> >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.
No one can guard against "all possible manifestations of mass-killing terrorism," to be sure, but the Pentagon is one of the most obvious targets, one that the governing elite, many thought, must have done all they could to protect from all conceivable modes of attacks. We are not talking about random bombings of discos, pizzerias, etc., you see.
>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.
Surely they must have had plans to exploit disasters like the WTC bombing. That doesn't negate, however, the fact that the _successful_ attack on _the Pentagon_ was a huge embarrassment to them.
Yoshie