>No, sir. From the standpoint of ruthless ruling-class efficiency,
>the best means would have been to _prevent_ the attacks on the WTC &
>the Pentagon from happening. For all the investment they made in the
>conventional armed forces, conventional police, intelligence, covert
>operations, etc. over many decades, however, they couldn't even
>defend the Pentagon effectively. One expects the governing elite of
>a capitalist state not to serve the interests of the working class,
>but one at least expects its department of defense to defend its own
>headquarters capably. The 9/11 bombings showed that it couldn't do
>even that. The governing elite of this nation are not fit to rule.
>A vote of no confidence.
Don't agree, Yoshie. Noone'll ever be able to guard against all possible manifestations of mass-killing terrorism. It's not efficient to try to do what can't be done. It's efficient to try to make it difficult, of course. And it was difficult. Not all the hijackers succeeded, remember, and those who did had to spend a fortune, take lots of training, keep secrets for months at least, and, by the way, kill themselves. That last is the clincher, for mine. When you're up against that, you're gonna have to get used to the odd bout of carnage, whoever governs your hegemon.
Maybe even have plans in place for how you might best benefit from so predictable a disaster. My view is that Shrubya's instant talk of 'acts of war, not terrorism' and 'harbours' (the strangeness of which I remarked upon in the moment on PEN-L) pointed to an already existent policy concerning what to do if a nasty terrorist event afforded the administration the political support and international moral leverage to do it. Hence the importance of all this 'evidence' of 'links' between Al Qaeda and Iraq, Nicaragua, and, conveniently, sixty-odd unnamed countries - probably already organised into the order in which evidence concerning each will appear.
Or am I too cynical?
Cheers, Rob.