I remember something about European agencies (UK and France IIRC) giving specific warnings a few weeks or months in advance to the US agencies and the US agencies doing nothing then later scrambled to justify this inaction.

-/edit- here: https://cpj.org/2007/12/french-journalist-investigated-over-... -edit/-

Then again 9/11 is not a valid excuse as the US has been orders of magnitude worse for decades, had been preparing for such an event but did nothing and even the contrary when it actually happened and then used it to go to war to unrelated countries for unrelated reason (access to oil). So please just stop brandishing 9/11 as a justification for doing more of what the US have been doing all along.

>Then again 9/11 is not a valid excuse as the US has been orders of magnitude worse for decades, had been preparing for such an event but did nothing and even the contrary when it actually happened and then used it to go to war to unrelated countries for unrelated reason (access to oil). So please just stop brandishing 9/11 as a justification for doing more of what the US have been doing all along.

I agree with you. That isn't what I was arguing at all.

> True, good point. But that seems more like basic incompetence or cockiness rather than awareness that 9/11 was about to happen.

Seems like mass suveillance by western agencies is jut a way to cover for their own incompetence. How many terrorist attacks in how many countries over the last few years have we heard that 'the suspect was known to intelligence agencies' and yet they still couldn't stop jack shit.

The whole intelligence apparatus in NATO countries needs reforming.