I don’t think the Thread title could be more descriptive.
Yes I do. Osama yo mama had already attacked the WTC once and Clinton was in office at the time. It is clear that he didn’t care who was in office.
Of course it would have. They’d been planning it for years. It was out of resentment for American forces using Saudi Arabia as a base during Desert Storm a decade back, not a personal attack on Bush. It’s one of the reasons he (Bush) had so much support at the start of his tenure, no one in their right mind blamed him personally for the attack.
In the sense that Bush may have been underestimated where someone else (Gore?) might not have been, and that that contributed to the “go” being given, and that that “go” might not have been given otherwise, I guess I could support the notion that 9/11 might not have happened at that specific time if it hadn’t have been that Bush was president.
Lots of ifs here. But I suppose the important thing is that it did happen, and that what-iffing is a waste of time.
I am no fan of George W Bush. I am among those who think he is the worst president since plastic was invented, and I don’t think much of his administration and its policies.
But this is one thing that should not be laid at his feet. If anything, the fact that the attack occurred on his watch indicates that it would have happened regardless of who was Prez.
The platform on which he was elected*-with-an-asterisk was one of isolationism, mostly voiced as “let those other nations sort out their problems, it’s not our concern (or the concern of our wallets)”.
My reaction at the time it occurred was very explicitly “What the fuck did they (whoever they are) think they were going to accomplish? We’ve got an isolationist president who scarely knows what other countries exist out there. So they attack us on our own soil? They just did the one thing that’s guaranteed to get this country immersed to the eyeballs in international affairs, are they nuts?”
I think there was a pretty fair chance the 9/11 attack would have been thwarted had Gore been president rather than Bush. The Warren Rudman-Gary Hart report was delivered in person to Bush in the Oval Office just days after he took office. The Bush people said thanks but we’re going to take our own security measures.
Hart visited Con Rice, in person, in her office and warned her again about certain attacks involving “airline highjacking and NY City and Washington, DC.” That was on 9/5/01, I believe. And what did she do?
We’ll never know but with all the signals outside the “noise” it appears that had we had a competant administration in place there MIGHT, …just might, …have been a chance to upgrade the airline highjacking screening and stop the murders.
Yes.
Yes.
I cannot imagine Osama and his cronies going “better not do this while a Democrat is in the White House”. And indeed, since Clinton fired cruise missiles directly at him, I’d imagine Bin Laden would have been only too happy to kill all those people on Clinton’s watch.
ALEX-NC,
So what if anyone had prior knowledge that “attacks involving airlines in NY and DC” might occur? What could you do?
None of the 9/11 hijackers did anything illegal up until the moment they slashed the throat of the first victim on the plane. Box-cutters were not banned at the time.
So unless the president was going to ground all US air traffic or utilize racial profiling and ban certain ethnic groups on airplanes, I don’t see how 9/11 could have been avoided by ANY president.
I think it would have still happened. I think whoever was the president would have handled it pretty similarly as well. However, with a more intelligent president I don’t think we would have run into the police state mentality that now is all around the capital region and in the airports. I believe that airport personel would have been forced to be more secure but would have done it more seemlessly so it doesn’t seem like you are walking into a prison when you are taking the equivalent of a bus trip in the sky.
Well, if Al Gore was President, that changes the entire universe. Butterfly flapping its wings and all that. Maybe they wouldn’t have hit the WTC, but someone would have knocked the Sears Tower down and killed 30,000 people instead.
But certainly the likelihood of it happening would not have changed. George W. Bush did not create the CIA and the FBI at the state they were in as of his inauguration; they got that way before it was his job to oversee them. I find the idea that Gore would have seen it coming where Bush did not kind of silly. It’s obvious that nobody saw it coming, or else they would have done something about it on September 10.
Probably.
Who knows what would have happend if Gore had become president? I’d say that Gore probably had a better chance of stopping it with 8 years of expeirence with foriegn policy under Clinton, but I doubt it would have made any difference.
I had been thinking how the terrorist cells were in sleeper mode, only awaiting to be activated. I was also thinking that the cells may not have been activated had Bush not been president. I feel exactly the same way as ** AHunter3 ** about this president, however I’m not suggesting that it was his fault, only that if he was not the president perhaps the cells would have been left to sleep. Living in foreign country, I take a lot of flack for the way this president acts, and the feeling around here seems to be that Bush must have pissed somebody off. I was intrested in seeing if this was the sentament in the states as well.
** Alex-NC ** wrote:
I didn’t know about this. Interesting.
Please provide a cite for this claim.
As for the OP, IMHO, the answer is yes. Four different attacks on the U.S. by Al-Qaeda occurred during the Clinton presidency–the 1993 WTC bombing, the embassy bombings in Africa, the Khober Towers attack, the U.S.S. Cole attack. I’m not following the logic that says the dirtbags only decided to ratchet things up because Bush was in office. Obviously, the 9/11 attacks were in the works for years so I don’t believe anything would have deterred the scumbags from carrying out the plan.
Stephe96 wrote:
"So what if anyone had prior knowledge that “attacks involving airlines in NY and DC” might occur? What could you do?
None of the 9/11 hijackers did anything illegal up until the moment they slashed the throat of the first victim on the plane. Box-cutters were not banned at the time.
So unless the president was going to ground all US air traffic or utilize racial profiling and ban certain ethnic groups on airplanes, I don’t see how 9/11 could have been avoided by ANY president."
They could have given high warnings to the people in charge of airline security. They could have put air marshalls on planes. They could have warned the airlines to secure the cockpits better. They could have matched alien’s wanted for illegal US entry with airline tickets purchased and perhaps made an arrest at the airport. They could have put the Air Force on a higher level of warning to be ready to get fighters in the air in the event of highjackings…
Would you like me to go on?
Con Rice admitted that there were warnings in the morning write-up they give to the president each morning… on August 18th, 2001. I don’t know if she or Bush read it. Bush was on that 1 month vacation in Texas after 7 months in office.
Unless someone manages to dig up a memo or an AIM history log showing the president and his underlings acknowledging the threat and saying they were going to pull up some chairs and popcorn, I think the 9/11 attacks would have happened no matter who was president (whether it be Bush, Gore, Nader, Bradley, McCain, or my drunk uncle Elbert).
I don’t Bush much at all, but I don’t think this is something that can be pegged wholely on him. Sure, there were lapses in the FBI and CIA, but who knows how far back the origins of those troubles are? The Clinton Administration? The Reagan/Bush Administrations? Sure, there might have been some bad decisions made in the upper echelons of the Bush Administration, but most of the administration officials overseeing terror threats were either new to their jobs or coming back into government following 8 to 12 years off in the private sector.
It’s possible that Al Gore might have tried doing things differently in regards to the terror threats, airport security, and what have you, but he would have been a Democratic president with a Republican congress and a public where the majority of the people viewed terrorist events as happening “somewhere over there.” There would have been low support, and I don’t think he would have been able to push anything through in time to do anything to prevent the 9/11 attacks.
Most likely exactly as it happened. Maybe on a different day.
But…but…then…it wouldn’t be nine-eleven!
Even Gore’s own advisors said they were happy that he was not in office during 9/11. If he was I think we would all be speaking arabic and worshiping in a mosque right now.