Earwicker wrote:I do (but can't be arsed going to find it) but Panic suggested that it had been edited to make it sound like there were more explosions going off.
It wasn't - it was repeat edited to repeatedly emphasise that there was a loud explosion that the firefighters reacted too.
Oh right! It was the firefighters around the pay phone! That I remember. Yes, like you say, it wasn't edited deceptively, it was edited to emphasize the explosion. That must be the video in question. Where did the cops and the schoolchildren come from, panic?
earwicker wrote:You don't start from the outside and work in. You start from the crime and work out.
That's what I would've thought anyway.
It's very weird how Panic and Eva03 have argued that the investigators were not sent down a very narrow tunnel early on. bin Laden was blamed by noon on 9/11.
Does anyone think it is strange that the same team of hijackers who are credited with being such masterminds that they completely evaded our security apparatus without any insider help were also so sloppy that they left all that evidence sitting in rental cars?
As media covered the 9/11 attacks unfolding, many quickly speculated that Bin Laden was behind the attacks. Within hours of the attacks, the FBI was able to determine the names and in many cases details such as dates of birth, known and/or possible residences, visa status, and specific identity of the suspected pilots and hijackers.
Two explanations for that: the FBI started to unsuck minutes after the attacks, and were suddenly able to fill in all the details on the patsies that they had ignored prior to 9/11, OR, these guys could be fleshed out because they were IN the system and had been for years, but they were off-limits because of their impending usefulness.
Few had made any attempt to disguise their names on flight and credit card records, and they were some of the few people of Arabic descent on the flights.
Even though the passenger manifests released to the media in the hours after 9/11 had no Arab names- so either, the investigation was
so far along at that point, the FBI knew exactly which names to
redact from the manifests ( like Earwicker said, working from the outside in ), OR, there were no Arab names on the original manifests because the FBI was still rushing to compile the list of patsies from the CIA archives, and trying not to pin this on Arabs who might still be alive. Despite their best efforts, the FBI seems to have failed in that, and they also failed by putting names on the patsy list that led back to US military bases, like in Pensacola and San Diego.
Mohamed Atta's luggage, which did not make the connection from his Portland flight onto American Airlines Flight 11, contained papers that revealed the identity of all 19 hijackers, and other important clues about their plans, motives, and backgrounds.
Yay! Good job, Mohammad Atta 007 Mastermind!
On the day of the attacks, the National Security Agency intercepted communications that pointed to Osama bin Laden, as did German intelligence agencies.
Fast translation on those. Slow translation on the communications BEFORE the attacks. Curses, foiled again! We were thisclose to stopping it. Nice job CIA and NSA not spotting those option trading patterns that began on 9/7, either.
From the 9/11 timeline kept at PBS:
September 11, 2001
Hijackers crash two airliners into the World Trade Center in New York. A third strikes the Pentagon, and a fourth crashes in a field in rural Pennsylvania. More than 3,000 people are killed in the terror attacks.
September 13, 2001
The White House announces that there is "overwhelming evidence" that Osama bin Laden is behind the attacks.
Colin Powell promised a "white paper" from the State Department to establish the authorship of the attacks by al-Qaeda. This was never forthcoming, and was instead replaced by a paper from Tony Blair, which presented only circumstantial evidence, with very few points actually relating to September 11th.
Remember that Blair paper? ( since when do we farm out our investigations to the UK? )
la times wrote:A further embarrassment was another bit of intelligence touted by Powell, a British report that Powell referred to as a "fine paper ... which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities." The report, grammar and spelling errors intact, turned out to be largely plagiarized from a graduate student paper, grabbed off the Internet from an Israeli publication, that relied on 12-year-old data. Unfortunately, unlike Scotch, intelligence does not age well. Nevertheless, there were the dregs of old dissertations and magazine articles, recycled and served up in a report cobbled together by British Prime Minister Tony Blair's press officer, just before Blair's meeting with Bush last month.
There was nothing better to report in regard to an Al Qaeda-Iraq connection because England's vaunted spy agencies would not confirm the falsehoods that Blair and Bush wanted to hear.
The FBI's "Most Wanted Terrorists" web page does not state that Bin Laden is wanted for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The FBI page states: "Usama Bin Laden is wanted in connection with the August 7, 1998, bombings of the United States Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya. These attacks killed over 200 people. In addition, Bin Laden is a suspect in other terrorist attacks throughout the world."
When asked why there is no mention of 9/11 on the FBI's web page, Rex Tomb, the FBI's Chief of Investigative Publicity, is reported to have said, "The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden's Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11."
But see, Colonel Panic remembers this:
September 13, 2001
The White House announces that there is "overwhelming evidence" that Osama bin Laden is behind the attacks.
