Takeshi's 9.11

[Stephen Cavrak]

On Sep 12, 2004, at 6:01 AM, Fergus MacDermot wrote:

> On one of the documentaires here, one of the 9/11 commission made the 
> point that the conspriacy theories helped as it provided avenues and 
> leads to follow.

Two Sunday's ago, the New York Times ran a book review of the 9/11 
report by Richard Posner. While it won't explain the conspiracy 
theories, it will help understand why the report doesn't sit right with 
many people (who may or may not have bothered to read it ... "yes ... 
but ..." )

The 9/11 Report: A Dissent
By RICHARD A. POSNER
  The New York Times
  August 29, 2004
  http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/books/review/29POSNERL.html

	THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT
	Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks
	Upon the United States.
	Illustrated. 567 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. Paper, $10.

"The tale of how we were surprised by the 9/11 attacks is a product of 
hindsight; it could not be otherwise. And with the aid of hindsight it 
is easy to identify missed opportunities (though fewer than had been 
suspected) to have prevented the attacks, and tempting to leap from 
that observation to the conclusion that the failure to prevent them was 
the result not of bad luck, the enemy's skill and ingenuity or the 
difficulty of defending against suicide attacks or protecting an almost 
infinite array of potential targets, but of systemic failures in the 
nation's intelligence and security apparatus that can be corrected by 
changing the apparatus.

"That is the leap the commission makes, and it is not sustained by the 
report's narrative. The narrative points to something different, banal 
and deeply disturbing: that it is almost impossible to take effective 
action to prevent something that hasn't occurred previously."