> THis is, I think, very nearly the _whole_ reason behind most
> conspiracism. Stupid arabs couldn't do anything that clever, it must
> have been done by the kind of guys that brought us the Bay of Pigs.
Right. I would add that the conspiracy theorists ascribe too much power and intelligence to the people they think were secretly organizing the conspiracy.
Conspiracies are hard to keep secret. I know this from experience because I was organizing a protest-related one when 9/11 happened.
Bill wrote:
> The trouble with this is that it assumes that US intelligence agencies
> are intelligent and competent. But if you assume they aren't, and
> there's some evidence for this, then there's no need for conspiracy
> explanations. In fact a successful conspiracy involving the Bush
> administration and US intelligence agencies seems quite implausible.
There is plenty of evidence that U.S. intelligence agencies are incompetent and ineffective. Starting with the 9/11 attacks, we know that lower echelon people tried to alert U.S. leaders about "Bin Laden planning to attack U.S."
U.S. intelligence agencies are full of paper pushers who don't care about their jobs. They also don't have enough people to filter through all the information they collect. This is one reason why I don't lose sleep over intelligence-gathering systems such as Echelon. They can collect all of that data, but they don't have the human brains to digest
those terabytes of information.
We know that all U.S. government agencies had a lack of translators with knowledge of Middle Eastern and South Asian languages. They also lack experts on these areas of the world. I had a history professor back in 1987 who told my class about how the U.S. government didn't have any Farsi translators or experts on Islamic countries. He also accurately predicted the current conflict involving the U.S. against Islamic "terrorism".
Look at other U.S. intelligence agencies. The FBI couldn't find the Unabomber. They can't even develop a new computer system. Or look at the files the FBI collected on famous Americans. Those dossiers were full of inaccuracies and downright silly nonsense.
U.S. intelligence agencies can be very dangerous, but they are not all powerful and omniscient.
Chuck