noteworthy wrote:

Yes, though "apologists" is rather loaded language. I'm not particularly interested in an argument, but what part of Bin Laden determined to strike in US requires further explanation? I'd like to revisit the 9/11 Commission report, perhaps in its comic book form.

For now, I'll quote the August 2001 memo:

Intelligence suggesting that suspected al Qaeda operatives were traveling to and from the United States, were U.S. citizens, and may have had a support network in the country.

Al Qaeda members -- including some who are U.S. citizens -- have resided in or traveled to the U.S. for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks.

Two al-Qaeda members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our embassies in East Africa were U.S. citizens, and a senior EIJ member lived in California in the mid-1990s.

Islamic terrorism was rather more than "a [hypothetical] threat" at the time.

Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam has told the FBI that he conceived the idea to attack Los Angeles International Airport himself, but that in ---, Laden lieutenant Abu Zubaydah encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation. Ressam also said that in 1998 Abu Zubaydah was planning his own U.S. attack.

Ressam says bin Laden was aware of the Los Angeles operation. Although Bin Laden has not succeeded, his attacks against the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 demonstrate that he prepares operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks. Bin Laden associates surveyed our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as early as 1993, and some members of the Nairobi cell planning the bombings were arrested and deported in 1997.

All that is well and good, but there is solid information out there (see the reports about the August memo) that the administration did not care about bin Laden, nor for anything else done in any manner by the Clinton administration. If Clinton touched it, it was tainted.

Were there concrete, legitimate reasons for CIA or NSA to want to expand what they were doing vis a vis bin Laden and his organization? Sure. That has nothing to do with what this administration wanted. Based on what came out of PNAC, they wanted the war in Iraq, and used 9/11 to get it and everything else their Grinchy little fascist hearts desired, because without it, I don't think even the rubber stamping Republican congress would have gone along with it.

RE: Pre-9/11 wiretap bid is alleged - Los Angeles Times