How would Al Gore have handled September 11, 2001

[pbrower2a]

One needs some assumptions:

1. That al-Qaeda would still have plotted the 9/11 attacks or something similar.

2. That the CIA would have figured that something was going wrong, and that al-Qaeda figures were up to no good. A favorite modus operandi of al-Qaeda was well-known, and that was the use of transportation equipment as suicide weapons.

3. That President Gore would have paid attention to CIA reports of a major security breach.

4. That he would have asked the right questions of what terrorists could do with a hijacked jetliner (such as "What damage could someone do with a hijacked commercial jet turned into a missile?)

These assumptions would have held for Gore or McCain.

9/11 could have been disrupted with mass arrests of known al-Qaeda operatives in the US. That would have been the best of all possible situations. Bad news: such would have been an excuse for harsh regimes in Russia and China to crack down on real and imagined Islamic insurgencies, causing even greater loss of life than on 9/11 over a wider period of time.

Pick your poison.