# Do you think that a government would allow a terrorist attack to occur? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [December 1, 2016, 7:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-think-that-a-government-would-allow-a-terrorist-attack-to-occur/773551 "2016-12-01T19:21:45Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![jtur88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e9c0ed/32.png) [@jtur88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jtur88)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2016, 7:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-think-that-a-government-would-allow-a-terrorist-attack-to-occur/773551/41 "2016-12-02T19:56:26Z")
It would not be difficult to find examples in which the USA, for example, behaved in ways inimical to itself in order to benefit the financial status of defense corporations. There is Nicaragua and El Salvador, where the US military provided exactly enough support to one side to keep the belligerents equally balanced, resulting in wars in those countries raging on for over a decade, with US defense contractors reaping the profits from open-ended military aid and logistical support. ---
**Author:** ![Me\_Billy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e480ec/32.png) [@Me\_Billy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Me_Billy)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2016, 8:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-think-that-a-government-would-allow-a-terrorist-attack-to-occur/773551/42 "2016-12-02T20:17:37Z")
So far as foreign countries are concerned, you will find that the US CIA has a history of doing the bidding of large US corporations. A book by ex CIA Philip Agee will open your eyes about this! > **[Philip Agee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Agee)** > > Philip Burnett Franklin Agee (/ˈeɪdʒi/; January 19, 1935 – January 7, 2008) was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) case officer and writer of the 1975 book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, detailing his experiences in the CIA. Agee joined the CIA in 1957, and over the following decade had postings in Washington, D.C., Ecuador, Uruguay and Mexico. After resigning from the Agency in 1968, he became a leading opponent of CIA practices. A co-founder of the CounterSpy and CovertAction s Agee was born ... ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2016, 9:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-think-that-a-government-would-allow-a-terrorist-attack-to-occur/773551/43 "2016-12-02T21:18:02Z")
> [@ftg](#): > > I think it’s possible that some people suppressed stuff concerning the strange dudes at flight schools that local FBI offices were reporting to HQ. If so, the plan wasn’t to allow 9/11 to happen as it did. They might have thought that it was smaller scale, they’d prevent it as it was going on, etc. But it didn’t end up like that. > > It’s really odd that the response the local FBI guys got was to stop wasting time on the flight school stuff. Really odd. The thing that’s hard to remember is that pre-9/11 the FBI was a crime-fighting organization. Their enemy was the Mafia and organized drug crime, not Al Qaeda. The “quit wasting time” response was because the info about flight schools had no relevance to ordinary domestic or international _crime_. Post-9/11 they got a new primary mission: counter-terrorism intel. But that was after, not before. The actual history is not quite as binary as I’ve described here, but it was close. Pre-9/11 the counter-terrorism guys were the red-headed stepchildren with no budget and the crappy offices. The guys chasing druggies & Mafiosi got all the glory. In that context the “failure to connect the dots” makes a lot more bureaucratic sense. > [@Machine\_Elf](#): > > … > We’re not talking about a conspiracy that starts at the top and spreads only to a trusted cadre of co-conspirators. This is about random field agents learning of an imminent attack, passing the info up the chain of command, and later (after the attack) noticing that nothing was ever done about it. The higher-ups would have to believe that _nobody_ in that entire chain would testify before congress that they had prior information about the attack. This IMO is really the key insight. If there actually was a high-level conspiracy to inaction in the face of a known threat, it’d have to play out like this: As info burbles up the bureaucracy there would inevitably be a level which is convinced this is a BFD that we \*need \*to preempt. And a level just above that which mysteriously does nothing despite receiving the impassioned hard sell from the layer just below. That disconnect won’t go unleaked after the lower layer is proven correct by events. Since that hasn’t been happening we can conclude there haven’t been overt conspiracies to inaction at high levels. Which is a very different thing from the ideas promoted by **jtur88** and others that concern for various corporations’ profits is given some (perhaps large) weight in the overall decision scheme for international policy and international action. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-think-that-a-government-would-allow-a-terrorist-attack-to-occur/773551.md?page=2)