Doug can't believe I'm serious:
Imploding? Are you serious? There's some serious straw clutching in the above linked articles. Absolutely peanuts compared to the misinformation being spewed by BushCo.
What color is the truth in your world?
And this color:
[http://foi.missouri.edu/terrorismfoi/whatwentwrong.html]
WHAT WENT WRONG. The inside story of the missed signals and intelligence failures that raise a chilling question: did September 11 have to happen?
By Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff Newsweek May 27/02
"SO MUCH COMES IN, rumor, hearsay, disinformation, so little of it more than trash: once in a blue moon an agent-prospector may get lucky. But even then an agentâs warning is likely to be dismissed as what Condoleezza Rice last week called âchatter.â âThereâs always TMIâtoo much information,â says former CIA agent Milt Bearden. Often agents poke fun at the sometimes obsessive quirks of their colleagues. âIf a confidential memorandum comes from a guy out in, say, Phoenix, the first thing that goes up the line is, âThatâs Harry again. Heâs like a broken clock twice a dayâ, â one ex-agent says. Even today, long after 9-11, streams of new threats pass unnoticed through Washington. In recent weeks, for instance, the FBI has gotten specific threats about a car- or truck-bomb attack on an âall-glassâ building near the U.S. Capitol, and another threat against a Celebrity cruise ship off Florida. Neither was corroborated, or publicized.
Yet every now and then, amid the piles of dross, a nugget of pure gold turns up in intel files. The key for American national securityânow and into the futureâis to know it when we see it. Back in July 2001, Bill Kurtz and his team hit pay dirt, and no one seemed to care. A hard-driven supervisor in the FBIâs Phoenix office, Kurtz was overseeing an investigation of suspected Islamic terrorists last July when a member of his team, a sharp, 41-year-old counterterrorism agent named Kenneth Williams, noticed something odd: a large number of suspects were signing up to take courses in how to fly airplanes. The agentâs suspicions were further fueled when he heard that some of the men at the local Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University were asking a lot of questions about airport security.
SOMETHING BIGGER?
Kurtz, who had previously worked on the Osama bin Laden unit of the FBIâs international terrorism section, was convinced he and his colleagues might have stumbled on to something bigger. Kurtzâs team fired off a lengthy memo raising the possibility that bin Laden might be using U.S. flight schools to infiltrate the countryâs civil-aviation system. âHe thinks of everything in terms of bin Laden,â one colleague recalled. The memo outlined a proposal for the FBI to monitor âcivil aviation colleges/universities around the country.â
Williams, the agent who sniffed out the link, was described by one former colleague as a âsuperstar,â a former SWAT sniper and family man who coaches Little League and, in 1995, helped track down Michael Fortier, Timothy McVeighâs former Army buddy. âAnything he says you can take to the bank,â says former agent Ron Myers."
-- Doug _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
