Much of the Global War On Terror was motivated, funded and carried out by personalizing the fight, as is often done, in this case against Osama Bin Laden as the individual who conducted the nine-eleven raids upon the US.
But actually there never has been any evidence tying OBL to 9/11. The Saudi was one of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted, but only for embassy bombings in Africa as seen here.
After 9/11 the US ordered Afghanistan to turn over OBL, but the Taliban refused unless they were shown proof of a connection to 9/11. That was the excuse the US needed to execute the invasion of Afghanistan which previously had been planned for strategic and financial reasons.
The new US general in Afghanistan, Miller, has renewed the "prevent a safe haven" reason for the US continuing its failed nation-building in Afghanistan. How ironic, since the US (under Carter) birthed al Qaeda in Afghanistan and subsequently supported it elsewhere, including Syria.

The Taliban offered on their own to turn over OBL to the US. OBL boasted that 9/11 was his operation several times.

You have better sources of information on the subject than I do, but my memory of what was available in the international press was that initially, at least, Mullah Omar's response was that Afghanistan was a sovereign country with an independent judiciary, and if we would just send the evidence we had they would arrest and try bin Laden themselves. I don't remember now where I was seeing these anecdotes, but I presume it was foreign publications, possibly The Economist. Anyway, most Americans did/do not know that bin Laden was Mullah Omar's son-in-law, and Omar was not about to allow him to be summarily executed. I believe he later said he would surrender bin Laden if the U.S. would send some evidence to support the accusation. We never had any. Incidentally, the speed with which we were able to start supplying the Northern Alliance makes me think we already had Special Ops people with them before 9/11.

Mike Scheuer told me a long time ago that this was true re: Taliban offering up OBL, even over their Pashtunwali codes. The irony of ironies, at least as he explained it, was that not making this deal with the Taliban had a much to do with President Clinton's desire to be liked in Hollywood and his addiction to Hollywood $$$. In particular, Jay Leno's wife played a significant part in fucking up Taliban/OBL deal by getting Clinton to agree to pressure the Taliban with some form of aid in return for the Taliban treating Afghan women like the empowered, western women that they are. As I recall his telling, the Taliban was so offended by the diktat that they scrapped everything and told us to fuck off.

A number of excerpts from various sources concerning the pressure from feminists on U.S. Afghan policy are in my post “Wars of feminist aggression”.
They include descriptions in Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars of the efforts of Mavis Leno to influence policy, and of how Taliban leaders reacted to U.S. efforts to influence their social policies.

Also among those excerpts is one from Scheuer’s 2008 book Marching Toward Hell. Its paragraph 2.3.8 (my numbering) includes (emphasis added):

[Shortly after bin Laden's return to Afghanistan from Sudan in May 1996] the Taliban regime
consolidated power over most of Afghanistan, and
offered bin Laden and his fighters the status of protected guests.
There was, to be fair, never much chance
that Washington could have negotiated with the Taliban
to secure bin Laden’s arrest and extradition.
No people are more protective of their guests than Afghans, and
none is less likely
to abide by the coercively phrased demands of a foreign power.

There seems to be a gap between the italicized sentence and what several people in this blog remember being told by Scheuer; I don't mean to claim anyone is misremembering (Scheuer himself may have varied over the years), just want to point out what Scheuer put in print.

Scheuer was correct in this. I was told this by a now retired CIA DO SIS to whom the Taliban made the offer.

The CIA had several contacts and sources in Afghanistan and USSF fell in on them. You don't know that?

Bacon: "But actually there never has been any evidence tying OBL to 9/11."

Mr. Bacon, you are totally incorrect on that.
See the excerpts from bin Laden's October 2004 "Message to the American Poeple" that I included in a post in my blog:
Lebanon 1982: the spark for 9/11 .
More extensive quotes from bin Laden's message are here, which quotes from both a translation (now deleted from the web) at www.aljazeera.com and a translation (still on the web) at cnn.com.
If you don't trust my quoting from those transcripts,
you can find that message in print as one of those collected in the book
Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden.

Mr. Bacon: If you are so inaccurate on this major point, why should we believe anything else you say?

Harper is correct in this but the cause of the intelligence and IC failure was not a failure to coordinate among the agencies. With the exception of the FBI who were never prior to 9/11 willing to coordinate much of anything, the rest of the IC was quite adequately tied together agency to agency electronically to share information among the analysts. The problem was that the SESs and generals who ran the IC knew that neither the Obama nor the Bush Administrations wanted to hear anything that would disturb their various agendas and did not want to hear anything like this and so the bosses in the IC and FBI simply suppressed the warnings in the interest of career advancement. In addition to that, inventive, aggressive clandestine HUMINT operations against al-qa'ida were everywhere disapproved by the same crowd. They were afraid of disclosure that might harm their careers. I have personal knowledge of this. The failure was not a matter of "connecting the dots." The problem was that timid collection operations did not produce enough dots to connect to provide target intelligence.

Col. Lang

In your opinion have any lessons been learned by the federal & state national security and law enforcement bureaucracies? Can we fight terrorism while retaining our constitutional liberties?

IMO, as a society we've paid a huge price. The Patriot Act that created artifacts like National Security Letters and mass warrantless surveillance. The GWOT that was used to invade Iraq on the basis of false pretenses and then followed by the destruction of the Libyan & Syrian states. And so on, that have shredded civil liberties here at home.

Did 9/11 create the pretext to formalize the Orwellian "organs of state security"? Reading about the focus of attention of the lead people on counter-intelligence like Peter Strzok, how can we be confident that they have any clue what our real adversaries are planning?

IMO target intelligence processes are much improved and senior managers are more willing to risk failure in clandestine HUMINT operations. those are good things. It is also true that counterintelligence ops in the states are much improved. the jihadis would have had a lot more effect if that had not been true. OTOH, that increased effectiveness does threaten out liberties.

Astonishing level of detail in the latest Russian report of preparation for a CW false flag in Idlib. Russian MoD claims 9 sham 'attack' scenes have already been filmed in Jisr Al-Shughour, with 2 to go to the OPCW "after getting the nod". Numbers of children involved, where they are from and sorts of other specifics. They also allege a real false flag attack with Chlorine by a group called Hurras al-Din is being prepared and will take place in Khan Shaykhun, with White Helmets providing assistance in the aftermath.

http://tass.com/defense/102...

I think I am developing a bit of a crush on Tulsi Gabbard:

https://twitter.com/TulsiGa...

Been following her. Does she get her message through much?

Trump, since he's from NY, ought to be ally in fulfilling congress's desire to get the full, declassified picture of 9/11 from the intelligence agencies.

Is he an ally to this cause?

And the beat goes on.....
The swamp is always in survival mode.
What's 3500 dead "deplorables" compared to the survival of the swamp?
What role did the "honorable" GW Bush play in this coverup, BTW?

Wonderfully profound.

Col: I'll take that as sarcasm, as I've never been profound.

Well, at least you recognized it

OK, I'll ask. Was Israel behind 9-11?

No. Al-qa'ida did it and the US was ineffective in dealing with the threat before hand.

The same "intelligence" community whose ineptitude brought us 9/11 and has lately been playing at soft coup, equally ineptly.

Boringly repetitive.

Better question might be, did Israelis know something was about to happen or not.

"Something" is worth nothing. Specifics are what matter.