[Dog]

That damn Clinton!!!!

Left this country wide opem!!!!!

[bloggerjohn]

The whole problem is that one really, really smart guy - a Sherlock Holmes - was missing or had no power to yank chains. Bureacracies are all very nice but in the end it takes one guy to put it all together.

Instead we got Dave Frasca. Oh, the FBI did get rid of the one guy who knew all about Al Queda. Brilliant of them.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

OFFICIAL BUMP(TOPIC)LIST

[flanew]

Thanks for posting this article

[Common Tator]

re-examination of years of terrorist plots and attacks around the world, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, suggests that American intelligence agencies profoundly underestimated Al Qaeda's reach and aspirations for more than a decade as it grew from obscurity into a global terrorist threat, lawmakers and investigators said this week.

Any one with a brain should be able to see our defense overestimated Al Quaida's reach and power. We were expecting suitcase nukes and trucks bigger than those used in the middle east to blow up cities and buildings. We way overestimated their power. That is why we didn't think of 20 unarmed guys gettin on 4 planes with tourist class tickets and in possesion of legal to carry on box cutters as a threat. We didn't see airplane tickets and cardboard box openers as a successful means of an attack to kill thousands. We did not think they would be reduced to a bottom dollar, budget level, penny anti, terrorist attack. They were so reduced and we overestimated them.

[J Jay]

U.S. Long Underestimated Qaeda's Scope, Officials Say

This really isn't a new philosophy. America usually waits until the enemy knocks us down before we get up and do something about it. Remember Dec. 7, 1941? I do.

[VOA]

bump

[Lady In Blue]

Bumping for a later read, thanks!

[aristeides]

Thanks. Informative article. Little mention of the Clinton administration here, and no mention at all of OKC, for example, of Terry Nichols meeting with the Islamists in the Philippines. But it's going to be very hard to keep that from coming out.

By the way one of the planners of the '93 WTC bombing trained in '92 at the same camp near Khost in Afghanistan that Ressam later trained at. He then met Ramzi Yusef in Pakistan, I take it in the bin Laden-financed safe house that this article says Yusef was staying at. Then they flew together to the U.S., with bombing plans.

[Fred Mertz]

"We really didn't see it until 1995 or '96," Mr. Sheehan said. "Until then, the intelligence and law enforcement communities kept insisting this was a lone cell operation," he added. "They really missed it initially."

Super informative post. The NYT can't bring it upon themselves to call the 1995 Philippine connection Project Bojinka, because it might connect the dots to OKC.

Wallaby, thanks for your additions to this thread, but I'll have to try to digest them tomorrow.

[keri]

ping

[dirtboy]

A re-examination of years of terrorist plots and attacks around the world, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, suggests that American intelligence agencies profoundly underestimated Al Qaeda's reach and aspirations for more than a decade as it grew from obscurity into a global terrorist threat, lawmakers and investigators said this week.

And they apparently also overestimated Saddam's WMDs capabilities. But Bush was supposed to be able to figure out that they had overestimated Saddam after it had been revealed that they had underestimated al Qaeda?

Yeah, right...