Cockup, Conspiracy or Just Plain Confusion? Sorting Out Olberman's Segment on Flight 253

I wouldn't be surprised if "they" weren't hoping for an attack just to make Obama look bad. I would put nothing past these scumbags. I am sure there are many folks in the intelligence community left over from Bush who would have no qualms.

This President is going to have to fight for everything for as long as he is President.

If this could be established, it would be actionable. Someone should end up in jail.

I have to say, I was disappointed by this segment last night. Fox "news" is rightly ridiculed for turning commentary into news. I felt Keith did the same thing last night by taking something a commentator postulated and expanding on it as "breaking news". I think Keith is above that sort of thing - don't play Fox's game by spinning opinion as fact.

If you've studied the numerous and crucial unconnected dots pre-9/11, especially with a skeptical eye toward the "Truther" mentality, you still come to a basic understanding that there are well-intentioned idiot screwups that happen, as well as intentional nihilistic "allowed" penetrations through the security wall for a political agenda. This latter kind is perpetrated by a very small loosely knit but very effective cadre of people loyal to an even fewer number of powerbrokers within the military-industrial complex, including corporate functionaries, U.S. intelligence double-agents, and ex-intelligence operatives doing it for both money and ideology.

Not paranoid. Just watching closely. And not a Truther, but aware of the elements of truth within their saner arguments.

Please fix the title: It is "cough up" NOT "cockup".

Olbermann has turned into garbage. It all began in the DEM primaries in early 2008. I appreciate his efforts mainly because he is not conservative but when he represents "the left" in so many people's minds he makes the left look bad. He seems to be all TV man and not at all real man. JMHO.

Is anyone on this string or at MSNBC concerned with the fact that there is not one shred of evidence supporting this conspiracy theory? Wolffe doesn't even name a source, that's a minimum requirement for the tiniest bit of credibility. Then again, Olbermann has never been terribly interested in facts, he's a TV hack that should have stayed in sports.

Shouldn't that be: Richard Wolfe, corporate lobbyist?

The relationship between this guy and Olbermann is incestuous at best. I don't know why people view either of them as "trusted sources" ... Olbermann just seems to be the O'Reiley of the left.

Olbermann does tend to get carried away at times, and he needs to filter himself a little better if he wants to be taken seriously. Speculation is just that--speculation. It is not news, breaking or otherwise. It is certainly POSSIBLE that this intelligence failure was a deliberate act by some neocon (we've all seen enough crazy on the right to believe just about anything), but without more than a rumor/suspicion to back it up, it's nothing more than ginning up controversy in the same way FOX does with their "some say" garbage.

"Reporting what they're hearing..." is the definition of being a TV hack... thanks for proving my point. That's an example of creating news out of rumors, there is no news here, this is fabricated drama.

I don't understand your mac'n'cheese reference, but i don't have any derangement towards Olbermann, he's too insignificant to be deranged over.

I watched the segment and saw the story very quickly morph from possibly bureaucratic snafu to conspiracy pretty much driven by Olbermann restating it in more speculative and frankly conspiratorial terms each time. By the end of the show, I was saying "but that's not what he said."

Not his finest hour.

Olbermann was jumping ahead of the curve, but was right on the money in wondering just exactly who fucked up letting this spoiled rich malcontent on a plane in the first place. For heavens sake the idiots own father went to the CIA and told them his son was not to be trusted and somehow that point blank warning never made it far enough through the CIA to keep this idiot off a plane??? There are people who are directly personally responsible for this BIG ASS fuck up and Wolfe was hinting that they might just not be ONLY stupid. I want to know who these people are and I want them humiliated and fired!

Keep asking those questions Kieth!

To all the blind fools who believe in the "War on Terror": I will put it in simple terms
Osama bin Laden is the son of an aristocrat with ties to the royal family of Saudi Arabia. What other American family has the strongest ties with the Saudi royal family and can exert the most pressure? The Bush family. Why? Oil.

The CIA has been involved in Afghanistan since the 70's and even trained OBL. Who was head of the CIA at that time? Bush 41 was head of the CIA from '76-77 during the time we supported the Afghan insurgence against the Soviets and a year befor OBL joined one of the militias. Throughout the 80's Bush 41 was vice-president and the CIA was run by Bush 41 understudies. The CIA taught OBL everything they know about escape and evasion and guerrilla fighting. And now you mean to tell me that the entire intel force of the CIA cannot capture or kill this guy after over 15 years. This is either willful negligence or epic ineptness.

It is my conjecture that there are members in the CIA who are wilfully keeping this war on terror going on. It may or may not lead up to the Bush family but there are connections. I know this may come to a shock to many Americans but there are members in our military and defense agencies and government who are not the most scrupulous of persons. Why was the CIA not given the green light when they had OBL in their sights back in '01 or any other time they were close?
Is it not funny how we do know that much of Al Qaida and some other terrorist groups are supported by the drug trade in particular the poppy trade but yet we don't go in and destroy their crops like we did in Columbia and Bolivia against the FARC and drug lords there, perhaps since the South Americans weren't giving a cut to the CIA anymore? Example: Bush 41 decides to invade Panama because Noreiga decided not to play with us anymore. Manuel Noreiega, known drug trafficker, and money launderer long before he was ever a dictator we once backed.

So sad, an entire nation goes into a knee-jerk reaction tizzy, because one loner with a stand alone complex decided that it was his time to "show the world". Americans need to stop acting like a bunch of scared sheep everytime a "terrorist" act is attempted. Random acts of violence happen everyday, and for people to think that they can be kept safe from all harm need to remember that there are over 6 billion people in the world and no matter how much security any given country puts in place, there will always be the one random person that just "goes crazy".
What is lost in all the chatter of "what should we do next?" and "how did our policies fail?" is that it was the act of fellow human beings helping other fellow human beings stopping the lunatic fringe from accomplishing its goal. That is where the focus needs to be on. It is within communities and families are how these people are identified. And it is within these zones of influence where hearts and minds are truly transformed. We could spend billions on more airport security or we could spend that money on humanitarian efforts in these areas such as Yemen and abroad and even here in the U.S. where helping people improve their lives and education will do more harm to terrorist recruiting than any bomb dropped on their houses.

I can't believe so many of you knuckle draggers really believe racial profiling is the answer. Then what is your answer for persons like Tim McVeigh, Eric Rudolf, and Ted Kaczynski do you think we should start profiling random white males as well? What about the two white males in Columbine, also affluent kids who went off the deep end. What about all the terrorist acts the IRA did? Serial murderers can be of any color or religion it is up to us to put on the labels of "terrorist".

However, the ultimate irony in all this is that the right wing is now calling for more "government oversight", hahaha. The very same group asking for less government control but are more than ready to take their trousers down for a government official to do a "freedom search".

Could we not all go overboard? Though the prospect of a conspiracy to hide information is awful, all we have is a report that the administration is investigating what went wrong, and they're not dismissing even the worst possibilities. That doesn't mean they found a conspiracy, that they're assuming a conspiracy, or even that they think it a likely possibility. They just can't completely dismiss it at this early stage. To all of you going off half-cocked on Olbermann, exactly what you're accusing him of, I wonder how true your charge can be when I'm getting all that from the report. Having watched it, it seems Olbermann was being careful not to outrun the facts, even if "breaking news" overplays it. The cable channels claim breaking news with anything they can, so that's hardly his fault.

"even though that's not what the former reporter had said."

Thank you! I thought the same thing, we didn't hear Wolffe say that either. WTF?

When I listened to Wolffe, I didn't reach the same conclusions as Olbermann, that is was malicious assclowns who wanted people to die to prove a point. No, I figured it was malicious bureaucratic assclowns who are engaged in a vicious turf war that goes back who knows how far (to the Truman Administration, for all I know) that got worse under Bush because of the "consolidation" and the creation of a centralized "head of intelligence", and then again under Obama as right-wing assclowns tried to make other assclowns look bad. The potential deaths of people probably didn't enter the minds of these people.

Never attribute to cunning what can be explained by stupidity.

If Mr. Olbermann wanted to encourage "conspiracy theories" about the 12/25 event, he could simply interview Kurt Haskell about the "well-dressed man":

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2009/12/28/let-the-right-one-in/