Was there a plan for the Taliban?

As we approach the fifth anniversary of 9/11 the number of conspiracy theories about the event are at an all-time high, discussed by Michelle Malkin this morning.

A good conspiracy is always fun as long as it makes a little sense, but I haven't wasted a lot of time debating the "Bush blew the towers" or other similar assertions because their bankruptcy of logic seems fairly obvious.

However, one assertion seems widely accepted, which is that Bush and Cheney were disengaged to the real threat from bin Laden in the months preceding the attack because they were fixated on Saddam. The supporting document is the now-infamous Presidential Daily Brief of August 2001 that said "Bin Laden determined to strike in US". The midnight crier is usually Richard Clarke.

But even that premise might be shaky. In analysing al-Qaeda's commemorative 9/11 video Laura Mansfield quotes Azzam the American regarding the attack:

In fact, it is Gadahn that the group has selected to make the claim on this tape that the September 11 attacks were a pre-emptive attack against American by Al Qaeda, in the face of what they saw as an inevitable invasion of Afghanistan by the US

Perhaps ABC's "Road to 9/11" will explore the veracity of this story, which appeared only a few weeks after the attack but lives on in the conspiracy underworld:

Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, was told by senior American officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October.

Mr Naik said US officials told him of the plan at a UN-sponsored international contact group on Afghanistan which took place in Berlin.

If true it would seem to pop the PDB bubble and prove that Clarke was the disengaged party.

The conspiracy theorists use this story to claim Bush allowed 9/11 in an effort to ease the political posturing necessary for our coming Taliban attack. I'll give them a point--there's no doubt 9/11 would have made any planned attack politically easier.

Problem is, no credible evidence supports that premise. On the other hand we have an AQ tape showing jihadis crowing over THEIR pre-emptive attack, more an indictment of the Pakistanis since if they indeed had fore-knowledge they could have tipped bin Laden--again. Conspiracists might surmise we deliberately dropped this nugget on a Paki knowing it would get back to UBL and hasten his attack, but that's pretty flimsy since it would be impossible to know exactly how UBL might react.

I'd like to think our government was above needlessly slaughtering thousands of our own citizens just to facilitate a justified counter-attack against a sworn enemy who had already declared war on us and bombed a Navy vessel. The look on Bush's face in the school room seems to back up my claim--no way that expression was faked. More likely he'd been beaten to the punch.