One Sucker's Saga, Part IX: Bumbling Like a Fox
There's one Arab terrorist with a sense of humor, and he said, "I bet I can get them all to take their shoes off at airports." If the next one is called, because of his M.O., The Underwear Bomber, we'll know I'm on to something.
Calvin Trillin on The Daily Show, June 16, 2006
Sometimes I feel I am absolutely alone in wondering why professed failures in intelligence gathering has led to rewarding those intelligence services with greater and greater resources and authority. Shouldn't failures be rewarded with punishments? That's how it works in most of the real world around me. Yet again and again, this attack or that was just barely detected before it could be stopped. Part of this is undoubtedly sampling error; no thwarted attack should be discussed publicly for a raft of reasons, therefore only the missed attacks get discussed, creating a seemingly overweighted sample of failure. I recognize this. Without knowing the success rate relative to the failure, one cannot really speculate on the nature of the actual threat.
Still, all of these very public failures have a few things in common. They serve to give the US intelligence community in general an air of incompetence, something which has to demoralize the low-level analysts poring over raw data looking for patterns and clues. At the same time, these failures are painted as reasons not to bolster our intelligence resources, but to expand the increasing intrusion of many other branches of government into our and the world's affairs. One can either take these failures and subsequent expansions at face value, or one can take what I think is an analytical tactic too long overlooked and examine which of these failures are not accidents but deliberate and strategic oversights.
Dmitry Orlov was born in Russia, and traveled between the United States and Russia during the collapse of the Soviet Union. He took many of his observations about the differences between the two superpowers and extrapolated those observations into predictions about what the United States could be facing in the coming fuel shortages (that I briefly outlined in Part II). Here's his take on the American intelligence services as a potential employer: "One area of government employment to avoid is in the federal intelligence and security agencies, because they are much too silly." Strong words, Mr. Orlov. Can you elaborate?
Compared to the Soviet Union's KGB, which was known for the high quality of its staff and its fearsome competence, the bumbling American intelligence and security services have never measured up. During the Cold War, one of their main activities was exaggerating the Soviet threat through fanciful interpretation of scarce and ambiguous data, in order to justify their own budgets, as well as those of their colleagues in national defense. . . . The attacks of September 11, 2001, which it failed to detect, prevent or even adequately understand after they occurred, were a palpable hit to its reputation, and although terrorism is not a major source of mortality in the US (it would take a 9/11-sized attack every month for it to rival the homicide rate) the response was a sort of desperate hypertrophy of the American security apparatus. It is getting bigger and more invasive all the time, but there are few signs that it is getting any smarter, and its growth is starting to look like the final feeding frenzy of a fatally wounded beast. While members of the KGB went on to play a big role in Russia's post-collapse government, because they were competent and well-organized, no such happy end seems likely for the hapless American spooks. Once the air starts leaking our of the federal budget, their fortunes will deflate along with it.
(Dmitry Orlov, Reinventing Collapse, New Society Publishers, 2008, pp. 150-151)
His opinion is far from uncommon. However, the comparison he made between the US and Soviet systems struck me as illustrative. I realized they are two systems working under very different conditions.
For example, the Soviet system was really the arm of the executive branch and beholden to few else. That branch has been run since the revolution in 1917 by only a handful of leaders. They might have had to change their operating procedures only during a changeover, which in the old system meant when the current leader died. By contrast, here in the States the intelligence services are constantly under domestic threat of review every time word of their activities catches the eye of an elected official. Consider very public reviews such as the Church Committee, reviews that curtailed the CIA's minimal oversight. That period must have been devastating for those who relied upon the dirty tricks the covert community previously were able to provide. What were they to do?
Refer again to Part I of this series. Two members of the intelligence community, former Director of Central Intelligence George H. W. Bush and the Director of the National Security Agency Robert Gates -- both officials sworn to serve and support the United States then under the executive command of President Carter -- joined Reagan's campaign manager William Casey in an act of treason. In turn, Casey was appointed the DCI when Reagan took office.
And what did Casey do once in this position? Exactly what Orlov accuses him of doing. Casey exaggerated "the Soviet threat through fanciful interpretation of scarce and ambiguous data, in order to justify their own budgets, as well as those of their colleagues in national defense." I'm curious. If one's goal is to increase the national defense budget, how is getting that accomplished evidence of "silliness?" It sounds much more like "competent and well-organized" intelligence operatives and directors going on to "play a big role" in the government.
Let's continue. According to Michael Ruppert, 9/11 was hardly something the US intelligence services "failed to detect, prevent or even adequately understand." Actually, let me clarify that. I'm certain most in the intelligence services fell into that category of ignorance. The ones who mattered, though, knew something was up. Others might have known something was afoot, but didn't know what, or at the very least were constrained by security classifications from saying much at all. Richard Clarke, former national coordinator for counterterrorism at the National Security Council, repeatedly advised the Bush administration both that Al Qaeda was a threat and that they were up to something imminent. His warnings were ignored by the very people who could have done something to prevent the attacks . . . people who, according to Ruppert, are the most likely culprits behind the planning and execution of the attacks.
When put into the context Ruppert presents, the many examples of higher-ups ignoring the warnings in favor of political considerations seem less like naiveté and more like constant efforts to maintain plausible deniability. From Richard Clarke's wiki page we read:
Within a week of the inauguration, I wrote to (Condaleezza) Rice and (Stephen) Hadley asking 'urgently' for a Principals, or Cabinet-level, meeting to review the imminent Al-Qaeda threat. Rice told me that the Principals Committee, which had been the first venue for terrorism policy discussions in the Clinton administration, would not address the issue until it had been 'framed' by the Deputies.
From the same page, we learn that a three-star general, Donald Kerrick, warned in a memo of a growing Al Qaeda threat. "As a result of writing that memo, he was not invited to any more meetings."
Like many, what interested me about Clarke was his opening remarks to the 9/11 Committee:
I also welcome the hearings because it is finally a forum where I can apologize to the loved ones of the victims of 9/11.
To them who are here in the room, to those who are watching on television, your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed.
And for that failure, I would ask -- once all the facts are out -- for your understanding and for your forgiveness.
To my knowledge, he was the only member of the administration to offer any apology for the record. I remember listening to the hearings live. That preamble stopped me in my tracks.
One thing occurred to me later, though, after I had finally accepted this revised mythos of culpability. Ruppert quotes Clarke's autobiography for key events in the 9/11 timeline. He also notes passages from Clarke's book marked by ellipses, suggesting content was redacted. As someone in possession of key top secret material, Clarke is absolutely not at liberty to discuss certain things, especially information that could damn his former employers, information that remains strictly classified.
Could he have craftily framed his apology to form a hint? Notice how Clarke specified the failure. ". . . your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you." What Clarke didn't specify was how the three parties he mentioned failed anyone. He also doesn't specify what each party was trying hard to do during their individual failure. They could have been (like Clarke) working hard to prevent 9/11 . . . and they could have been working hard in other directions.
It's just speculation on my part, I freely admit. But it tends to answer both Orlov's charge of bumbling incompetence and the amazing amount of energy that went into continuing to bumble so very hard.
And what of the "palpable hit to its reputation" Orlov mentions the intelligence community suffered? Under the suggested reordered hierarchy of cause and effect, the intelligence community hardly presents itself as a united front, a single body of policy and execution. Rather, only the official members in the community are subject to review and recrimination. Those high enough in the pecking order have the luxury of compartmentalizing intelligence, redirecting critical intelligence out of the way or dismissing it as irrelevant (as those two above examples suggest), and letting underlings take any corrective stripes later. As to the "fact" that US intelligence officials failed to "to play a big role" in the US government, I'll let the fact that George H. W. Bush, Richard Cheney and many, many others did serve stand as reproof. No, they may not have been "official" intelligence operatives for their entire careers, but that position is for suckers not in the know and, by extension, fall guys who take the rap.
So much for "silly." Still, let's give Orlov some credit. In speaking of the days before the Soviet Union collapsed, he notes how ruthless the intelligence services could be, sometimes by removing families from their homes at night, never to be seen again. A PBS documentary explored a high-level apartment building near the Kremlin used by Stalin's favored, one with secret entrances into each of the homes. These were used to remove those targeted by Stalin's wrath without disrupting life in the halls. These may have been nice, well-appointed apartments, but they were far less safe for the occupants than digs father away from the seat of power.
After these removals:
Their disappearance was studiously ignored and the families of the disappeared were shunned by society. Society was afraid, but since any admission of fear could be misinterpreted as an admission of guilt (of suspecting that the system itself was criminal), even the fear had to remain hidden.
(Orlov, ibid., p. 42)
Elsewhere in his book, Orlov notes that the American system of psychological oppression is more efficient. Consider the tactics used on Congress outlined in Part VI. Consider what happens to reporters blowing the whistle on covert activities such as what happened to Gary Webb in Part III. Unruly reporters and Congresscritters need not disappear in the night here in the States to be silenced. The same studious inattention and shunning continues, albeit with a fraction of the resources the former Soviet Union devoted toward achieving the same goals. And backing that deliberate ignorance and shunning, the same fear had to remain hidden.
Echoing Orlov's observation about the "desperate hypertrophy of the American security apparatus" is Thomas Homer-Dixon.
So, the biggest impact of the September 11 attacks wasn't the direct disruption of America's financial, economic, communication, or transportation networks -- physical things, all. Rather . . . the attacks' biggest impact was their shock to our subjective feelings of security and safety. Such shocks don't remain subjective: they soon have huge, real-world consequences.
(Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Upside of Down, Shearwater Press, 2006, p. 121.)
Homer-Dixon continues to note "the increased spending on security measures and the later Afghanistan and Iraq wars" almost as a side-note to his observation of the other economic impacts the attacks had. But what if that was the initial point? What if, getting back to Ruppert, the entire reason for the attacks was to shock the world and the country enough to justify those invasions and the build-up of unquestionable power -- as in power that cannot be questioned -- in the Executive Branch? Framed that way, the economic impact seems negligible. In fact, let's take some of the most recent "failures" of intelligence and see what has become of them, how they have impacted our lives.
First, the shoe bomber. Ever since Richard Reid failed in his attempt to blow up his feet, all air travelers have had to take off their shoes for inspection. Why? In the States, we are a checklist oriented people. That is, if someone can check an item off a list, that person is no longer responsible for what happens afterwards. Therefore, we check the shoes because of Richard Reid. If we can see no obvious explosives in the shoes, the person can get their shoes back and proceed to the next level. Next. Never mind that the next item of explosive clothing, as Calvin Trillin so accurately predicted at the beginning of this post, will not be in the shoes.
So now we have the Underwear Bomber, someone who actually hid explosives in undergarments. What next for TSA? Body scanners, that can indeed see you naked.
Let me maintain that all of this is just plain silly. For example, both Mr. Reid and the Underwear Bomber were traveling to, not from, the United States. Do passengers in Europe have to take off their shoes or present their boxers for inspection? I'm genuinely curious, but suspect the answer is No. (Please, if you have recent first-hand experience with traveling through Heathrow or Amsterdam, do let me know the answer.) Why? Europe has a far longer history with terrorism, and has a security presence at most of their airports and train stations that makes the on-the-ground checklist fumblings of the TSA seem absolutely laughable. And besides, if a suicide bomber really wanted to bring down a plane, Dmitry Orlov knows how to do it right:
The more or less constant stream of terror alerts focusing on airlines results in ever more onerous public safety measures at airports. The notorious shoe bomber was taking a step in a particular direction, making it just a matter of time before another ideologically confused nobody decides to parlay an airline ticket into a lifetime of room and care of the american taxpayer and takes the obvious next step, flying with a bomb up his rectum . . . . After that, it will be body cavity searches for everyone, to be performed by some eager high school dropouts whom Homeland Security will recruit and train.
(Orlov, ibid., p. 153.)
I highly doubt a bomb in one's body cavity can be scanned, even with this fancy TSA set of X-Ray specs. I also highly doubt (as Mr. Orlov suggests) that anyone will submit to the humiliation of a butt probing just to take a flight. The TSA's disastrous large breast pat-down policy was rescinded, after all. Therefore, the purchase of these scanners is simply a waste of money that could be used elsewhere.
However, if we frame the question differently . . . what if that's the real goal? What if the diversion of money to expensive but ultimately useless scanning equipment is yet another way of diverting money from something practical to people in league with those that need more money, or perhaps to make sure the United States debt load is never, ever paid, strapping our economy with more debt than we can handle, a move that will undoubtedly slow our economy to a crawl? I fully admit it's a speculation, but consider the similarities between these two would-be bombers: both were incompetent, both were armed by people who knew what they were doing and supposedly Al Qaeda.
Look what Mike Vreeland had to say in his interview with Michael Ruppert (from the interview I referred to in Part V):
14. Does that statement imply that the U.S. or some other intelligence agency had achieved complete penetration of the terrorist cells?
That goes without question. Sometimes certain governments design, create networks like Al Qaeda, which was really the government in Afghanistan. Those entities create specific problems at the creating government's direction.
15. Do you know who had achieved this penetration?
I cannot comment on that.
16. Is it possible that the terrorist cells were being "run" without knowing by whom?
Absolutely.
(Emphasis mine, italics used by Ruppert to indicate Vreeland's quotes.)
Ruppert makes a compelling case that Al Qaeda was not an Afghanistan government creation.
Calvin Trillin on The Daily Show, June 16, 2006
Sometimes I feel I am absolutely alone in wondering why professed failures in intelligence gathering has led to rewarding those intelligence services with greater and greater resources and authority. Shouldn't failures be rewarded with punishments? That's how it works in most of the real world around me. Yet again and again, this attack or that was just barely detected before it could be stopped. Part of this is undoubtedly sampling error; no thwarted attack should be discussed publicly for a raft of reasons, therefore only the missed attacks get discussed, creating a seemingly overweighted sample of failure. I recognize this. Without knowing the success rate relative to the failure, one cannot really speculate on the nature of the actual threat.
Still, all of these very public failures have a few things in common. They serve to give the US intelligence community in general an air of incompetence, something which has to demoralize the low-level analysts poring over raw data looking for patterns and clues. At the same time, these failures are painted as reasons not to bolster our intelligence resources, but to expand the increasing intrusion of many other branches of government into our and the world's affairs. One can either take these failures and subsequent expansions at face value, or one can take what I think is an analytical tactic too long overlooked and examine which of these failures are not accidents but deliberate and strategic oversights.
Dmitry Orlov was born in Russia, and traveled between the United States and Russia during the collapse of the Soviet Union. He took many of his observations about the differences between the two superpowers and extrapolated those observations into predictions about what the United States could be facing in the coming fuel shortages (that I briefly outlined in Part II). Here's his take on the American intelligence services as a potential employer: "One area of government employment to avoid is in the federal intelligence and security agencies, because they are much too silly." Strong words, Mr. Orlov. Can you elaborate?
Compared to the Soviet Union's KGB, which was known for the high quality of its staff and its fearsome competence, the bumbling American intelligence and security services have never measured up. During the Cold War, one of their main activities was exaggerating the Soviet threat through fanciful interpretation of scarce and ambiguous data, in order to justify their own budgets, as well as those of their colleagues in national defense. . . . The attacks of September 11, 2001, which it failed to detect, prevent or even adequately understand after they occurred, were a palpable hit to its reputation, and although terrorism is not a major source of mortality in the US (it would take a 9/11-sized attack every month for it to rival the homicide rate) the response was a sort of desperate hypertrophy of the American security apparatus. It is getting bigger and more invasive all the time, but there are few signs that it is getting any smarter, and its growth is starting to look like the final feeding frenzy of a fatally wounded beast. While members of the KGB went on to play a big role in Russia's post-collapse government, because they were competent and well-organized, no such happy end seems likely for the hapless American spooks. Once the air starts leaking our of the federal budget, their fortunes will deflate along with it.
(Dmitry Orlov, Reinventing Collapse, New Society Publishers, 2008, pp. 150-151)
His opinion is far from uncommon. However, the comparison he made between the US and Soviet systems struck me as illustrative. I realized they are two systems working under very different conditions.
For example, the Soviet system was really the arm of the executive branch and beholden to few else. That branch has been run since the revolution in 1917 by only a handful of leaders. They might have had to change their operating procedures only during a changeover, which in the old system meant when the current leader died. By contrast, here in the States the intelligence services are constantly under domestic threat of review every time word of their activities catches the eye of an elected official. Consider very public reviews such as the Church Committee, reviews that curtailed the CIA's minimal oversight. That period must have been devastating for those who relied upon the dirty tricks the covert community previously were able to provide. What were they to do?
Refer again to Part I of this series. Two members of the intelligence community, former Director of Central Intelligence George H. W. Bush and the Director of the National Security Agency Robert Gates -- both officials sworn to serve and support the United States then under the executive command of President Carter -- joined Reagan's campaign manager William Casey in an act of treason. In turn, Casey was appointed the DCI when Reagan took office.
And what did Casey do once in this position? Exactly what Orlov accuses him of doing. Casey exaggerated "the Soviet threat through fanciful interpretation of scarce and ambiguous data, in order to justify their own budgets, as well as those of their colleagues in national defense." I'm curious. If one's goal is to increase the national defense budget, how is getting that accomplished evidence of "silliness?" It sounds much more like "competent and well-organized" intelligence operatives and directors going on to "play a big role" in the government.
Let's continue. According to Michael Ruppert, 9/11 was hardly something the US intelligence services "failed to detect, prevent or even adequately understand." Actually, let me clarify that. I'm certain most in the intelligence services fell into that category of ignorance. The ones who mattered, though, knew something was up. Others might have known something was afoot, but didn't know what, or at the very least were constrained by security classifications from saying much at all. Richard Clarke, former national coordinator for counterterrorism at the National Security Council, repeatedly advised the Bush administration both that Al Qaeda was a threat and that they were up to something imminent. His warnings were ignored by the very people who could have done something to prevent the attacks . . . people who, according to Ruppert, are the most likely culprits behind the planning and execution of the attacks.
When put into the context Ruppert presents, the many examples of higher-ups ignoring the warnings in favor of political considerations seem less like naiveté and more like constant efforts to maintain plausible deniability. From Richard Clarke's wiki page we read:
Within a week of the inauguration, I wrote to (Condaleezza) Rice and (Stephen) Hadley asking 'urgently' for a Principals, or Cabinet-level, meeting to review the imminent Al-Qaeda threat. Rice told me that the Principals Committee, which had been the first venue for terrorism policy discussions in the Clinton administration, would not address the issue until it had been 'framed' by the Deputies.
From the same page, we learn that a three-star general, Donald Kerrick, warned in a memo of a growing Al Qaeda threat. "As a result of writing that memo, he was not invited to any more meetings."
Like many, what interested me about Clarke was his opening remarks to the 9/11 Committee:
I also welcome the hearings because it is finally a forum where I can apologize to the loved ones of the victims of 9/11.
To them who are here in the room, to those who are watching on television, your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed.
And for that failure, I would ask -- once all the facts are out -- for your understanding and for your forgiveness.
To my knowledge, he was the only member of the administration to offer any apology for the record. I remember listening to the hearings live. That preamble stopped me in my tracks.
One thing occurred to me later, though, after I had finally accepted this revised mythos of culpability. Ruppert quotes Clarke's autobiography for key events in the 9/11 timeline. He also notes passages from Clarke's book marked by ellipses, suggesting content was redacted. As someone in possession of key top secret material, Clarke is absolutely not at liberty to discuss certain things, especially information that could damn his former employers, information that remains strictly classified.
Could he have craftily framed his apology to form a hint? Notice how Clarke specified the failure. ". . . your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you." What Clarke didn't specify was how the three parties he mentioned failed anyone. He also doesn't specify what each party was trying hard to do during their individual failure. They could have been (like Clarke) working hard to prevent 9/11 . . . and they could have been working hard in other directions.
It's just speculation on my part, I freely admit. But it tends to answer both Orlov's charge of bumbling incompetence and the amazing amount of energy that went into continuing to bumble so very hard.
And what of the "palpable hit to its reputation" Orlov mentions the intelligence community suffered? Under the suggested reordered hierarchy of cause and effect, the intelligence community hardly presents itself as a united front, a single body of policy and execution. Rather, only the official members in the community are subject to review and recrimination. Those high enough in the pecking order have the luxury of compartmentalizing intelligence, redirecting critical intelligence out of the way or dismissing it as irrelevant (as those two above examples suggest), and letting underlings take any corrective stripes later. As to the "fact" that US intelligence officials failed to "to play a big role" in the US government, I'll let the fact that George H. W. Bush, Richard Cheney and many, many others did serve stand as reproof. No, they may not have been "official" intelligence operatives for their entire careers, but that position is for suckers not in the know and, by extension, fall guys who take the rap.
So much for "silly." Still, let's give Orlov some credit. In speaking of the days before the Soviet Union collapsed, he notes how ruthless the intelligence services could be, sometimes by removing families from their homes at night, never to be seen again. A PBS documentary explored a high-level apartment building near the Kremlin used by Stalin's favored, one with secret entrances into each of the homes. These were used to remove those targeted by Stalin's wrath without disrupting life in the halls. These may have been nice, well-appointed apartments, but they were far less safe for the occupants than digs father away from the seat of power.
After these removals:
Their disappearance was studiously ignored and the families of the disappeared were shunned by society. Society was afraid, but since any admission of fear could be misinterpreted as an admission of guilt (of suspecting that the system itself was criminal), even the fear had to remain hidden.
(Orlov, ibid., p. 42)
Elsewhere in his book, Orlov notes that the American system of psychological oppression is more efficient. Consider the tactics used on Congress outlined in Part VI. Consider what happens to reporters blowing the whistle on covert activities such as what happened to Gary Webb in Part III. Unruly reporters and Congresscritters need not disappear in the night here in the States to be silenced. The same studious inattention and shunning continues, albeit with a fraction of the resources the former Soviet Union devoted toward achieving the same goals. And backing that deliberate ignorance and shunning, the same fear had to remain hidden.
Echoing Orlov's observation about the "desperate hypertrophy of the American security apparatus" is Thomas Homer-Dixon.
So, the biggest impact of the September 11 attacks wasn't the direct disruption of America's financial, economic, communication, or transportation networks -- physical things, all. Rather . . . the attacks' biggest impact was their shock to our subjective feelings of security and safety. Such shocks don't remain subjective: they soon have huge, real-world consequences.
(Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Upside of Down, Shearwater Press, 2006, p. 121.)
Homer-Dixon continues to note "the increased spending on security measures and the later Afghanistan and Iraq wars" almost as a side-note to his observation of the other economic impacts the attacks had. But what if that was the initial point? What if, getting back to Ruppert, the entire reason for the attacks was to shock the world and the country enough to justify those invasions and the build-up of unquestionable power -- as in power that cannot be questioned -- in the Executive Branch? Framed that way, the economic impact seems negligible. In fact, let's take some of the most recent "failures" of intelligence and see what has become of them, how they have impacted our lives.
First, the shoe bomber. Ever since Richard Reid failed in his attempt to blow up his feet, all air travelers have had to take off their shoes for inspection. Why? In the States, we are a checklist oriented people. That is, if someone can check an item off a list, that person is no longer responsible for what happens afterwards. Therefore, we check the shoes because of Richard Reid. If we can see no obvious explosives in the shoes, the person can get their shoes back and proceed to the next level. Next. Never mind that the next item of explosive clothing, as Calvin Trillin so accurately predicted at the beginning of this post, will not be in the shoes.
So now we have the Underwear Bomber, someone who actually hid explosives in undergarments. What next for TSA? Body scanners, that can indeed see you naked.
Let me maintain that all of this is just plain silly. For example, both Mr. Reid and the Underwear Bomber were traveling to, not from, the United States. Do passengers in Europe have to take off their shoes or present their boxers for inspection? I'm genuinely curious, but suspect the answer is No. (Please, if you have recent first-hand experience with traveling through Heathrow or Amsterdam, do let me know the answer.) Why? Europe has a far longer history with terrorism, and has a security presence at most of their airports and train stations that makes the on-the-ground checklist fumblings of the TSA seem absolutely laughable. And besides, if a suicide bomber really wanted to bring down a plane, Dmitry Orlov knows how to do it right:
The more or less constant stream of terror alerts focusing on airlines results in ever more onerous public safety measures at airports. The notorious shoe bomber was taking a step in a particular direction, making it just a matter of time before another ideologically confused nobody decides to parlay an airline ticket into a lifetime of room and care of the american taxpayer and takes the obvious next step, flying with a bomb up his rectum . . . . After that, it will be body cavity searches for everyone, to be performed by some eager high school dropouts whom Homeland Security will recruit and train.
(Orlov, ibid., p. 153.)
I highly doubt a bomb in one's body cavity can be scanned, even with this fancy TSA set of X-Ray specs. I also highly doubt (as Mr. Orlov suggests) that anyone will submit to the humiliation of a butt probing just to take a flight. The TSA's disastrous large breast pat-down policy was rescinded, after all. Therefore, the purchase of these scanners is simply a waste of money that could be used elsewhere.
However, if we frame the question differently . . . what if that's the real goal? What if the diversion of money to expensive but ultimately useless scanning equipment is yet another way of diverting money from something practical to people in league with those that need more money, or perhaps to make sure the United States debt load is never, ever paid, strapping our economy with more debt than we can handle, a move that will undoubtedly slow our economy to a crawl? I fully admit it's a speculation, but consider the similarities between these two would-be bombers: both were incompetent, both were armed by people who knew what they were doing and supposedly Al Qaeda.
Look what Mike Vreeland had to say in his interview with Michael Ruppert (from the interview I referred to in Part V):
14. Does that statement imply that the U.S. or some other intelligence agency had achieved complete penetration of the terrorist cells?
That goes without question. Sometimes certain governments design, create networks like Al Qaeda, which was really the government in Afghanistan. Those entities create specific problems at the creating government's direction.
15. Do you know who had achieved this penetration?
I cannot comment on that.
16. Is it possible that the terrorist cells were being "run" without knowing by whom?
Absolutely.
(Emphasis mine, italics used by Ruppert to indicate Vreeland's quotes.)
Ruppert makes a compelling case that Al Qaeda was not an Afghanistan government creation.