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"How do you explain this away? If we knew something was about to take place, why didn't we have contingency plans to protect the capital from attack by air?"

Attack by air? You mean, like... shoot down every commercial airliner that comes within, oh... 20 miles of the capital? Or just certain ones? Which ones? Better yet, why didn't the administration intercede earlier, and demand strict licensing and limit the production and sale of box cutters, the real "culprit" in this controversy?

This "What did they know before 9/11?" hysteria is absurd. Half the crackpot "journalists" in this country are being stampeded by this idiotic "feeding frenzy", but they live off of that kind of hysteria, called "buzz", and care not for logic or getting at the real basis of a story. I hope we folk at FR are not falling for a similar scam.

This particular "feeding frenzy" is very much like the one we saw regarding the ENRON collapse; leftist journalists hear the beginings of a hot story, they make wild assumptions about what is behind it, and go looking for a predetermined "smoking gun" to back up said assumptions. In that case they wanted to somehow blame the "ENRON disaster" on Bush and find coresponding classic examples of back room corruption. Instead, they found nothing to in anyway blame the looting and failure of ENRON on Bush, but found plenty of classic examples of back room corruption... by the Clinton administration. Follow the pattern, as the same will happen again.

All of the "dots" that the intelligence establishment failed to connect, were in place long before Bush came to office. And more importantly, the real reasons for these bureau's ineptitude, inaction, and vacilation regarding all these "warnings" or "clues" were instituted as points of policy by previous administrations. The Rowley memo points out that a major reason FBI agents were inhibited from making the connections that would lead to warning about possible hyjackings was... fear of offending racial and ethnic sensibilities, i.e. political correctness. Are we going to try and link that to the Bush administration too?

Richard, in a study presented to President Clinton, the scenario of hijacking planes and crashing them into the pentagon and CIA headquarters was documented. If you guys want to stick your head in the sand and dismiss everyone who acknowledges this report and others as Monday Morning Quarterbacks, so be it. The fact is these types of attacks were predicted and our intelligence service as well as our president did nothing to stop them.

For the record, I'm not laying this at Bush's feet. However, it does appear that something was up, for even under his watch department heads were called in and warned that it appeared something was going to take place.

Now, do you find it unreasonable for us to question why even our capital was left exposed to these suicide flights? I don't.