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Originally Posted by jjacobs43
The Presidential Daily Briefing from August '01 clearly talks about them hijacking planes.
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The PDB doesn't talk about hijacking "planes." It speaks of hijacking an "aircraft" as in singular. The report was uncorroborated and was three years old, and it defintely doesn't point to a plane being used as a missile, but rather as leverage for the release of the Blind Sheik. A plane that no longer exist doesn't provide much leverage.
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Originally Posted by jjacobs43
No it doesn't get more specific than that...it usually won't be more specific. They didn't have any more specifics in '99 either.
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Wrong. You keep bringing up a fallacious analogy. The millenium period contained specific threats within the US tied to a specific small time period. Any specifics from the summer '01 threats pointed to an attack abroad, and vigilance was taken towards the most likely targets (i.e. the G8 summit). The voluminous chatter had ended by the time the above PDB was given.
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Originally Posted by jjacobs43
But while the Clinton administration took the necessary measures, the Bush administration blew it off.
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What measures did the Clinton administration take towards the '98 report of potential hijackings? Did the Bush 43 administration countermand these measures?
Please don't bring up your fallacious millenium analogy again. The CT effort was stepped up because there was an obvious need to surge due to the millenium and the other specifics I already quoted from the 911 Commission Report. There were no specifics to surge against - the same intel report mentioned in the PDB that you hang your argument on didn't spur the Clinton Administration into a permanent state of high alert.
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After the millennium alert, the government relaxed. Counterterrorism went back to being a secret preserve for segments of the FBI, the Counterterrorist Center, and the Counterterrorism Security Group.
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Originally Posted by jjacobs43
They still might not have prevented it, but the hubris of this administration turned a maybe into a 100% probability by not doing a damn thing.
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So, your claim is now that the administration issued no warnings, didn't do a "damn thing"? Sorry, but the failings were structural and not temporal. It is possible that leadership could have potentially overcome these structural failures, but the opportunities to overcome them were quite far down the food chain, making it quite hard to argue a counterfactual.