What would have been the appropriate response after 9/11 ?

[kentuck]

No question about it, we were attacked by hijackers that were able to do tremendous damage to our country. They destroyed the WTC and demoralized the Pentagon. In the process, almost 3000 people died. What would you have done at that time? Would you have invaded Afghanistan? Would you have invaded Iraq? What would have been the appropriate response?

[indepat]

1. Eternal vigilance and seek out the masterminds and their networks

[DemonFighterLives]

2. A proper investigation first and foremost

That could find which rogue elements of our country helped the attacks come about. I am in no way convinced it was those 19 people pushed by Osama Bin Laden. Afghanistan was needed for pipelines and opium and Iraq for oil. Ask Bushco!

[rman]

9. That would have been a good start. n/t

-

[DemonFighterLives]

11. I thought so

I'm afraid the truth of 9/11 will not come out, much like the truth of the Kennedy Assassination. It seems some criminals need to be thrown out first.
:thumbsup:

[electron_blue]

3. frankly I would have loved to have seen a massive outpouring

of peaceful reaching out to other countries.

Would have been cheaper in the long run and probably would have worked better.

[CJCRANE]

4. The appropriate response

was not to let it happen.

[babylonsister]

19. Amen! Why did this admin ignore all the evidence

staring them in the face? Oh, yeah, vacations...:eyes:

[SoCalDem]

5. We should have capitalized on the warm feeling from the whole world

and immediately convened a "meeting of nations" that would have brainstormed about what to do about terrorism, the tactic...and in a broader sense, how to alleviate the feelings of frustration that CAUSE people to do these things.

There should have also been a military action in Afghanistan to remove the camps forcefully, and HUNT DOWN bin laden..BUT that should have been done WITH the assistance of MANY Arab states..(not just Pakistan)

The forum should have been convened ASAP, and should have been televised, and done in a town hall setting, so that input for ordinary people could have been included.


An immediate review of ALL foreign policies should have been ordered too, and should have included a truly bipartisan look at these policies.

Bush literally had the whole world in his hands, and he squeezed them all through his fingers, and scraped their residue off without a second thought.

He put HIS vengeful needs and the needs of his benefactors FIRST, and told the rest of the world, that their concern and genuine sympathy was misplaced..

[rzemanfl]

6. My thoughts at the time were:

1) Open every missile silo cover at a time when we were sure commercial satellites would see that and send every submarine to sea.
2) Send every military asset we could to Saudi Arabia whether they liked it or not. Tell them they could have their country back when we were done with it.
3) Tell the Taliban that they either told us where Bin Laden was and let us come in and get him or we'd nuke their country into a radioactive parking lot.
4) See what happened next.

This was, of course, before I knew how * let it happen through malfeasance or worse.

[jobycom]

8. The Taliban offered to turn over Bin Laden, and we refused the offer.

[rzemanfl]

14. Didn't know that then. n/t

[jobycom]

7. Should have impeached Bush and Cheney for deriliction, and then

Gone after UBL. When the Taliban offered to turn him over, we should have accepted. If they played games, we should have sent ground troops in after him, rather than using the excuse to take over the nation to get our oil pipeline.

We would have suffered a lot of casualties if we had sent in ground troops, but since it was our problem, that would have been morally preferable to bombing tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of innocent people to save our own lives. Our problem, so we should have born the responsibility.

Of course, getting UBL should have been followed up with a long range plan to reduce the hatred of us in the Middle East, thus undercutting the terrorists.

Instead, we spent more money, slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and created vast numbers of enemies. That's exactly the wrong response, and it will come back to us.

[tanyev]

10. FULLY investigating the put options;

FULLY investigating the money trail into/from Saudi Arabia; FULLY investigating why none of our senior security team did what they were supposed to in a crisis situation. The best interpretation of their actions is still impeachment--for gross incompetence.

[Monkie]

18. what money trail into/from Saudi Arabia?

The only confirmed money trail's relating to 9-11 i have seen lead to the military industrial complex and (ex)CIA

for example this piece by michael meacher ex-minister in Tony Blair's cabinet and a 35 year member of parliament in the UK sums up one trail

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1266520,00.html

"Significantly, Sheikh is also the man who, on the instructions of General Mahmoud Ahmed, the then head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), wired $100,000 before the 9/11 attacks to Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker. It is extraordinary that neither Ahmed nor Sheikh have been charged and brought to trial on this count. Why not?

Ahmed, the paymaster for the hijackers, was actually in Washington on 9/11, and had a series of pre-9/11 top-level meetings in the White House, the Pentagon, the national security council, and with George Tenet, then head of the CIA, and Marc Grossman, the under-secretary of state for political affairs. When Ahmed was exposed by the Wall Street Journal as having sent the money to the hijackers, he was forced to "retire" by President Pervez Musharraf.
~snip~
Daniel Ellsberg, the former US defence department whistleblower who has accompanied Edmonds in court, has stated: "It seems to me quite plausible that Pakistan was quite involved in this ... To say Pakistan is, to me, to say CIA because ... it's hard to say that the ISI knew something that the CIA had no knowledge of." Ahmed's close relations with the CIA would seem to confirm this. For years the CIA used the ISI as a conduit to pump billions of dollars into militant Islamist groups in Afghanistan, both before and after the Soviet invasion of 1979.

With CIA backing, the ISI has developed, since the early 1980s, into a parallel structure, a state within a state, with staff and informers estimated by some at 150,000. It wields enormous power over all aspects of government. The case of Ahmed confirms that parts of the ISI directly supported and financed al-Qaida, and it has long been established that the ISI has acted as go-between in intelligence operations on behalf of the CIA."

another example from The Independent a uk newspaper, 14 October 2001:
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/linkscopy/insideDeal.html

"Further details of the futures trades that netted such huge gains in the wake of the hijackings have been disclosed. To the embarrassment of investigators, it has also emerged that the firm used to buy many of the "put" options -- where a trader, in effect, bets on a share price fall -- on United Airlines stock was headed until 1998 by "Buzzy" Krongard, now executive director of the CIA."
~snip~
There is no suggestion that Mr Krongard had advance knowledge of the attacks."

I'm getting a bit tired of the "Evil Arabs" conspiracy theory being peddled by the RW and swallowed by the masses

[tanyev]

21. I am referring to what Richard Clarke mentioned in his

book--John O'Neill's investigations into the money trails were leading him to Saudi Arabia, but all of those investigations were completely shut down when the Bush administration swept in to power.

I think the reason they were shut down is because of all the connections you have cited. I am in complete agreement with you. You have stated it more clearly than I did.

[Demeter]

12. Impeaching Bush and Cheney and the rest

They were criminally negligent at the very least.

[BeyondThePale]

13. Criminal investigation with the world's assistance...

resulting in arrests and convictions. Just like the strategy in Spain following the Madrid bombings.

[DanCa]

24. I agree with my buddy BTP (nt)

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

15. Bomb! Kill civilians! Destroy! Invade! Show that we're "civilized".

Oh, wait...that's what we have done and are still doing.

Sure is working well.

[Name removed]

16. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Poiuyt]

17. We should have invaded Lichtenstein

:)

[smoogatz]

20. 9/11 should have been prevented

Bushco failed, catastrophically, to protect the American people. I believe Richard Clarke's and Paul O'Neill's accounts of the months leading up to 9/11--Bush, Rice and Cheney were focused on Iraq and missile defense to the exclusion of all other security issues. They did absolutely nothing to prevent the attacks, whether through hubris or stupidity or because they thought the attacks would be small in scale and would help to further their agenda in the middle east. The fact is, they knew attacks involving airline hijackings were coming. They knew the identities of several of the hijackers. Any marginally competent administration would have prevented the hijackers from getting on the planes. That said, the appropriate response, I think, would have been to declare all out war on al Qaida. That would entail a series of coordinated air and special forces attacks on al Qaida headquarters, camps and strongholds in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and coordinated law-enforcement action in Europe, Indonesia, Thailand and other nations where al Qaida is active.

On edit, I should add a few things: working peacefully (and sincerely) toward Democratic reform in the middle east; pressing hard for the full enfranchisement of all Palestinians living in Israel and the occupied territories, and the creation of a contiguous, autonomous Palestinian state; improving domestic security without undermining civil rights; and making a JFK style commitment, right now, to energy independence by 2025.

[reverendpatrick]

22. I live in Brooklyn and saw the towers burning...

... and in the three blocks it took me to rush home rather than going to work that day, I KNEW that the world had changed. I KNEW that it was Islamist terrorism, I KNEW that it was the "New Pearl Harbor" and the beginning of WWIII, and I KNEW that OUR government let it happen. All before I heard my first news reports.

I thought the best response, appropriate or not, would have been this (if *I* was the king of the world):

Call the Russians and the Chinese and tell them - something is about to happen, don't freak out!
Make a statement to the world - something is about to happen - this will show you what we are capable of.
Pick a target somewhere in the mountains above the Khyber Pass where there were no people, and make sure there were lots of cameras available.
Shoot off the biggest, baddest ICBM in the arsenal.
Make sure the footage of the third Nuke fired in anger made its way on to every TV network on the planet.
Make a statement to the world - this is what we are capable of. There's one with "Kabul" printed on it, another with "Riyadh", a third with "Islamabad", a fourth with "Amman", "Damascus", "Cairo", Sana'A", "Khartoum", etc. This is what we are capable of. Do NOT stand in our way.
Then - Pursue the perpetrators of the crime and bring them to justice.

Unfortunately, there have been times since when I've felt like there should be one that says "Washington." I hate the neo-con bastards who make me feel that way. Once we get our once-and-hopefully-again great nation back from their clutches, I hope they rot in hell for all eternity...

[CJCRANE]

23. The appropriate response

was to sit in a classroom for half an hour so as not to frighten the children.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

25. See our own hand in its making...... and do something that

would deter anyone from wanting to do it again.. I am afraid son of shrubber is only playing into their hands.

[kiki]

26. I'm afraid I think the question is ludicrous...

...from the first word. "No question about it"? You don't have to be a MIHOPer to know there are a thousand questions about it.

And "demoralized the Pentagon"? WTF is that supposed to mean? If that's how the Pentagon acts when it's "demoralized", I'd hate to see what it does when it's feelin' frisky.

If I was the Bush administration on 9/11, the first thing I'd do is break down on tears on national TV, beg forgiveness from the American people for causing this to happen, and march straight to the Hague to plead guilty at my trial. But that's just me.

[wli]

27. Dubya et al turning themselves in for crimes against humanity

If they wanted to play geopolitics they should have passed the PNAC agenda around to the citizenry, or perhaps even had real military advisors look at it to make sure it would work (which all the honest ones knew it wouldn't).

The false flag attack was counterproductive in every way.

[Tactical Progressive]

28. For the media to have questioned BushCo hard

on why they ignored every intelligence warning from both inside and outside our own agencies to let us get attacked?

On purpose. I know how hard it is for people to accept, and thereby recognize, this reality, even in spite of everything else you see these monsters have been unabashedly willing to do. Even most Dems don't want to go there, preferring to simply associate ridiculous MIHOP conspiracies with the blatant reality of LIHOP so that they can dismiss them in tandem from their thoughts as quickly as possible.

On purpose.

But the media didn't do that, choosing to instead wrap their horrific decline into propaganda and self-celebrity, in phony patriotism, in the sad belief that that would be their salvation. Instead all they did was charter themselves into the final stages of Republican corporate whoredom.

The answer to your question is that after that initial course was taken, it didn't make much difference what we would have done because it would have, and of course was, all going to be based on lies anyway. If I had a choice on what future - based on lies - we would have chosen, it would have been to restore Afghanistan to some semblance of order and prosperity with huge help from the rest of the world. Then wedge every country over there, like Saudi Arabia and Jordan and Israel and yes, even Iraq, into a better world, again with huge help and monetary aid from the rest of the world, who we could have extorted for good and not for Halliburton and Bechtel profits. I think we had the moral authority, the attention, and enough of the world's sympathy to have really straightened out the Middle East along with the military might and economic leverage we always have.

But again, it would all have been based on a lie, and that lie was directed at no such outcome. That makes your question moot, akin to asking 'What do you wish the bank robbers had done after they blew the safe open?' I wish the police, that is American journalism, if it existed, hadn't driven their getaway cars up to the bank entrance and given the robbers a parade over to the best hotel in town. But that's exactly what they did. BushCo let America get attacked, and the media covered for them long and hard. Both of those things not happening would have been appropriate.