I was actually commenting on Oliver’s “Attack on Bali = An Attack on the West” post from the other day. Since this thread was about terror, I felt it was slightly off topic. You, of course, couldn’t possibly find a way to respond to the post.

Yeah. A bit off topic, but not too much

I thought a terabyte was any data relating to the War on Tera.

Ba dum ching, off to bed.

I agree the amount is probably not relevent. I only brought it up because of the persistent effort it took to delete the files. Also there was paper.

BTW; for any who are interested;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabyte

Semanticleo…

No, I hadn’t made the connection.

Now for some, er, semantics: surely if you are going to compare the Abel Danger files to the Library of Congress, you must consider all the photographs in the library in their digital forms, and you must also consider all the formatting data in all the books, rather than just the characters on their pages. That’s why an MS Word document with a few pages in it takes up a megabyte on your hardrive…though it’s nowhere near a million characters. I don’t think the 25% figure is accurate, but then again I don’t think your point requires it.

JWG

We are both on the same page. You may already have guessed I am talking about Abel Danger currently before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

What interests me most, is the brass ordering Abel Danger files (2.5 Terbytes) equaling 25% of all info in the Library of Congress, destroyed.

Curt Weldon and Arlen Spector seem determined to uncover the truth.

But I still worry about Spector’s history of ‘concern for public reaction’ .
You may recall Spector was the author of the absurd ‘magic bullet’ theory in the Warren Report.

I hope you didn’t take my remark about “pre-9/11″ to be code for “in Clinton’s time.” I’m referring to the fact that if we were to go back now and examine all pre-9/11 intelligence, we would find plenty of pertinent information about the attacks…among a ton of other information relating to threats that never came to pass. It’s easy to look back and see what info would have made a difference had it raised an alarm…it’s much more difficult to stare at the pile of info that comes in every single day and decide which of it, if any, needs to be acted upon. I’m willing to bet we could find more specific and credible intel about attacks that never came to pass…and again, witness the rain of criticism that comes down on any agency that raises an alarm because - gasp - nothing happened!

As to your second point…I’m confused about whether you are talking about obscuration after the fact or before the fact. In a nut shell:

- Information discarded or not acted upon by analysts before the attacks because in their judgement the information was not credible or actionable: nature of the art.

- Information deliberately obscured or destroyed in advance in order to aid the attacks, or in order to serve some political goal in spite of a certain knowledge of the attacks: jail or worse.

- Information obscured or destroyed after the fact in order to hide negligence before the attacks: administrative discipline or jail.

Clear? I don’t think we disagree on these things.

Scratch;

You will notice there is not one word or suggestion about what side of the aisle should be prosecuted. I am not differentiating. As I’ve said before, and gone unheard; “If it’s shit, get rid of it”

But here is the distinction I am making between two roads.. Incompetence is bad enough. I am talking about conscious activity that seeks to hide information(no matter if argued as good intentions; good intentions is the cheapest of the virtues) or destroy information that could reveal the truth about what was known, and who knew it. Do you also agree as to the difference between those two roads?

I think it should be clear to you that it was not intended by the Feds to boost Bush’s sagging numbers. It’s an attempt by Bloomberg to boost his sagging numbers. It is, after all, an election year for him, not Bush.

Bush controls the entire machinery of the Executive Branch. He can do better than a back - handed security warning in NYC.

As witness, Operation Iron Fist, AKA “Kill me some Iraqis, I’m losing my ass, here, fellas.”

Again, Scratch, when this admin tells us they’ve foiled 10 Al Qaeda plots since 9/11 and when you look into the details of those plots–it’s pretty weak beer. Jose Padilla? To date, all that Padilla’s been accused of–he’s not been formally charged–is that he’s met with AQ reps and that he once looked at an internet site that had a ‘how to’ guide on dirty bombs (even the Govt admits that site is terribly inaccurate).

Nope for the simple reason you re assuming both sides have an equal capacity/capability for assessing the intel.

So you side with the federal agencies on all the other alerts that have been given, right? None of them were political tricks? None of the timings were “convenient?” Even though no attacks occurred, those warnings were timely and were based on good intel, right?

the agency that disseminated the intel admitted it was not credible.

Not credible does not equal not accurate…but your point is taken. My point is that the prevailing sentiment seems to be that if a warning is given and no incident occurs, the warning must have been in error. Can we at least agree that that is faulty logic?

Nope–for the simple reason you’re assuming both sides have an equal capacity/capability for assessing the intel. In this case, NYC’s capability for assessing intel is about zero.

Lat question first–because the agency that disseminated the intel admitted it was not credible.

WRT the 6 Aug 2001 PDB–the PDB isn’t a document that contains speculation or gossip or what-ifs. It’s a document that is intended to highlight what the NSC, DoD, and various intellligence agencies consider to be the paramount issues affecting national security. Now, as the 9/11 Commission pointed out, we knew AQ was very likely trying to plot something involving commercial aircraft (Condiliar’s famous line about “traditional hijackings”)—so it might have beehooved AWOL George to perhaps beef up airport security or at least issue advisories to the airlines.

Of course, the 9/11 Commission also pointed out a number of leads went unnoticed (the Phoenix memo, Colleen Rowley, etc) simply because this admin opted not to pull the string on the 6 Aug PDB.

it might have beehooved AWOL George to perhaps beef up airport security

He still hasn’t beefed up our borders.