Posted on 06/19/2002 6:39:39 PM PDT by RCW2001
I recently heard that the moon is made of green cheese.
Do you really expect me to believe your above story without any proof? Is that how you come to believe things?
How can the government possibly talk about reorganizing government or this or that--they don't know what all went wrong.....this re-organization is a cover-up in my opinion.
And in the article, they say nothing could have been done......horse pockey! If they had translated the damn intercepts, they could have put everybody on alert! The military puts their units on alert status all the time, and then takes them off--at least they did when my brother was with the 101st.
All this CYA, CYA, CYA.....excuses, excuses, excuses.
People with Arabic/Pashtun/Farsi etc. language skills have been having an easy job being hired.
I'm sure even in the bizzare instance that no one was hired with proficiency in Arabic, the CIA would be able to get some of their employees to learn the language. While average US citizens aren't renown for their foreign language skills, the US gov't has the best language teaching facilities in the world. Also US insitutes of higher education such as the Georgetown SFS produce highly capable, multi-lingual graduates.
There was a special on one of the major channels a month or so after 9-11 and they interviewed the head of the NSA agency that intercepts these messages. They have a budget that is very, very small and millions and millons of conversations from all over the world to soft through.
The staff is very small is mostly computerized. The computers look for certain keywords like "bomb" or "terrorist" etc. and then flags the tape to be reviewed by a human. The agency has to send may taped conversations to the CIA or National Language Agency or whoever most of the time because their agants don't speak the language.
I hope the got about a 10 Billion Dollar boost in the next budget?
What difference would it make? If you'd heard about it on Sept. 13 would it make the 3000+ killed on 9-11 any less dead? NO! I'm sick to death of this perfect 20/20 hindsight everyone is bragging about. We didn't see 9-11 coming, plain and simple. Let's stop tearing the CIA and FBI apart for a while and let them get their acts together so they can continue preventing terrorist attacks. Have you noticed that the omnipotent Osama and his henchmen haven't been able to pull anything else off. I'm not saying that they won't in the future, but I'm sure they've had several attempts quashed by the good guys.
I hear you, man. My Australian girlfriend may not make her flight to the U.S. because the US Consulate in Sydney screwed up her visa application. I yelled at the lackey I talked to, that she worked for me because I pay taxes. I'm still waiting to hear from my girlfriend -- the mail should be arriving there any minute now, and this is the last mail delivery before her flight. So yeah, I am enraged at my tax dollars being wasted, too.
There were 3 agents monitoring that language then. Probably more now, possibly including a few who have and are still going through intensive language courses and some native speakers. Note that even Arafat has to say the same thing in English and Arabic these days. The right people are listening.
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