The level of hate and venom being spat at the US from some quarters right now really IS worrying. There are those Palestinian pictures, of course, and some of my friends have passed on the most appalling anti-US statememts made by some people on the net, including one guy from Bucharest who made this out to be the happiest day of his life.
It's a disturbing world.
Ok, I am hearing questions asked about why this wasn't detected and stopped in advance by America's large resources.
I hope this doesn't turn into an internal blame thing at any point. A lot of people seem to think that preventative intelligence is easy, and it definitely is not.
Thr fact is, Amercian is a modern democracy. And, as other deomcracies (including our own) have found out over time, when you come up against people willing to take advantage of and abuse the freedoms that a modern democracy offers it is not difficult to commit terrorism.
Obviously, this was a well-planned, large scale operation that could theoretically have been stopped at an earlier point. But balance thus against the amount of successes that security services have had over time... the sad fact is that nowhere is entirely safe.
America is ever-so-slightly a soft touch for homeland terrorism because they simply have such little experience in it. But that is something to be PROUD of. For a long time it has been free of the troubles that plague much of the rest of the world, and I thkni it will yet be again
Anyway, who could have predicted that anyone would do something this insane? It's mind-boggling. And, as I say., vast effort will now be made to prevent such a thing happenong again.
For now, my support is with the emergecny crews who will now be working thier nuts off trying to find as many survivors they can in there. Good luck to them.
Still can't find anything else on the Camp David thing.....
Here's more from the prez....BARKSDALE AIR FORCE BASE, La. (Sept. 11) - As chaos unhinged New York and Washington, President Bush commanded the full force of the United States government to ''hunt down and to find'' the terrorists responsible.
''Terrorism against our nation will not stand,'' he declared Tuesday.
In Florida for a pair of education speeches, the president scrapped his schedule and said, at the first reports of attacks on New York's World Trade Center, that he was hastening back to Washington.
But, with the White House evacuated under threat of attack and his wife hunkered down in an unidentified secure location, the president and Air Force One were rerouted - under escort by military fighter jets - to this Louisiana air base.
In a conference room dotted by portraits of decorated Air Force officers, the commander in chief announced that the U.S. military was on ''high-alert status.''
''Freedom itself was attacked this morning and I assure you freedom will be defended. Make no mistake. The United States will hunt down and pursue those responsible for these cowardly actions,'' Bush said.
First lady Laura Bush spoke with her husband by a secure military phone line before he took off from Sarasota, Fla.
Mrs. Bush and a handful of aides were whisked by motorcade from Capitol Hill, where she was to have testified to a Senate committee on education, to a hide-out away from the White House. There, the sequestered group huddled around a single TV in their hide-out and channel-surfed for the latest news, according to one person in the group.
Mrs. Bush also checked with her twin daughters at college to make sure they were safe.
who could have predicted that anyone would do something this insane?
It also make the planned Missile Defence System pointless.
KJ, America was warned about attacks but NOT on American soil. We were looking at Embassy attacks here, lime Laden has done before.
And who gives a frig what crazy scenarios Hollywood have come up with over time.
To make it clear: We have no reason to think that there was ANY indication of anything even vaguely approaching what happened here.