Let's take the fuck up theory as a major one. What do you do once you fuck up? You try to cover up your tracks that would expose you as the fuck up you are.
How did the Bush administration fuck up? For a start, their allies in Congress and in the US military and intelligence communities, long before Bush took office, made regime change in Iraq the top priority. They even rhetorically conflated the 'war against terror' with the 'war against WMD' and the 'war against the madman dictator of Iraq'. In fact, if you look at the rhetoric coming out of the people who drive policy (such as the interests attempting to lock up hundreds of billions in federal spending), the war against terror WAS the war against rogue regimes and their WMD. To quite an extent, it still is.
What did this 'believing their own bullshit' fuck up lead to? Or more precisely, how did this allow 9-11 to happen? Simple it would seem. When 20 Arab men converged on the US to carry out 9-11, they were not picked up as possible terrorists by the intelligence or law enforcement (with the FBI supposedly acting as a bridge in between). Why? Perhaps because they were identified as belonging to our own 'assets', assets which were being put together for the long-planned, much-debated (inside the national security state) regime change war against Iraq.
One version of this theory is simply that everyone was so busy getting ready to attack Iraq (and collect their billion dollar paychecks), they didn't really give a shit about 'Al Qaeda' or other non-state organizations launching attacks in the US. Remember, it's not what they were being paid to train for, and it's not what they were training for. The federal government had been gearing up for a long long time on Iraq and other rogue states with WMD.
Next, once the fuck up occurs, how do you cover your ass? You start by conducting a massive bombing campaign in a largely defenseless country where some elements of at least one terrorist organization are receiving haven: Afghanistan. Now it was quite masterful the way the US handled Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, but also Russia and India, in order to bring this about. If you are really lucky, even considerable numbers of idiots on the left of many countries will support you.
Then you have some of the people who helped oversee the fuck up oversee investigations about what led to 9-11. Call Sen. Biden if you need bipartisan help. Meanwhile, you mix good information about the background of your fuck up with really awful information to keep everyone confused and sifting through the information and arguing amongst themselves. You might even go so far as to finance some 'conspiracy theory' efforts yourself, since this only helps to add to the confusion and arguments and red herring madness. Then when such ludicrous conspiracy theories are exposed as Larouchite and anti-semitic plots, you can at least emotionally discredit anyone who is still trying to analyze and understand why your attempts at investigation and disclosure read like total bullshit (because they are total bullshit, but they aren't as interesting a bullshit as the bullshit you paid to have put into the conspiracy theories).
Then what do you do? You boldy carry out the original plans that caused you to have your pants down--that caused you to fuck up. You scream TERROR, WMD, madman dictator, and you invade Iraq. You also proceed to hold phony military tribunals instead of real trials for all the people you kidnapped in the years 2001-2004 and jailed in Guantanamo and with allied regimes (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan, and possibly even Syria). Why? The issue isn't their guilt (they are probably guilty of a lot of things), but rather the danger in outside people finding out about how you were covertly operating 1998-2001 in preparation for the war against Saddam. You might fire a few people who really let you down (e.g., Tenet) knowing full well that they would never blab, and even if they did, it would have about as much credibility as their intel on Iraq.
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