Check out PBS on Tuesday 9pm

[Jim DeVito]

There is a super cool NOVA regarding the NSA and how they missed 911. It should be interesting.

[Stephen Eisel]

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/spyfactory/hill.html

[Stephen Eisel]

How about the laws that prohibited the CIA and the FBI from sharing intelligence? or the slashing of the CIA budget in Afghanistan in the 1990's?

[Jim DeVito]

Seems to me they dropped the ball. We will have to tune in Tuesday to find out more. Looks very interesting.

[Stephen Eisel]

Seems to me they dropped the ball. We will have to tune in Tuesday to find out more. Looks very interesting.

Wow, we finally agree on something

[Jim DeVito]

WOW... that is all I have to say. That is insane. 911 happened because NSA failed to tell anybody or do anything about it. They flowed these guys across the country. One of them had his real name and address is the san diago white pages for christ sake. I need to put the laptop down and grab a beer. WOW.

[ryan costa]

more sophisticated policies tend to compound the potential for human errors to crop up. it gets to a point where it reduces the number of people who understand the system.

a bigger budget would not have increased the odds of the CIA or NSA prevent 9/11.

the budget for Afghanistan was slashed because the Soviet Union was gone. progressive income taxes are always raised during war and during aspirations of Global Super Powerdom.

Turkey has a large military that works pretty cheap. they aren't using it for much. they could probably spare a few hundred thousand infantry for Afghanistan. Are we still calling it a "Coalition"?

[ryan costa]

The 9/11 attacks were not very sophisticated. There are any number of ways terrorists can make more destructive and demoralizing attacks. Al Queda tried to impress us with their planning, but had no expectation of destroying us or scaring us away.

It was not a very expensive operation for them to do. the biggest expense was paying the living expenses of their guys. I have read some of them had gym memberships and enjoyed hanging out at topless bars. The biggest impediment Al Queda faced was being sure all four planes took off on time. If there were delays in any of the flights it would have thrown off their syncronization. that would be much less impressive. but all the flights took of in time. They did not even use guns to hijack the planes.

It was not an expensive operation or an operation that required many people. Any random fringe group or band on religious extremists could have done it. there's not much the NSA or CIA or FBI can do to stop them. it is just a coincidence there were a few dots that might have should have could have been put together in this one instance.