Gore rants: I would have taken 9/11 warnings seriously

The way he and his boss took the first Trade Center attack seriously and the embassy bombings seriously and the U.S.S. Cole bombing seriously. Read it. This would be like Bush, five years from now, angrily criticizing the current president for not sending enough troops to Iraq.

Back we go down memory lane:

O’DONNELL: But many people have made the impression that something in the Bush administration was done wrong. But there’s evidence that the Clinton administration knew full well that bin Laden had the wherewithal and was planning to attack the United States. Who is to blame and did the president, Clinton, get this information?

SCHEUER: Certainly the president got the information. And most certainly his closest adviser, Sandy Berger and Mr. Clarke—Richard Clarke, had the information from 1996 forward that bin Laden intended to attack the United States. There’s no question of that. And in terms of which administration had more chances, Mr. Clinton’s administration had far more chances to kill Osama bin Laden than Mr. Bush has until this day.

O‘DONNELL: That‘s very interesting. I don’t think that many Americans know that or think that everything that they’ve heard—you’ve spent your life tracking Osama bin Laden. From what we know now and what you know, how many missed opportunities were there to prevent the 9/11 attacks?

SCHEUER: Well, we had—the question of whether or not we could have prevented the attacks is one you could debate forever. But we had at least eight to 10 chances to capture or kill Osama bin Laden in 1998 and 1999. And the government on all occasions decided that the information was not good enough to act.

While we’re on the subject, yesterday the feds finally released video of the Pentagon taken on 9/11 by a surveillance camera at the Doubletree Hotel in Virginia. It was supposed to be released in early November, which led the Truthers to question the timing — before the announcement came that the vid would be delayed by several weeks. No matter; they’d already prepared their arguments for why the clip was bogus in case it showed what they said it couldn’t possibly show.

Note that if this video does indeed show a plane flying into the Pentagon, it will not actually show the plane hit, but in fact will show it disappear behind the Pentagon’s west wall (see aerial photo above) and then a fireball will obviously be seen coming up over the roof. This will be very similar to what was seen with the first video of the 2nd WTC crash shown “live” on TV which shows a plane (with no discernible markings) come across the screen and disappear behind the North Tower (which is blocking the view of the South Tower) and then a fireball is seen erupting from the other side.

I.e., if you see a plane, that proves the video’s fake. As obviously fake as the video of the second plane hitting the south tower on 9/11, in fact. That fake.

As it turns out, though, the plane’s not visible in the Doubletree clip. Which means it’s legit!

Apologies for the slight Trutherization in there. This was the only clip of it I could find.

Update: Not surprisingly, the little aside in the video about where the flight path should be visible is wrong. Click here and note how low the plane was in the moments before impact. It didn’t swoop down; in fact, it came in at a low angle, glanced off the ground on its approach, and then barrelled into the building.

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