I don't have too much time, so I'm afraid this'll have to be quick and dirty... :/

Boyd's article is certainly formidable, and although these ideas are not necessarily new to me, I don't have adequate command of these concepts to incorporate them in off-the-cuff comments.

Where I was going with the Boyd article... One of Boyd's points is that we group like things together in our minds - "domains" as he refers to them. When a person creates something, Boyd says that we in fact destroy those domains and form a new domain from the constituent parts.

(Boyd also points out that due to Heisenberg, Goedel, and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, the instant we form a new domain, problems start to crop up. That's because we immediately start to look for things that reinforce that mentally constructed domain/theory/classification and the closer we examine something, the more chaos results, etc, etc etc until, once again, we must destroy what we've got and start again. But anyway...)

What I'm attempting to do is destroy some other peoples' "domains" or theories about al Qaeda and re-form the constituent parts in a manner that makes the most sense. There are some people, like Rivero, or the people at Cooperative Reaserch (and a few others) who believe that the only possible explanation is that the US gov't or parts of it are rogue and we caused it ourselves. There are people who believe that Israel did it. Laurie Mylroie says look to Saddam's Iraq. Michael Ledeen thinks we ought to suspect Iran. Still others point to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. And of course I'd like to include the serious works on terrorism and al Qaeda in particular by Rohan Gunaratna and Yossef Bodansky. Needless to say, not all of these sources agree with one another!

What I would like to do is look at all the facts that these people have marshalled, but look to combine as many facts as possible in a new way, without regard to the previous theories. I think I've done a fair job so far. I think all of them, in different ways, are partially correct. I come into this with the assumption, perhaps naive, that people seldom make stuff up out of thin air. A theory might include data that has been mis-interpreted by the author, or even include some disinformation. But if one proceeds carefully, one can generally ferret out the disinformation. Footnotes always come in handy.

The president's visit to the Booker school apparently had been in the planning stages since August, and was formally announced on Sept. 7

Yeah, everyone who wanted to know knew where he was. I think the business on the morning of 9/11, and for that matter Masood's assassination, were actually why-not shots in the dark. Great if it succeeds, but the main effort was elsewhere.

pattern I perceive for American involvement in wars and conflicts over the last century is subterfuge in casus belli

OK, so there's the Spanish-Am War, with the Maine. But I think that was probably a genuine magazine explosion (they weren't unknown), but the public reaction got out of control, and good ol TR & company didn't exactly try to quiet things down.

Gulf of Tonkin incident and subequent resolution. Yes. But I would point out that the US had been invovled in Vietnam for some time before that incident, and the President could have conceivably comitted large numbers of soldiers & Marines without the resolution anyway. I also wonder how much of that was a CYA exercise by the Navy. One skipper gets too agressive, and when awkward questions arise, the skipper or someone in the chain of command says to the boss "Sure we were in int'l waters! Them damn commies just came outta nowhere!"

Anyhow, if there were dark forces in our gov't who wanted to go ape on the Middle East, they probably would have chosen a less disruptive method - such as assassinating high gov't official, or a repeat of the Cole bombing, only this time the vessel is lost. I remember in the aftermath of 9/11, no one knew what was going to happen with the economy, the stock market, etc.

I think everything just makes more sense from a perspective of a straight-up attack on the US by al Qaeda associated foreigners. Not a surprise attack, exactly, but a surprise within a surprise attack.

On prior warnings:

I've seen enough to convince me that the US gov't defintely knew something was up, and had recieved intel from either its own sources or a friendly foreign intel service that there was to be a hijacking plot inside the US. I believe Willie Brown, SF mayor, said that Condi Rice told him not to fly in early Sept. There was also something about Ashcroft not flying on a commercial airplane. And there was a NORAD anti-hijacking exercise going on on the morning of 9/11.

What I believe happened is the Bush administration thought they could finesse it. There's already a policy of denying, or when that's impossible, downplaying terrorist incidents. And that makes some sense - because terrorism is mostly show anyway. And the pattern of hijackings until then had been mostly for show. But if there's a minimum of fuss, you deny the publicity terrorists seek.

After Palestinian terrorists killed Navy diver Robert Stetham during the hijacking of TWA flight 947 in 1985, gov't officials became more concerned with the safety of specific individuals during hijackings. So it would make sense to send out warnings to certain high-profile people. No extra-special bargaining chips. And Debka maintains that the Ethiopean Airways flight 961 hijack was an al Qaeda operation that killed a CIA officer, some senior Ukranian air force officials, some Israeli aviation industry guys, among others.

But the US gov't didn't want a lot of headlines and things. After the rash of hijackings in the '70s, the gov't decided to do something about it. Here's a pretty decentexplanation. Now, I don't believe all of the conclusions in the article here, but I do believe that there is a little bit to think about here.

My guess is that there were hijackers on the planes, and that they knew how to defeat this system. It's common knowledge that the transponders went off on the controller's radar screens, so we know the hijackers could play silly buggers with the electronics. I also think this could explain the circuituous path of the two WTC flights. (I might expand on this later, but I'm already using up too much time.)

This might also explain why no planes were scrambled until too late.

About the Pentagon: I don't know what exactly happened there. I think it's possible there were two events. Perhaps a heat seeking missle was tracking, and hit the Pentagon? But I'm just guessing here.

Back to Florida and Bush's behavior. He tried to brazen it out and play the script. No terrorist incident. Even after the first plane hit, the classroom visit goes on, it was just pilot error. Things start to fall apart when the second plane hits. I beleive Card when he said he leaned over and told Bush that a second plane hit. But I don't Card when he said he added "America is under attack." First of all, there really wasn't enough time to say that phrase.

But you can see it in Bush's face. Not a great deal of surprise really. Just sort of silently mulling to himself. "Oh, damn, now what am I gonna say?" And then he gets a little angry.

So why didn't the secret service agents pick him up by the armpits and haul him off, like they did with Cheney? Because Bush probably had a combat air patrol above him. Anything that approached him would be shot down, while they were still trying to find another solution with the WTC planes. Bush knew it, and the Secret Service knew it. There wasn't cause for alarm until the really weird stuff started happening later... remember that they knew about the hijacking plot in the first place, they just failed in choosing the correct remedy.

Oh, and I believe Bush when he said he saw the first plane hit shortly before he went into the school. Bush said his reaction was "what a terrible pilot" - which was to be the cover story. (Remember his father's infamous reading of a cue card during a televised speech. "Message: I care.") He probably saw some footage from a stealth(y) observation platform in NYC. These images wouldn't have been released to the public.

I'm probably going to get pilloried here for even posting this, but I think the observation platform might have been a smaller class of this type of ship. I would guess that some of these platforms are currently serving as sentries over US cities and sensitive sites, etc. The US gov't did some fairly successful research into hiding airplanes in daylight as far back as 1944 and '45. A lot of the trick is just matching the brightness of the sky in the background.

And, for what it's worth, Tom Clancy in The Bear and the Dragon has the US military deploying high-endurance stealth platforms in Siberia. Yeah, it's fiction, but Clancy had the USAF with steath bombers in Red Storm Rising, which came out in 1985 (?), and the F-117 wasn't public until after that. So clearly he's got defence contacts telling him something, even if the specifics are murky or wrong.

Some of these platforms might have been caught on tape. Stealth means "stealth" after all, not "invisible." The image quality really sucks, but check it out. And be sure to check out pages two and three as well.

Anyway, that's as much as I'm prepared to write tonight. I've got much more to say, but I already spent too much time on this, so all the spelling errors, etc. are going to stand. I'm sure the people on this board will be by to tell me what a credulous idiot I am shortly. Have at it...