Conrad over at The Gweilo Diaries has cut back on the cheesecake posts and focused on what’s going on in the rest of the world this week to our benefit. Cheesecake is plentiful on the net; hard headed analysis is in short supply. His 9/11 Blame Game is a masterpiece all by itself, and captures my thinking (minus the swearing) perfectly.
The only thing I have to add is a look at the infamous August 6 PDB “Bin Laden determined to strike in US.” A couple of things strike me – the most obvious being how old the data in the PDB — all the threats are from the 1990s. But the very first one, at the top of the PDB, is:
Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Laden implied in U.S. television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and “bring the fighting to America.”
Did you catch that – in 1997 and 1998 Bin Laden was on our TV screens telling us that he would bring the fighting to America. So like Conrad says, if you want to see who was responsible for our lax response to al Qaida, go look in the mirror.
