9/11 Intelligence, Blind Spots, and Wacky Conspiracy Theories

The subtitle for this interview with Judith Miller over at the lefty alternet.org reads, "In 2001, an anonymous White House source leaked top-secret NSA intelligence to reporter Judith Miller that Al Qaida was planning a major attack on the United States. But the story never made it into the paper." Interesting. The interview is definitely a worthwhile read. In addition, Ms. Miller highlights some of the problems the U.S. intelligence community had in understanding even the basic identity of our enemy and the perpetrators of attacks against American assets. For example, consider these two key paragraphs:

"I was working on a special project in 2000-2001 -- trying to do a series on where Al Qaida was, who Al Qaida was, and what kind of a threat it posed to the United States. In the beginning I thought it was going to be pretty straightforward, but it turned out to be anything but. And it took me a long, long time, and a lot of trips to the Middle East, and a lot of dead ends, before I finally understood how I could tell the story to the American people. It was a long-term investigative piece, which meant that for the most part, I didn't write articles on specific individual attacks -- I was working the story …

"I was fairly persuaded that the attack on the Cole was an Al Qaida operation, based on the sources that I was talking to, because I had no independent information, obviously. The people that I was covering ardently believed that Al Qaida was behind a lot of these attacks on American forces and Americans throughout the Middle East that we were beginning to see. At the time there was still a fair amount of debate and a fair amount of resistance to that thesis within the intelligence community, as it's so-called. But from the get go, I think the instinctive reaction of the people I was covering was that this was an Al Qaida operation. So I started looking at the attack on the Cole as an example of Al Qaida terrorism." [Emphasis Added]

From my own research, I know that this is accurate. The U.S. intelligence community refrained from calling the attack on the USS Cole an al Qaeda attack for months. Interesting, no? I would say that is additional evidence of a fairly large blind spot when it comes to our terrorist foes, wouldn't you?

Check out the comments at the bottom of the interview. It seems quite a few folks over there think that the neocons/Bush/U.S. government/Halliburton/or some amorphous conglomeration of corporations were behind 9/11. Consider this post by one "aussidawg":

As unbelieveable as it is, the majority of the sheeple in this country still believe the "official" story about the 19 hijackers with box cutters. If one looks at all of the pieces to the puzzle, it is so blatently obvious that 9/11 was the planned precurser for the takeover of our government by the neoconservatives. Had 9/11 NOT happened, the passage of laws such as the Patriot Act, wiretapping and data mining of domestic phone calls and e-mails, and the war in Iraq would NEVER be accepted by the American public. This actually allowed a two pronged attack on our country. In addition to the hijacking of our Constitution, the prospect of endless war, made possible by our "fighting back against terrorism" is of enormous benefit to the defense contractors, and because of the location of this endless war, the middle east (aka America's gas station), an opportunity to manipulate the availability, and thus the price of crude oil and the products made from crude oil. We know 9/11 was an inside job, besides the obvious from the video footage taken that tragic day. If the government wasn't invoved, why would they be objecting so strongly to further investigation?

Crazy stuff.