I don’t know what the definition of “truther” is, but it is clear from reading Richard Clark’s book on the Bush administrations pre-9/11 approach to terrorism that they discounted the ability of Al-Queda to succeed in an attack on the US, and reduced the resources and priority attached to monitoring Al-Queda. What the Bush administration’s intent was with this, if intent can be ascribed to an organization, is another matter.
My personal opinion is that they wanted something bad to happen in order to drum up war. See the PNAC document that wished for a “Pearl Harbor event”
A lot of people think the Bush administration made some poor choices in handling the situation. You cross over into truther territory when you you think the Bush administration intentionally made poor choices in order to make things worse.
Believing the Bush administration was incompetent to deal with or indifferent to the threat of domestic terrorist attacks does not make one a Truther.
Even believing the Bush Administration HOPED for some kind of attack or incident that they could use as a pretext for war does not make one a Truther.
What makes one a Truther is the belief that the Bush administration knew the specific details of the 9/11 attack in advance and consciously decided to let it happen, or that they actually participated in the attack in some way such as planting bombs in the WTC.
Ballsy? Courage? How exactly is Asner demonstrating courage? Courage and balls involves taking a risk. What risk is Asner taking? It’s not like he’s a promising young actor putting his career on the line. He’s 82 years old. His career peaked in the 1970s. He has absolutely nothing to lose.
Those are two very different definitions. Because Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Perle all signed the PNAC document saying that a Pearl Harbor type event was necessary for the war footing state that they wanted and said they wanted, I conclude that they in fact wanted something of that scale to happen.
Did they set up the hijackers with passports, etc.? I’ve no evidence or belief that they did. But they did let down the level of attention put on terrorists and Osama bin Ladin in particular. That is documented.
I think that they failed to take the steps their predecessors (Clinton and Bush I) did to combat and prevent terrorism. They then profited from it politically and monetarily. Ewwww.
I agree they did a bad job watching terrorists. But it’s a major leap to say they did a bad job in the hopes that a terrorist attack would occur. The much more likely explanation is that they mistakenly thought a terrorist attack was unlikely to happen and therefore they didn’t need to devote many resources to the possibility.
Which PNAC document are you talking about? “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” is the one most commonly offered as evidence of Bush administration guilt. It does mention Pearl Harbor but not in a “we need this to happen” context. What they say is that increasing American military forces will have to be a long process because unless there’s a Pearl Harbor like event. But the document is about the long process not the possibilities that would arise if a Pearl Harbor occurred. It’s clear the writers were not counting on a Pearl Harbor in their plans.
I’ll also note that Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Perle were not among the authors of “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”. Paul Wolfowitz was the only one of the four you mentioned who actually had a hand in writing the document.
On a broader note, if you read the document it’s clear that the writers were not hoping for a 9/11 type attack. Terrorism is barely mentioned in the document. The writers are talking about the need to build up American military forces for a conventional war. The enemies they’re planning for are Iraq and North Korea not al Qaeda. If anything, they would have regarded the 9/11 attacks as an unfortunate diversion not a golden opportunity.
The audience is certainly different in their interpretation. I read it as they are hoping for it.
Oh, and they made a ton of money on it. I think that after the fall of the Soviet Union that terrorism was the only credible threat to the US for violent attacks. There had been numerous attempts, including the 1993 World Trade Center attacks. These guys were hawks peddling dangers and requiring vast military forces. But they virtually suspended intelligence on those forces.
We can’t get in the minds of others, but it is pretty clear to me that they wanted war in Iraq long before 9/11 and war in general.
If everybody is misinterpreting your point, perhaps your point is obscured by the lack of coherent presentation. In other words, if everybody has a problem with you, perhaps you’re the problem. Just sayin’.
Well yeah, that’s my point. They wanted a war with Iraq. 9/11 had nothing to do with Iraq. They had to work real hard to get the public attention off of the real culprits of 9/11 and back on Iraq. So why would they have been hoping for a 9/11 attack when it worked against their plans?
To use the Pearl Harbor analogy, if somebody back in 1940 had wanted the United States to go to war with Germany, the last thing they would have wanted was for Japan to attack Pearl Harbor. That attack diverted attention away from Germany and towards Japan.
The executive branch claims that Iraq and Al Queda were working hand in hand, and then went through cherry picking and confirmation biasing all the evidence to prove its point that Iraq was behind it, the same way they manufactured the WMD claims. It was immaterial to them who was really behind it as long as they could use it the way they did, which was to argue for a permanent state of war against the human emotion of terror.
And it would have been a lot simpler for them if there hadn’t been any Al Qaeda. Then they wouldn’t have had to pretend that Iraq and Al Qaeda were working together. They could have just focused on Iraq like they wanted to without any Al Qaeda distractions.
Heck, if it hadn’t been for Al Qaeda maybe they could have gotten a war going with North Korea like they were thinking about. But they got stuck with that war in Afghanistan that they didn’t want so they had to settle for just Iraq.