[freekitty]

i don't believe this.

[PogySailor]

Could've, should've....

Sure. But were we ABLE to? How?

The things we would have had to do to prevent the attacks provoke howls from the left (as well as some on the right) AFTER 9/11. Can you just imagine if the FBI started rounding up flight school students from ME countries on slim evidence available at the time?

[Alas Babylon!]

OK, just for the sake of argument, here, Gov Kean, let's say we entertained the idea that hijackers might attempt to fly planes into our buildings. What should we have done about it?

Ground all commercial air travel? People would have had a fit, and the dems would have called for impeachment.

Or, we could have created a Homeland Security department, federalized airport screeners, confiscated all jack-knives, scissors, box cutters, anything sharp or dangerous, and thrown them away at the gate. But hindsight isn't foresight, and once again, without the cause that 9/11 gave us, the screams of violated civil rights would have been horrendous.

Ok, how about returning all alien Muslims back to their countries of origin? Shoot, we can't even do that now without a outcry from the Left.

Of course we could have just popped Osama or taken him from Sudan when they offered in 1994. Nah...

[McCloud-Strife]

NEWS FLASH
Pearl Harbor was preventable. If only people had put all the clues together and add up 2 and 2. Also, World War I, The Civil War, The French Revolution, The Fall of the Roman Empire and the Crusifixtion of Christ might well have been prevented as well. If only..
such tripe

[RightWhale]

Of course WTC911 was preventable. But we weren't at war, and that is why it was a cowardly act.

[TeleStraightShooter]

9/11 could have and should have been prevented,

Liberal reformers screwed up the CIA;
therefore, if the CIA was not blinded by the likes of Frank Church & the ACLU, then 9/11 should have been prevented.

[savedbygrace]

For this conclusion to be reached, they needed to have the intelligence that pinpointed what was going to happen, when is was going to happen, and where it was going to happen.

Because other than that, the only way to prevent it would be to shut down all air transportation for an unspecified period of time.

We can't let this go without reminding ourselves of that simple logic.

[Recovering_Democrat]

YES, IT WAS PREVENTABLE. WE COULD HAVE HAD AN ADULT IN THE WHITE HOUSE FROM 1993-2001. INSTEAD WE HAD A TEENAGE BOY WHO DIDDLED HIS TIME AWAY.

Kean had damn well better not try and put this upon the current POTUS.

[arasina]

It's time for "The Memo" to be revisited:

Text of Memo Prepared by Democrats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

We have carefully reviewed our options under the rules and believe we have identified the best approach. Our plan is as follows:

Pull the majority along as far as we can on issues that may lead to major new disclosures regarding improper or questionable conduct by administration officials. We are having some success in that regard. For example, in addition to the president's State of the Union speech, the chairman has agreed to look at the activities of the Office of the Secretary of Defense as well as Secretary Bolton's office at the State department. The fact that the chairman supports our investigations into these offices and co-signs our requests for information is helpful and potentially crucial. We don't know what we will find but our prospects for getting the access we seek is far greater when we have the backing of the majority. (Note: we can verbally mention some of the intriguing leads we are pursuing.)

2) Assiduously prepare Democratic "additional views" to attach to any interim or final reports the committee may release. Committee rules provide this opportunity and we intend to take full advantage of it. In that regard, we have already compiled all the public statements on Iraq made by senior administration officials. We will identify the most exaggerated claims and contrast them with the intelligence estimates that have since been declassified. Our additional views will also, among other things, castigate the majority for seeking to limit the scope of the inquiry. The Democrats will then be in a strong position to reopen the question of establishing an independent commission (i.e. the Corzine amendment).

3) Prepare to launch an independent investigation when it becomes clear we have exhausted the opportunity to usefully collaborate with the majority. We can pull the trigger on an independent investigation at any time-- but we can only do so once. The best time to do so will probably be next year either:

A) After we have already released our additional views on an interim report -- thereby providing as many as three opportunities to make our case to the public: 1) additional views on the interim report; 2) announcement of our independent investigation; and 3) additional views on the final investigation; or

B) Once we identify solid leads the majority does not want to pursue. We could attract more coverage and have greater credibility in that context than one in which we simply launch an independent investigation based on principled but vague notions regarding the "use" of intelligence.

In the meantime, even without a specifically authorized independent investigation, we continue to act independently when we encounter foot-dragging on the part of the majority. For example, the FBI Niger investigation was done solely at the request of the vice chairman; we have independently submitted written questions to DoD; and we are preparing further independent requests for information.

Summary

Intelligence issues are clearly secondary to the public's concern regarding the insurgency in Iraq. Yet, we have an important role to play in the revealing the misleading -- if not flagrantly dishonest methods and motives -- of the senior administration officials who made the case for a unilateral, preemptive war. The approach outline above seems to offer the best prospect for exposing the administration's dubious motives and methods.

www.intelmemo.com

[Kirkwood]

Hey Mr. Kean! You know what else was preventable? WWII, WWI, The Civil War, The Revolutionary War, etc, etc, etc. Everything could be preventable if you can foresee the future with enough time to change the course of events. Heck even your own life could have been prevented if your old man had the foresight to have worn a condom.
Hindsight is always 20/20/

[Britton J Wingfield]

Of course it was preventable. We could have armed pilots and sealed cockpits years ago.

Of course, people would have thought that was paranoid.

[mc5cents]

Coud'a, shoud'a, would'a. Hell, If, if ands or buts were candy and nuts, oh what a Merry Christmas we would have!

Thank's to Dandy Dan Meridith for that one!

[optimistically_conservative]

http://search.yahoo.com/search?va=Breitweiser+victim+fund&ei=UTF-8&fr=my_bot&n=20&fl=0&x=wrb

A "mind-numbingly boring" propaganda film
A 9/11 widow reviews last night's Showtime film about President Bush's actions on and after that fateful morning.

By Kristen Breitweiser

Sept. 8, 2003 |

The film "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis," which premiered Sunday night on Showtime, is a mind-numbingly boring, revisionist, two-hour-long wish list of how 9/11 might have gone if we had real leaders in the current administration. This film is rated half of a fighter jet -- since that is about what we got for our nation's defense on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

Despite the title, the film only budgets approximately 10 minutes to the actual morning of 9/11. Most of the movie is spent cataloging the myriad cabinet-level debates as to whether to declare "war" against terrorism and how to effectively sell that to the American people.

It is understandable that so little time is actually devoted to the president's true actions on the morning of 9/11. Because to show the entire 23 minutes from 9:03 to 9:25 a.m., when President Bush, in reality, remained seated and listening to "second grade story-hour" while people like my husband were burning alive inside the World Trade Center towers, would run counter to Karl Rove's art direction and grand vision.

Remember the aircraft carrier photo-op? Bush is a man of action; in fact, he is an action hero. Except, of course, when it really counts, like in those early morning hours when this country was under attack and our Commander in Chief was drinking milk and eating cookies with second graders. Can you imagine one of those second-graders years from now when they are asked where they were on the morning of 9/11? They will simply say, "I was sitting with the President reading him a story."

---

Donahue Interviews
9/11 Widow Kristen Breitweiser
Gutsy and incisive performance from a woman with a mission

DONAHUE: Probably wanting to know what’s going on with Mom. That’s -
OK, so here you are. You know you’re not alone. Nothing anybody’s going to say is going to ever make you feel better. You got to hold up. You’ve got a daughter you got to worry about, all the rest.

But as the days go on-do I understand this, that-you know, and you start to put yourself together here, was it an anger that you felt?

BREITWEISER: I think what really initially started was I saw the picture of the president in, I think it was “Newsweek” or “Time” magazine, and I read the caption. And the caption said, you know, “Andy Card telling the president about the second plane.” And then I read that he proceeded to read for 25 minutes to the 2nd-graders. He was in a Sarasota school that morning for a reading program.
And I read it again, and I thought it was, you know, misreported. And it wasn’t, and I got upset. I said, you know, this nation was under attack. It was clear that we were under attack. Why didn’t the Secret Service whisk him out of that school? He was on live local television in Florida. The terrorists, you know, had been in Florida. I mean, we find out that out now. He was less than 10 miles from an airport.

---

NOW with Bill Moyers.
9/11 Widows Speak
9.12.03

---

"You have President Bush out there saying that he wants transparency and accountability on behalf of Fortune 500 CEOs. I would like some transparency and accountability on behalf of, you know, President Bush and his workers, who were the individuals that failed my husband and the 3,000 other people that day."
- Kristen Breitweiser, Sept. 11 widow
(Quoted on DU)

---

"Why would the House Republicans give the screening companies a get-out-of-jail-free card at the last minute?" asked Kristen Breitweiser of Middletown, N.J., whose husband, Ronald, died in the trade center and who has been considering a lawsuit against the screeners.

"The families are outraged by this," Ms. Breitweiser said. "We were down there lobbying last week and trying to make the case that this will hurt us, but they did it anyway. It's just a slap in the face to the victims."

---

Widows' Walk

In the depths of their grief, four World Trade Center widows get the political education of a lifetime.

By John T. Ward

March 2003

What really got Breitweiser back to her feet, though, and energized hundreds of other victims' survivors was the Victim Compensation Fund that Congress authorized just ten days after the attacks. Lawmakers, attempting to keep the already-teetering airlines in business, had crafted a $15 billion bailout. The law effectively precluded survivors who accepted an award from the fund from suing the City of New York, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, or any other agency. To offset that elimination of legal remedies, Congress drew up, in roughly 24 hours, the outlines of a fund to compensate them for their losses, with no dollar limit on awards.

The fund soon would come to be viewed as arbitrary and unfair. With varying degrees of bile, victims' family members began challenging rules that were being established for the fund by Kenneth Feinberg, a Washington lawyer named by Attorney General John Ashcroft to oversee it. Among the challengers was Casazza. With Breitweiser's help, she wrote the Justice Department a four-page letter detailing reservations about the rules and got hundreds of other survivors to sign it. Placitella, a Colts Neck neighbor of Casazza's, had urged her to write the letter at a meeting in his office during which Casazza, Kleinberg, and Van Auken sat sobbing. Afterward, he says, he was stunned at the focus and strength the women seemed to gain from the effort.

"Within seven or eight weeks of the attack, there's this transformation that is extraordinary," he says. "Remarkable. They were like tigresses protecting their young."

So when hearings came up at the state Assembly in early December on a bill to allow lawsuits for mental anguish in wrongful-death cases, Placitella asked Casazza to testify in its favor. Kleinberg and Van Auken, too, made the trip to Trenton. Their unscripted stories about their children's pain brought some legislators to tears. The bill eventually was shelved, but for Kleinberg the trip was revelatory. "All of a sudden my mindset was different," she says. "We were in a wrongful-death situation." That led to the realization that, under the airline bailout law, not only would there be no way to hold the carriers responsible financially for any failures on their part, but there would also never be any discovery, the fact-finding process in civil litigation, to determine who, if anyone, had left open the door to the terrorists.

Through the winter, the widows became immersed in the battle over the fund. But as spring approached, the tide of public opinion began to turn against them. Feinberg announced the final rules for the fund in March and said that the average settlement (before deductions for other money awarded) would be $1.85 million, $200,000 higher than previously estimated. When survivors continued to object to the nuances of the fund, they were blasted. An editorial cartoon depicted September 11 widows as greedy and self-absorbed. Comments posted on a Justice Department Web site started to take on a "get a job" tone. "We can't get our message heard," Kleinberg says, "because people hear money and they think greedy, and they don't realize that our motives are pure."

[Cold Heat]

I was against this commission to begin with.

The blame, if any is to be addressed, belongs squarely on the Clintoon administration for allowing bomb after bomb to be detonated by these Islamo freaks without any response other than lobbing a half billion dollars worth of missiles at a camel and a empty tent. (this was done not for Bin Laden, but for a media diversion to help with scandals in the oval office)

So how can this commission help protect America?

The answer is that it was never intended to protect anything. It is nothing but a fishing expedition to find some sort of wrongdoing in the Bush administration.

In reality, the buck was passed by Clinton. He wiped his butt with it first.

[Wally_Kalbacken]

The problem is in the press quoting Mrs. Breitweiser. The victims of 9/11 – the organized families and survivors which are probably already incorporated – are not the aggrieved parties in terms of legal actions, beyond a civil wrongful death action they are welcome to file against OBL or any of his facilitators. There is a good reason that it is U.S. vs. ____ or The State of California vs. O.J. Simpson – we do not have a private system of justice – a crime against a citizen is a crime against the state.

The victim’s families seem to think they have the right to determine things like the architectural design of a successor building to the twin towers or to memorials to 9/11. As if the misfortune of their loved ones conveyed upon them some kind of special veto power over public investments and public policies, which are rightfully decision to be made by the public and their representatives.

Although it has been just over two years – in some ways this seems to have the kind of cult aspect that has developed over the JFK assassination over 40 years. In their grief and anger these folks are going to find someone in government to blame and the press will be their facilitators because it makes for good drama and they like the idea of doing damage the Bush Administration.

The article suggests that there is something implausible about a National Security Advisor knowing something that was written 10 years earlier in an internal FBI report. I find it plausible that you could find plenty of information that is in FBI reports from even 1 year or 1 month ago that a competent, qualified National Security Advisor does not know. Information abounds – requiring that Condoleezza Rice know all of this information or be judged incompetent and suitable target for the survivors’ wrath is absurd.

With Democrats failing to do damage to Bush on the conduct of the Iraq War – and with the capture of Saddam – you have to expect that they will exploit any detail in the 9/11 investigation. It is to be expected. What’s shocking is that Kean would chime right in.

[Republican Wildcat]

Okay, this guy says the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented. Then he admits they have no information to suggest such. So he makes a conclusion based on nothing.

It's quite unfortunate, but it looks like this guy is simply using this investigation to get 15 minutes of fame. It's rather sick to take something this important and reduce it down to this level.

[FRgal4u]

Yes, it wa preventable. Had Clinton nabbed from the Sundanese in the 90s, the whole 9/11 and the war on terror were preventable. Kean may try to argue that someone somewhere in those millions millions of documents said it is possible for terrorists to fly planes into buildings, maybe within Kean's own life, one could find the same coulda, shoulda, woulda crap on Kean's decision...

[MJY1288]

Connecting the dots after the fact is quite easy, Any act of terrorism can be prevented if you guess correctly 100% of the time.

Did we know terrorist might attack us? ......Absolutely

Did we know that terrorist have hijacked planes in the past? ............ Absolutely

Did we know that Al-Qaeda was plotting acts of terrorism? ......Absolutely

Did we know before hand that 19 terrorist were gonna simultaneous hijack 4 Passenger Jets and crash them into the Twin Towers? ....... Hell Know

Half the hijackers didn't even know what their mission was. If blame must be placed on anyone, it should be congress for gutting our Intel gathering capabilities.

President Bush's Nomination to head the FBI was sworn in one week before 9/11 and over half of his nominations to key positions in his administration wasn't confirmed yet because some goof ball named Al Gore refused to accept his defeat and slowed the transition by 6 weeks.

What happened on 9/11 was a culmination of years of empty threats in response to terrorist kidnapping and killing our people. It all started when Jimmy Carter refused to stand up to the Mullah's in Iran back in 1979. For over a year we were held hostage and after 20 more years of our leaders not going after these terrorist, they became very confident that the USA was soft and would never go after them like George W. Bush has.

All the finger pointing now is a waste of time. Unfortunately, it takes an event like 9/11 before we get serious, and I think this administration has gotten real serious, and I thank God often that we do.

[facedown]

Those documents may shed light on one of the most controversial assertions of the Bush administration – that there was never any thought given to the idea that terrorists might fly an airplane into a building.

"I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile," said national security adviser Condoleeza Rice on May 16, 2002.

"How is it possible we have a national security advisor coming out and saying we had no idea they could use planes as weapons when we had FBI records from 1991 stating that this is a possibility," said Kristen Breitweiser, one of four New Jersey widows who lobbied Congress and the president to appoint the commission.

What a clever segue. From the "report" to an out of context quote to a litigant. Nice try Commie Bovine Scatology.

[weegee]

Was the 1993 WTC terrorist bombing preventable?