should be removed. If the President throws a stink about it later, so what? An agent’s job is to take a bullet for that man; to be afraid of being chewed-out is small in comparison. At least he’s alive.
The only people seeing him look “presidential” were a group of schoolchildren and reporters taping footage to be used later. None of it was carried live. The first that I remember hearing on that day about the President was that he was being flown to an undisclosed location. I didn’t even know about the reading event until much later, when the media started running the footage.
Not necessarily. If the President had taken off all of his clothes and started doing the Macarena on the teacher’s desk, I doubt if the American people would have noticed. While watching those towers fall, I wasn’t thinking about what the president was doing. I don’t think I would have much cared if he’d run screaming from the room on live TV. America panicked even with a calm President.
The difference between this situation and Kennedy’s was that Kennedy was facing the possibility of an attack. We were undergoing one.
Pssst…“tinyurl” is not the name of a website. The link is to the Sarasota Herald Tribune. acaveman hasn’t been here long enough to know how to incorporate links into text, so he used a program called “tinyurl” to convert a very long link into a short one.
And they had no way of knowing what was going on, so they couldn’t be sure that it’d be safe to move the President at all. I can’t remember the time I saw Reagan if there were any military fighters in the air or not, but I’d be willing to bet that the airspace was already cleared in the area, just on general principals.
I’ve no idea where the VP was at the moment, and what it would have taken to get him to a secure area. If he had minimal SS protection (he being the spit bucket holder), it seems logical to me that you’d want to get maximum security to him ASAP.
Yes, they are, but I actually worked for a company which handled those phones, and they don’t operate like ordinary cellphones, they take time to get set up. Especially when you’ve got to change codes all of a sudden (in such an emergency the intelligent thing to assume is that your current codes have been compromised and switch to a new standard). Not to mention, if the folks you need to talk to aren’t at their phones, then you’ve got to get them to the phones (or the phones to them).
How safe is the route to AF1? Is the area around AF1 still secure? Those are the questions which have to be answered and quickly.
Can’t say for sure, but if there was some kind of jamming system which was fouling the electronics of all aircraft?
Those are all standard emergencies, but this was a new one. In the Apollo program they never trained for the kind of failure that happened on 13 because no one thought that such a disaster would be survivable. It obviously was.
Again, at that moment, you only know that the area your in is safe. If there’s been no unusual activity, no planes headed in that direction, then it’s best to keep the big guy there while you sort things out.
No matter how well prepared you are for a disaster, if nothing happens for years and years to keep you on your toes, you’re going to get “rusty.”
You’re not looking at things correctly, rushing the President out of there might put him at greater risk than having him stay put, better to make sure that you can get him out of the building (which means the SS guys with the machine guns in their briefcases have to get them out and ready) into the next safe area (probably want to do a sweep of Limo 1 to make sure no one’s been able to plant a bomb), and you’ve got to be certain that this is right, because otherwise the big guy might get killed (or you might have to take a bullet for him).
Rather, I think SOME Israeli leaders knew in advance about the attacks since MOSSAD was following Al Qaida’s every move. I even think Bush knew and let it happen as an excuse to go to war. I use the following as my sources:
I realize I am oft impatient and abrasive and have been trying to be more careful. I have a new motto, “Criticize But Don’t Generalize”. I criticized your actions in this thread but didn’t generalize and call you a sneak. No one has used the word “weasel” in this thread but you. I mocked your literal interpretation of my Nero analogy but didn’t call you a clown. I might feel you are being intellectually dishonest on this topic but I will not call you a liar or deluded. YOU have attacked ME. I have attacked only your behavior.
I haven’t addressed all the arguments because so many are mere distractions. The argument that the President was doing what he was supposed to do is germain. It’s also unconvincing. The first step in a response is to figure out what is going on. To continue my marine analogy the place to respond is from the bridge. That’s where the captain reports in an emergency. That’s how Bush should have acted presidential. By leading a response instead of following his schedule.
What about the behavior of his subordinates? They surely knew it was a terrorist attack before he went into the classroom yet they let him go ahead and during it cued him not to say anything yet. Does it surprise you that they seem to treat him more like an actor than as their leader?
Woops… I feel like an ass. Sorry about that, acaveman, and thanks for pointing out my error, Rilchiam.
I know what you mean… it does seem like the thread has almost been severely hijacked, in some cases.
I agree 100%. But I also think that this is what xtisme is trying to say, as well.
This is where we begin to differ, I believe. Why does the president have to respond “from the bridge?” I think when you are speaking of a ship (in your analogy), a captain usually has to report from the bridge because most of the control resides in that location. That’s not the case with the POTUS, though. He has aides with him, wherever he goes. He can be informed of situations, and give commands from virtually anywhere (I would venture to say, even the bathroom of an elementary school).
But you cannot give commands, or “lead” in a situation where you do not have complete information. And since “The first step in a response is to figure out what is going on” was an incomplete step, it would be impossible (and a bad idea) to try to advance to the second step.
