Even worse, the Republicans blew $70 million dollars on Clinton over a number of years, and only came up with where his penis had been.

Apparently, Bill Clinton's blowjob is more important to the nation that what happened on 9/11 and what we might learn from it.

I'll bet a little research would show that FDR spent more than that, in 1942 dollars, on the Pearl Harbor investigation.

The difference is, he really wanted to know what happened, whose fault it was, and what to do about it in the future. None of these things can be said about the current administration.

While the $3 million is a joke as far as funding goes, I don't think an investigation is going to turn up anything useful either. We already know who did it, how they did it and why. Why bother with doing something that amounts to little more than political window-dressing?

...what David said, there. I ... wow. Does the government really think the causes of 9/11 warrant an investigation? (Well, certainly as much as Clinton's blowjob did.) The idea makes me sort of sick. Is it possible people actually don't understand why 9/11 happened?

David, we know who did 9/11. We even know a little about why, or at least what they said their reasons were. FDR knew who did Pearl Harbor, too, and why.

But consider the following:
Somebody on our side screwed up. There was info that wasn't followed up on, data that wasn't correlated, etc. Who was responsible for this failure? Why did that happen? What should we do to prevent it from happening again?

Are we getting all the info we need to know what's being planned by alQ? Are we at least getting all that's available (I realize they ain't gonna tell us their plans, but there are bits and pieces out there to be gathered).

Did the police and fire units do their job properly? Is there something else they should have done? Do they have everything they need to react properly in an emergency like this?

And a hundred other questions. $3,000,000 isn't nearly enough to answer them. And we owe it to those who died that they should not have died in vain. (Sorry to go on so long, but there it is).

I bet if the administration suspected that there was an inkling of a chance of finding out that Bill Clinton was responsible, the funding would have been a lot higher.

"we are ruled by people who wish us harm."

Nah. I suspect we are ruled by people who simply don't give a damn.

Only in the sense that the mugger "simply doesn't give a damn" about his victim.

In the days before 9/11, there was a tremendous increase in "put options" for American and United Airlines, and for one or two other companies that were directly affected by the attacks. These were bets that those stocks would fall in value. It seems obvious that whoever was behind these put options knew, in some detail, about the attack before it happened.

Maybe the commission could start by tracking this down, since nobody else seems to have bothered. Or did I miss something?

I can't believe you people. I for one want to know what Bill Clinton's penis was doing on 9/11.

Good point, Keith. What do you think the odds are of Bush & Co letting that information become public?

Well, it would be silly for them to fund an investigation into their own neglect and malfeasance, wouldn't it? Contrariwise, the pathetic funding level makes me suspect that they have something to hide.

Duh.

Chuck,

I did a little research to see how much FDR spent. My impression is a lot less than $3M, at least on his 1st try.

Here is a link to a NYT reprint:

http://www.csis.org/isp/pubs/a_020727_campbell.pdf

" Somebody on our side screwed up. There was info that wasn't followed up on, data that wasn't correlated, etc. Who was responsible for this failure? Why did that happen? What should we do to prevent it from happening again? "

I think my worry is that a whole lot of energy is going to be spent on pointing fingers and assigning blame, and that a whole lot LESS energy is going to be spent in finding ways of lessening the risk of it happening again w/o turning the US into a police state.

Or maybe I'm just being cynical.

Rachel - While you articulate a possibile outcome of well endowed (argh I blame all the penis talk) commission, at least there could still be some good come out of that. The current level of funding seems set to mean nothing will come out.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and company are scoundrels and thieves, but they aren't the Bavarian Illuminati. There has been an investigation of the big bets on the financial markets placed in anticipation of the 9/11 attacks, with the presumption that they were al Quaeda fundraising efforts. Implying that the Bush gang is behind those bets is kind of like blaming the attack on the USS Cole on Hillary's elite killer ninja lesbian attack squad.

Alan -- I'm sure somebody (Amiri Baraka?) believes the options on airline stocks indicated US knowledge of the attacks. The rest of us wonder whether this level of activity should have raised questions about who was expecting airline stocks to fall and why; the presumption is terrorists, especially after the government claims that terrorists were tapping many other sources of money (e.g. charities, money-wiring firms) despite bin Laden's huge personal fortune. This is part of the overall question of why US intelligence didn't find and assemble enough evidence to at least make the attack more difficult (cf the possibility that the passengers who brought down the fourth airplane in rural PA couldn't have done so if the "20th hijacker" had been on board).

As for knowing why, the Bush administration's public pronouncements show the same sort of blind ignorance that let the mainstream media claim that the only unhappy people in Iran in the 1970's were reactionary religious fanatics (and the left claim that the only unhappy people were the downtrodden -- I'm not sure anybody got that >40% right). But I don't expect a commission to teach the US people about the dark side of US actions in the rest of the world.

I'm almost surprised the commission is so underfunded; Cheney at all must think it's too balanced to be twisted into reporting that the problems were not enough surveillance, black funding, and other interference with civil liberties.

A recent poll reported that 21 percent of Americans think the 9/11 hijackers were all Iraqis. Another 20-some percent thought only "some" of the hijackers were Iraqi.

This represents a massive failure by the media and a massive success for somebody's propaganda machine. Those "somebodies" have no interest in funding a real investigation.

Oceania was behind the attacks. We are at war with Oceania. We have always been at war with Oceania ...

Please also note that al-Qaida is not a part of Mr. Bush's "axis of evil."

What's up with that?

Alan Bostick wrote:

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and company are scoundrels and thieves, but they aren't the Bavarian Illuminati. There has been an investigation of the big bets on the financial markets placed in anticipation of the 9/11 attacks, with the presumption that they were al Quaeda fundraising efforts. Implying that the Bush gang is behind those bets is kind of like blaming the attack on the USS Cole on Hillary's elite killer ninja lesbian attack squad.

I didn't mean to imply that the Bush gang was behind the put options. I might suspect it in my more paranoid moments, but that's beside the point.

You say there's been an investigation. (I don't doubt you, but I haven't heard much about it.) What was the outcome of this investigation? Surely something like this should be traceable. Have any arrests been made? If not, why not?

I just found a bit more information about this, at snopes.com. The article there says:

The Chicago Board Options Exchange is investigating each of these trades and at this time is declining to offer comment on its progress.

That's as of October 3, 2001. What has been learned since then?

BTW, I'm also not trying to imply that the US government should have noticed the trades when they happened, made the proper connections, and prevented the attacks -- though I certainly hope they've been looking for that kind of thing since then. Of all the intelligence breakdowns that occurred before 9/11, this was an understandable one.

slacktivist asked

"Please also note that al-Qaida is not a part of Mr. Bush's 'axis of evil.'"

"What's up with that?"

What's up is that he was naming nations. It's an old-fashioned concept, but still useful, and still used. As they've said on Usenet since before I got there, HTH, HAND.

If that was supposed to be a withering comeback, it missed. Slacktivist's question seems sensible to me. You don't have to be a wild-eyed left-wing peacenik to note that the Bush Administration has worked very hard to move public attention away from Al Qaeda and towards their preferred bete noires. This is a fair point that has been made by people of many different political persuasions, and Gary Farber's response looks like nothing more than a rather ineffective attempt at misdirection. Who the heck cares whether Bush was arbitrarily constraining himself to "naming nations"? It wasn't a "nation" that blew up a chunk of New York on 9/11, it was Al Qaeda. That's Fred Clark's point, and Gary's cutesy Usenet blithering says nothing to it.

They do have something to hide:

Palast interview

Speaking of the put options, this site alleges a link between the unusual trading patterns and the CIA. I express no opinion on the plausibility of this allegation.

From Stefan Jones:

"I bet if the administration suspected that there was an inkling of a chance of finding out that Bill Clinton was responsible, the funding would have been a lot higher."

An excellent point. And (pretty much the same people) GOP Congress was willing to spend zillions on Clinton, with investigations which wouldn't accept 'innocent' as an answer. The federal government is now controlled by the GOP, so running an even more partisan investigation would be easier.

Bush's action is almost a confession that he has something to hide (such as ordering a halt to any and all investigations into Saudi ties to terrorism, perhaps).

Did that really happen? That would mean all the FBI and CIA and NSA guys would have to stop reading the newspapers and watching TV, wouldn't it?

I thought the claim I read was the more limited one that ObL's immediate relatives had been allowed to leave the country right after 9/11. I remember that being reported at the time, though not that there had been an Executive intervention to allow it. At first blush, I'd have expected them to get out of the jurisdiction before the attack, not after it, if they'd known it was coming.

Other things a 9/11 commission could look into: is the current Republican administration of NYC still shirking the need to pay for radio upgrades for emergency services?

My understanding of this from mainstream media is that the Giuliani administration started work on upgrades, then decided to discontinue the project. On the day, police and fire fighters had no common radio frequencies and there were significant performance and range problems which hindered rescue and evacuation efforts.

"If that was supposed to be a withering comeback, it missed." Fortunately, it wasn't. I do agree that adding "HTH, HAND" was unnecessary, but I'm only about the billionth person to use the phrase, and it's not generally considered unacceptable, or significant, so far as I'm aware.

My answer was otherwise supposed to be just that, an answer to what I thought an entirely obvious question. Now, moving on to the topic of suggesting that the "axis of evil" usage is supposed to distract attention from the fight against al Queda is an entirely reasonable topic of discussion, but my response to the actual question asked was hardly an "attempt at misdirection" -- I think, and I'm scarcely objective about this, of course, and may be wrong, that the worst I might fairly be accused of is my, not untypically, arguably being overly literal-minded in reading the question.

I regret that the amount of respect you read me with, Patrick, caused you to characterize my words as "cutsey... blithering."

We could, perhaps usefully, discuss the difficulties of fighting against non-state actors, and the wisdom or lack thereof, in the part of Bush policy that focuses (theoretically, anyway, and in that speech to Congress), therefore, on asserting that state backing for such non-state actors should be made intolerable.

How vigorously or not such a policy is being followed is one worthwhile question. What are the useful limits, and perils, of such a policy, is another worthwhile question. Whether such a policy is in any way necessarily a distraction from, or attempt to substitute for a direct war on non-state terrorists is yet another such question.

Whether, in practice, the Bush Administration is attempting to distract attention from their failures: well, that one actually seems pretty indisputable to me. Of course they are! (That's not the only thing they're doing, wrong or right, but I certainly wouldn't dream of arguing the point, let alone attempting to "misdirect" attention from it.)

But I kinda prefer to engage in such discussions when I amn't faced, inexplicably, with presumptions of rhetorical (and therefore personal) bad faith. I'm just saying.