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Read other letters about this article
It really seems to me that you are throwing things at the wall in an effort to see what sticks.
How so?
You start with the crime and you work outward from that. You have to start with the 5 "W"s of investigative journalism.. who, what when where and why.
Okay. For starters I assume that we both agree that al Qaeda (who) hijacked and then crashed planes (what) on September 11 (when) into the World Trade Center and elsewhere (where) because they wanted to score a high-profile attack on the United States in the name of wahabism (why).
I also assume that there's no debate about the who, what, where, when, and why's of al Qaeda in the Philippines or South America, nor in their smaller-scale blunders in New York City.
What I'm saying is that we also know that the Bush administration (who) ignored the warnings of a proven counterterrorism apparatus (what) throughout 2001 (when) as presented in intelligence briefings (where).
As for the why, that's the question. But surely we can't accept the conventional explanation that there was simply no way of knowing about this brand-new threat from "al Qaeda" and its mysterious leader "bin Laden."
