The New Pearl Harbor

You gotta wonder why, on 9/11, almost all of our defense assets were engaged in a wargame that, coincidentally, featured planes crashing into buildings. The obvious result of this is that, had anyone tried to call the FAA or NORAD or whoever and tried to tell them about the plot, the person on the other end would have assumed it was part of the wargame and "played along."You gotta wonder why so many top public officials stopped flying the public airways in the time before 9/11, even gong so far as to cancel September 11 travel plans days before the event.You gotta wonder why the "plane" that hit the Pentagon co-incidentally managed to wipe out the only section whose offices had been largely vacated due to planned renovations.Either the terrorists were really, really lucky, or else they had some help. What I think is that Bush et al. knew it was going to happen, knew they could use to galvanize public support for a flagging administration, and made sure that nobody tried too hard to stop it. My guess is that they never intended to sacrifice 3000 people, I'm sure their projections assumed that the towers would survive and that the casualties would be limited to the passengers of the plane and those people on those floors.If you look at the paper trail, it's impossible to come to the conclusion that they didn't have ample forwarning of a terrorist strike in the US employing airplanes as missles. So either a whole lot of people who should have been smarter than that dropped the ball, or their investigations were hampered by commands from the top to "not look too hard into this."

Oh, really? You guys were having nationwide wargames that featured terrorist activities the exact day of the real terrorist strikes? Really?

Are you kidding? You can't even imply the word "conspiracy" and expect to be taken seriously. There's almost nobody who believes that conspiracies are even possible; which is why I come to the conclusion that they happen every now and then. The constant offhand rejection of conspiracy theories is the perfect cover under which to conduct a conspiracy, wouldn't you say?

Wow. I didn't realize you were being serious.Ok, so now we're two for two in regards to simultaneous wargame exercises. It blows my mind that they were training in exactly the "right" place at the right time.Can anyone here tell me that this is just a coincidence? At this point there's only two realistic possibilities:1) High-level Islamist infiltration of both our governments.
2) Collusion between our governments and Islamist terror.I was prepared to believe that the terrorists were really lucky the first time. I'm not prepared to accept luck as an explanation for the London bombings.

Sure. Here's an article from the Associated Press: Boston.com / Sept. 11

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In what the government describes as a bizarre coincidence, one U.S. intelligence agency was planning an exercise last Sept. 11 in which an errant aircraft would crash into one of its buildings.

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It's too bad for the late Mrs. Olsen that nobody thought to include Ted in the plot. Or maybe they got the same warning Willie Brown got and didn't take it seriously. How could they have caught us by surprise, when Bush is reading memos about bin Laden attacking in the US and using airplanes as weapons? When the FBI is sending up red flags about people taking commercial pilot training and flunking the landing units? How were they able to schedule their attack on the exact day that a scenario sufficiently similar enough to cause confusion was being wargamed?Coincidence? I would have believed it for 9/11 but not for both 9/11 and the London bombings. Surprise? I would have believed it if Bush hadn't consistently blocked the 9/11 Commission at the start of their inquiry, and if his testimony hadn't been unrecorded, held at the White House, and accompanied by Dick Cheney.Look, at this point, the side that needs to overcome the greatest hurdle of incredulity and staggering coincidence is the side that posits no American complicity in the 9/11 attacks. The things that you're asking me to swallow are, on their face, simply unbelievable.

And, just coincidentally, they trained in the exact time and place of the bombings? Four bombings, timed to the second, and there just happened to coincidentally be folks there training under the exact scenario?Why on earth would I believe something so ridiculous? It shatters, not strains, credulity. Am I saying that the training was done to conceal the bombing? Not nessicarily; perhaps it was reversed, and the conspirators took advantage of the pre-existing cover of the training.But it's certainly burying your head in the sand to refuse to see that an identical training scenario consists of the perfect cover to place and time explosives. I would have believed that Al-Queda was lucky the first time, on 9/11. The second time? No frickin' way. At this point the burden of credulity is significantly in your court, not mine.

NORAD has specific procedures for hijacked aircraft that pose an immediate danger to ground targets. The fact that they weren't followed on 9/11 is evidence of that confusion (or of complicity, of course.) Into a building. You seem to have left out that little detail. As you know, when the first plane hit it was not immediately obvious that an attack was underway. (Funny that you're prepared to explain the improbable timing of the attacks as simple coincidence, but apparently your credulity doesn't stretch so far that you dispute the idea that four such collisions on one day represents something more than chance.) I have done so. That you can wave away every piece of evidence with a mounting convergence of improbabilities doesn't diminish my argument. At the end of the day the least credulous position is the one that you're promoting; the one that requires the greatest degree of unlikely coincidence.And your offhand remarks about Mrs. Olsen notwithstanding, you haven't even touched the evidence that numerous government officials seemed to have advance warning. Who called Willie Brown, and what did they know? That doesn't appear to be a question you're equipped to address. Do you have any evidence? If you're not prepared to accept my incredulity, I'm certainly not prepared to accept your credulity. You have no problem, apparently, with the idea of two terrorist attacks being so improbably successful as to appear to support an accusation of complicity by the organizations who unwittingly have them cover. Well, I do.

Remember that the proposal is not that the excercise provided cover for the detonation of the bombs, but of their placement. The preparations for the excercise, which would have had to begin earlier than 0930, would have acted as cover for whatever agents were involved in the planting of those devices, as well as for the eventuality of their apprehension. That's a great question. If they proposed bombs in every Tube stop in London, the odds seem a little more believable.Moreover I'd be interested if there were any similar training situations involved in the Madrid attacks. When did I say that it did? As far as I know the London bombing implicates only those who would have set the bombs, those who would have allowed them to occur, and possibly whoever set the time, date, and location of the excercise.

It's proposed in the article. You read it, right? Is that even necessary? I don't see why it would be. So, now, I'm supposed to accept not only your credulity, but your assumptions, in leiu of argument? Then why were they at the Tube stations? Apparently no one caught them at it, so they didn't need to use the excuse. At any rate I don't recall ever proposing that government agents planted any bombs, fake or otherwise. You're putting a lot of words in my mouth and then demanding that I support positions that aren't mine. Why don't you try supporting yours for a change? Or addressing arguments presented to you? For the third time, who warned Willie Brown, and how did they know?

From the article:

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The exercise fulfils several different goals. It acts as a cover for the small compartamentalized government terrorists to carry out their operation without the larger security services becoming aware of what they're doing, and, more importantly, if they get caught during the attack or after with any incriminating evidence they can just claim that they were just taking part in the exercise.

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Now, I don't neccesarily agree that the bombing was carried out by government terrorists, but the excercise itself - despite having not actually occured at any of the bombing locations - still provides cover for the conspirators. That doesn't matter. The excercise itself still provides cover for conspiracy because they can always claim they were part of the excercise; how many people outside of the company would have been familiar enough with the details to immediately judge the veracity of such a claim? The last I heard, one bomb was carried by a suicide bomber and the other three were detonated by cell phone. They did, after all, explode within seconds of each other.

Huh, hadn't heard that. Well, good to know.

Well, you've successfully argued against conspiracy - aside from the utterly ridiculous conspiracy scenarios we could both devise - but I still don't see that coincidence is the explanation, either.

Not "near the time." Exactly at the time. No, but it was the US, specifically ambassaor April Glaspie, who told him that he could.Oh, you didn't know that, did you? Yeah, just one more thing you won't learn on Fox Spews, Tal.

Try the New York Times, September 23, 1990, in which Glaspie was reported as telling Saddam:

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But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late '60s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America.

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In other words "yeah, we know it's just a little border dispute, so no, we won't get involved. Promise." Yes, exactly they were right on the money. They were right on the money because they were ordered to hold those drills at that time by people who [/i]knew about the attacks."That was the whole point, remember? Credit for getting duped and facilitating an attack that cost the lives of 3,000 Americans? Why do you hate America so much, Tal?This message has been edited by crashfrog, 07-19-2005 07:23 PM