Wonder no longer. Read this material from "former CIA officials," posted at Free Republic on 9/12, and the comments thread that follows it and you'll have a pretty good idea.
Most interesting, and in some respects amusing, is how wrong some of the usual assumptions have proved to be.
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The way you PREVENT things like this is just that: Prevention. You find out about these things and you defuse the situation. You knock on doors in the early hours of the morning and herd half-awake, half-clothed would-be suicide Jihad-ers into waiting police vans.
This is how we have always prevented the majority of these tragedies.
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This time NO ONE KNEW!!! NO ONE HAD A CLUE!!!!
That's why we can say with confidence that our intelligence capability has suffered so drastically under Clinton
There's a lot of scary stuff, too, and most of all, repetition of charges disproved again and again, but never acknowledged as such by the mainstream media.
I post this unpleasantness now, because Democrats and those of us who need them to deprive Bush of another four damaging years are going to have to deal with some of the assumptions here, that will be thrown at all Democrats as easily as they were thrown at the Clintons.
*(I'm leaving aside the increasingly plausible possibility that under President Gore the 9/11 plot might have been uncovered before it could take place, or more easily foiled on the day itself; that's for another post)
**Under the "knowledge is power" rubric, always informative reader, Sara, informs us that an excellent book on the Clinton administration's actual engagement with the issue of terrorism is Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon's "The Age of Sacred Terror"