The WH was panicked after 9/11?

The WH was desperate to prevent follow up attacks and that desperation gave way to condoning torture. This is the narrative of Mayer's book The Dark Side and is in line with Suskind's One Percent Doctrine.

One problem. It doesn't square with the administration's bizarre conduct in the lead up to 9/11 and their bizarre conduct immediately following 9/11. For example, they didn't want an investigation. That's rather odd. We later learned that Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar were supported by Saudi officials based in San Diego. To date, we don't know the extent of their involvement because the WH refused to declassify 28 pages of the Joint Inquiry report which dealt with these details.

Is the "they were panicked" narrative simply spin to justify outrageous counterterrorism policies? I would think if WH officials were truly panicked they would have been scared shitless to have Tenet remain as CIA Director and Rice remain as National Security Adviser.

thanks for the information

and only by the flunkies who didn't know what was about to go down.

Yes, they had warnings. No, they didn't do anything about them.

They were jubilant. They had the ability to feed on American's fear and tear the Constitution as they had always wanted, as they had already started to do.

And, they got their wargasm.

it was all planned for. it worked brilliantly for them.

BUT...it may have been because they didn't expect so many casualties. If they imagined one hit on one building, that would have been enough for their purposes and wouldn't have made people ask questions about what they were doing while it happened. But THREE hits? FOUR hijacked planes? There were windows of time for action when none was taken. After all, Bush knew about the first hit BEFORE he entered the school. WHY did he enter the school? WHY didn't he immediately take action to protect New York and the rest of the country? WHY didn't he call New York's governor to discuss aid? Clearly, one hit didn't panic Bush. One hit was business as usual. No biggie.

NOTHING says conspiracy as much as Bush's reaction to the first hit. His only thought seemed to be assuring himself of an alibi.

on AF 1?

It was intriguing and I am uncomfortalbe writing it out here, but after that day, the multiple assassinations of left-leaning leaders, nothing seems impossible at the 'highest' levels.

believe it either. If things looked in disarray, it was to their benefit and fit into the overall story line that 9-11 was all due to incompetence.

The secret service certainly didn't panic while B** sat at the school house.

it was published in on alternet.org the day before the planes about them building up the military - they wanted an enemy to build up and distract americans while they robbed us