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Comment by ithought | Hacker News Reader

I believe he's referring to the 50 CIA employees who knew there were 2 suspected terrorists inside the US. As Richard Clarke alleged, the CIA purposely withheld this information from the White House because they appear to have been running a sting operation.

If you look at "Interview #07 (Washington, DC) by FF4Films on Youtube, Richard Clarke makes this allegation. It's pretty clear the situation is quite different than just saying the warnings were too non-specific to notice.

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True, good point. But that seems more like basic incompetence or cockiness rather than awareness that 9/11 was about to happen.

I remember something about European agencies (UK and France IIRC) giving specific warnings a few weeks or months in advance to the US agencies and the US agencies doing nothing then later scrambled to justify this inaction.

-/edit- here: https://cpj.org/2007/12/french-journalist-investigated-over-... -edit/-

Then again 9/11 is not a valid excuse as the US has been orders of magnitude worse for decades, had been preparing for such an event but did nothing and even the contrary when it actually happened and then used it to go to war to unrelated countries for unrelated reason (access to oil). So please just stop brandishing 9/11 as a justification for doing more of what the US have been doing all along.

>Then again 9/11 is not a valid excuse as the US has been orders of magnitude worse for decades, had been preparing for such an event but did nothing and even the contrary when it actually happened and then used it to go to war to unrelated countries for unrelated reason (access to oil). So please just stop brandishing 9/11 as a justification for doing more of what the US have been doing all along.

I agree with you. That isn't what I was arguing at all.

> True, good point. But that seems more like basic incompetence or cockiness rather than awareness that 9/11 was about to happen.

Seems like mass suveillance by western agencies is jut a way to cover for their own incompetence. How many terrorist attacks in how many countries over the last few years have we heard that 'the suspect was known to intelligence agencies' and yet they still couldn't stop jack shit.

The whole intelligence apparatus in NATO countries needs reforming.

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