According to the PDB now released from August 6, a little more than a month before the attacks of September 11, intelligence from other countries as well as the US pointed to a group of bin Laden's terrorist organization that had entered the country and was planning an attack with explosives. Now, obviously we can look at this information now and say that the government should have taken action to thwart the terrorists' mission, but, as the Bush administration is arguing in its defense, there was no concrete evidence, no 'smoking gun,' to make this information absolutely necessary to act upon. In other words, according to the administration, there was no reason to take action prior to the attacks, no need to pre-emptively attack al-Qaeda solely based on the information that its operatives were planning on striking us- I mean, when hadn't bin Laden wanted to or planned on attacking the US?
Similar to this situation- of considering al-Qaeda to be a threat, but not being absolutely certain of the imminence- was the case with Iraq. We knew Saddam was a dangerous guy who could pose a threat to the US. Based on intelligence from other countries as well as the US, it was decided that he needed to be stopped. My question to the Bush administration is this: If evidence of imminent attacks in the US by al-Qaeda, a growing threat for many years, wasn't enough to justify pre-emptively striking, how could lesser evidence of Saddam's potential threat to the US have justified a [b]war[/b]? I'd like some real answers from the administration, because their actions and motives/reasons don't quite add up for me.
Hmm, thats a very good question. They might claim that they learned from the 2001 attacks, and decided to act from then on. That turned out to be the wrong decision as well.
Reply to: whoisjohngalt
It's truly touching, isn't it.
"Tragically, a nation that was created by intellectuals and visionaries has now been completely taken over by venal corporate gangsters, delusional Christian fruitcakes and hopelessly shallow Texas shit-kickers." -Tom Robbins
