this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2025
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My money would be on the Bush admin bearing the lion's share of the blame, but I've also not done enough of a deep dive on it to absolve the Clinton administration of responsibility, so I included them as possible ball-droppers.
You might want to check out "The Looming Tower". Its probably over dramaticized, but it follows FBI agent John O'Neil played by Jeff Daniels. It shows how frustrating it was to deal with the Bush administration. O'Neil was fired and went to work security at the WTC and was killed by the attack.
I think Clinton et al. fumbled some balls in their own efforts to address the problem, probably made others worse. But it was the discarding of intelligence as if it wasn't worth at least monitoring that caused 9/11. Something may have eventually happened even with attention to the data, they were dead set on coming after the US, but in a sense we let them in when we didn't have to. I've always said, what if the gov't made the FAA mandate a closed cockpit to all airlines before then, how would that have changed things? A huge shift from just a rule change.