markfiend wrote:
Standard government incompetence. When's the inquiry into the 7/7 bombings going to happen?
Yep.
markfiend wrote:
I call bullsh!t on this claim, sorry. Firefighters hate fires in buildings with a similar structure to the WTC precisely because they do collapse.
This is correct (I have some friends who are firefighters and have mentioned similar concerns). Furthermore, my understanding is that the steel skeleton of the building warped under the heat of the flames, thus it could no longer support the weight of the upper tiers of the building; thus it began to collapse.
markfiend wrote:
Well documented. They claim that Osama has had nothing to do with them for years and is the "black sheep" of the family.
Yes, according to all accounts he was disowned sometime between his return to Saudi Arabia and his taking up residence in Sudan. Pete Bergen (I think) has an excellent book on bin Laden, completed shortly before the 9/11 attacks.
markfiend wrote:
Debatable. I don't know one way or the other. It's at least possible that the twelve hijackers were a small group acting alone without instruction (similar to the "cell" that did the 7/7 attack)
Bin Laden has admitted responsibility for the attacks on a tape recovered in Afghanistan shortly thereafter, and has again reiterated a connection to the plan at the end of the Zacarias Moussaoui trial in the US, stating that Moussaoui was not, in fact, part of the 9/11 plot. The 9/11 plot itself is a scaled down version of a previous al-Qaeda airliners-as-cruise-missiles plan discovered in the Phillipines called 'Oplan Bojinka.'
markfiend wrote:
Probable. The US government could well have known that attacks were coming. It has certainly helped the "hawkish" cause in the US. A similar argument has been shown to be largely true about Pearl Harbor; the US knew it was coming, did nothing to prevent it as they knew it would be a pretext to join WWII, but when the attack came it was far bigger than they'd been expecting.
The CIA had recently determined that al-Qaeda was planning something big based on various sources. Unfortunately, those sources did not offer what could be called 'actionable intelligence,' beyond a vague warning, and the impression that the CIA had was that the target would be somewhere in Europe (American embassies or military bases) rather than in the United States itself
markfiend wrote:
I don't know that it was ever "stepped up" -- see above
The whole thing happened so quickly that by the time military aircraft had been scrambled it was over. There have been suggestions that the quick grounding of all civilian traffic may have prevented other attacks from occuring, but I have yet to see this confirmed. The suggestion that United airlines flight 93 was shot down seems unlikely to be true given the circumstances.
markfiend wrote:
Yeah, pretty bad isn't it?
This seems paranoid, honestly. Bin Laden made public his desire to wage war on the United States a number of times (see, for example, his delaration of the formation of the World Front for Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders), going back to the mid 90's.
markfiend wrote: See (7)
I think this is dangerously reductionistic. While energy security (and thus economic security for the West as a whole) is part of what is at stake in the current conflict, there is a much deeper dimension. Remember, bin Laden isn't fighting just over things that have happened in the last hundred years--he's fighting over, among other things, the
reconquista of Spain, as well as the creeping secularism or Westenization of the Islamic world (why do they call America the Great Satan? Because it does what Satan does--it
tempts the believer toward secularism and liberalism). There's a very specific theological foundation to what he is doing that we ignore at our peril. One can debate whether or not his theology is orthodox Islam; what one can't debate is that his chief motivation is religious rather than political. As long as we project Western categories of thought onto militant Islam, we will not be capable of understanding the jihadist mindset.
If anybody wants, I can try and compile a brief bibliography of books on the subject, although it wouldnt' be available until sometimes next week (I'll be out of town until then).