Maybe it's even more telling that she refused to testify under oath.

Speaking of "Rice" puns. Would you believe there are only two instances of the pun "The Rice Stuff" to refer to Condi on google? And they all are or link to a copy of the only relevant Lexis-Nexis hit. It's insane. Headline and title writers are getting too lazy these days.

"...her May 16, 2002, statement at the White House when she said, “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center…that they would try to use...a hijacked airplane as a missile.”

You know, at the time when she said that, I was appalled.
The NS Advisor had never thought that airplanes could be used as weapons??
How ignorant can one person be?
Maybe she should have asked my neighbor, Vic -
he could have told her all about it.

Vic had been a radioman aboard the Franklin.

The first written response to 9-11 I saw that came from a New Yorker mentions having first worried about this possiblity in the Seventies: "It made me wonder how many other people had thought the same thing in twenty-odd years." I guess we now know of one or two who didn't.

In all fairness, I can only imagine that her spokescitter meant 2001, not 2002.

But wasn't there a plot to crash an airliner into some Parisian landmark in the mid 90's. (Of course, a plot against France would never work in the US, would it.)

My first thought was that 2002 must be a typo for 2001. But that doesn't add up, because the point is to get her off the hook for her amazingly dimwitted May 16, 2002 statement.

OK. one more time:
Bush went to the G8 Summit in Genoa in July 2001.
(Did Rice go with him?)
The Italian authorities surrounded the conference with SAMs, to protect against hijacked aircraft being used as weapons.

And nobody in the administration noticed that, or found it at all eyebrow-raising.

See http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/2002/05/16_Bush_Knew.html

I'd bet good money that this is just a lie, even if we read "2001" for "2002," and that Rice was in fact briefed on this at some point.

The reason why she might lie about it is that if she had been aware of the possibility before 9/11, and didn't do anything about it, well obviously that's a failure of some kind on her part. Now, I don't know that I'd consider it a huge failure - I'd need to know a lot more details than I do about intelligence analysis of terrorism up to 2001, scenario projection, etc. to say anything very meaningful. It's possible that it would a perfectly understandable, if tragic, oversight or misemphasis or whatnot. (It might also have been a huge failure requiring penance by resignation at the very least.)

Anyway, it'd have been a mistake, and one of the salient characteristics of the Bushites is that they don't make mistakes.

Now, of course not even having been briefed on the possibility is ridiculous and if true means that there is something very wrong in how Rice and the NSC staff and the intelligence community interact. However, that's a process issue, or possibly failure on the part of staffers, y'see. The other salient characteristic of the Bushites is that their top-level people are not in fact responsible for what happens in their baliwicks, so even if everyone on the NSC staff dropped the ball, that's not Rice's fault at all.

Not to pile on or anything, but even my dad, a staunch Republican, found this business ridiculous. You see, he reads Tom Clancy (sigh). Apparently a book of Clancy's about six *years* ago featured a plot where somebody hijacks a plane and crashes it into...mm, Congress? I think? Maybe the White House. Something of national governmental importance anyway.

It really oughtn't take much to extrapolate from kamikazes.

Also, re: the Passion link, because I'm too lazy to find the last open thread in the archive:

"...convicted in her heart.."

Really. I just bet she was.

Don't just count, take a shot for every commandment.

Stephen King's Insomnia features a small plane (with explosives) being steered into a building (yes, it is a long book and the reasoning is different). It was published mid-Nineties (can't find my copy).

Data point.

Adam Hall, QUILLER SOLITAIRE, William Morrow, 1992.

For that matter, several Japanese pilots, Pearl Harbor, 1945 (-et seq,- of course). I would be surprised if there wasn't a First War instance, though that would have been more of a last gesture than a weapon of you know what.

Also in re the Passion link, doesn’t “radically impacted” sound like something that’d let your dentist buy a new car?

Surely in Bizarro World, people *add* vices instead of giving them up for Lent. Maybe that explains why we seem to be gettiing even more untruths than usual.

The first written response to 9-11 I saw that came from a New Yorker mentions having first worried about this possiblity in the Seventies

After the B-25 hit the Empire State Building in 1945, I'm sure many New Yorkers had such thoughts. (Even though the 1945 incident was an accident.) IIRC the World Trade towers were built with the possibility of such an incident in mind, though thinking of planes of the late 1960s when they were designed, not taking into account that later planes might be bigger and hold more, hotter-burning fuel, much less someone hitting both towers on purpose.

When I first heard on the radio that morning that a plane had hit the WTC, I remembered the B-25 and thought it was something like that, though that would have been bad enough. But I was still half asleep. Then I turned on the TV and woke up quick!

OK so you've got it all lined out - there's no possibility the current administration was unaware of the potential use of airliners as bombs.
So then what?
They had to have known that, they're spouting nonsense hoping to be believed? Like some Mack Sennet bank robber caught with a sack of money?
Or they're really a very powerful group of absolute lunatics with no connection to the real world?
Or maybe something else is going on.
And maybe Rice and Bush and even Cheney and Rumsfeld are sacrificial.
Used to accomplish something, held up as responsible for it, and discarded along with all suspicion.
Tell me the vast majority of news-aware liberals and leftists won't feel they've accomplished great things if Bush fails to gain a second term.
Yet the same media that elected him, against the majority will, is at best Bush-neutral now, and seems coyly friendly toward Kerry.
That's why the numbers still show Bush's approaval ratings in the double digits, the media.
If it was politics alone, in a neutral media context, you'd need a decimal point for his ratings numbers.
The simplest explanations often work.
Bush is too dim to orchestrate his own way on to a City Council, let alone into the White House.
After four years of Constitutional evisceration and fascist police-state building, the idea that merely removing him and his visible cohort will do much to change things seems pretty naive.

During the eighties i had a friend in Utah that subscribed to some obscure periodicals, one of which was called something like Counter-Intelligence Monthly. I used to read through it, always having been something of a spy buff. One of their terrorism articles that I found especially cool dealt with the idea of, WOW, using airplanes as cheap man's missiles. This was my first encounter with the idea, and I thought it was a pretty cool idea actually, being at the time somewhat maladjusted - I lived in Utah, remember.

Since then I have encountered the idea in various serious scenarios involving terrorism, until the day that we all encountered it. Of course outside the area of policy the idea has been a staple of books, TV and b-movies for some years, so that even someone as amazingly brain-dead as the Columbine shooters could fantasize about the subject in their death notes. To not have ever encountered the idea before September 11th would require super-heroic efforts of stupidity; I'm sure that George Bush could have managed it, but Rice strikes me as not having the self-control and steely determination such a task would require.

Not to pile on or anything, but even my dad, a staunch Republican, found this business ridiculous. You see, he reads Tom Clancy (sigh). Apparently a book of Clancy's about six *years* ago featured a plot where somebody hijacks a plane and crashes it into...mm, Congress? I think? Maybe the White House. Something of national governmental importance anyway.

Using my secret superpower of instinctively knowing stuff about books I've never read, it was Congress during the State of the Union address. It's how he got Jack Ryan, his CIA analyst hero of all those books and movies, to be President in his later works.

"After four years of Constitutional evisceration and fascist police-state building, the idea that merely removing [Bush] and his visible cohort will do much to change things seems pretty naive."

Could be. On the other hand, it's worth a try.

If that doesn't work, we can always go to Plan B: sneering at folks in weblog comment sections. To the barricades, mon freres!

Bush has an invisible cohort? Like the Praetorian Guards in Book of the New Sun? Kewl!

The Tom Clancy thing happened in his Japan book, which (being the first of his books that was about something I knew something about) made it quite clear to me that Clancy didn’t know anything about anything that couldn’t be totted up as a list of Dungeons-and-Dragons-style statistics in Jane’s. I didn’t take word one of it seriously, and I think it actually would speak well of Bush’s cohort (visible or invisible) if they didn’t, either.

Then again, maybe they did have a contingency plan for crazed kamikaze JAL pilots — just not one for al-Qaeda hijackers.

Rice has a choice of being throught regrettably unprescient (she knew about the threat but didn't learn a plan was actually in motion), for which like Clarke she could apologize; or being thought completely and rampantly incompetent (she'd never thought of a threat that was common knowledge to even the fiction-reading public). Consistently, from the first reactions to 9/11 on, she's chosen the latter course.

Why? Perhaps she can't apologize: she's always gotten her way, she's always been the smartest and toughest person in the room, and the thought that she finally has a job that's bigger than her is simply inconceivable. And, being new to this kind of situation, she doesn't realize how damaging the admission of ignorance is.

Cheney and Rumsfeld and Powell are probably the same way. As for Bush, he's always relied on a combination of personal charm and daddy's fixers to get him out of holes, but though charm works on Tony Blair it won't work on terrorists, and this hole is too big for daddy's fixers.

Clarke, by all accounts, is natively more arrogant than any of the above, but the difference is, he was capable of learning humility when he needed it.

They knew ahead of time and failed to stop it.

I don't mean they didn't even try. They may well have. I mean they blew it.

What's stuck with me for two and a half years was how very quickly after the event they were able to name all 19 hijackers out of the hundreds (all the people on the planes) of potential suspects. I remarked on it at the time, and my wife, who listens to NPR so I don't have to, told me that this very thing came up as follows:

Anchorperson: Nina, how do they know so much already?

Nina Totenberg: [Anchorperson], somebody really screwed up.

And there the matter has lain since. WHO really screwed up? How? Apparently we must not, must not know.

Jim, I've read some discussion of this matter. First, most of the hijackers were already on watch lists. It's been remarked by many people that the additional security instituted since 9/11 would have been superfluous in this case: we wouldn't have needed additional security to catch the hijackers, we needed to use the security we already had. This was not a failure on the national security level (though there might also have been failures on that level), this was a failure at the lower intelligence gathering-and-analysis level.

Second, the recently-released tapes of phone calls from the planes reveal that the callers gave some of the seat numbers of the hijackers. That enabled them to be identified pdq.

Also, the hijackers chose flights that they knew, from prior experience, were relatively uncrowded (to minimze the risks of passenger interference), which helped officials narrow the pool of suspects somewhat.

Jim:

It's come out how they knew some of the hikackers so quickly. Flight attendants with cell phones were in contact with ground control and read off the seat numbers of the hijackers.

So it's not surprising that we knew who the hijackers were so quickly: The passangers and flight crew of the planes told us.

"No reports of the use of airplanes as weapons were briefed or presented to Dr. Rice prior to May 2002," said her spokesman Sean McCormack.

One does wonder what Dr. Rice's briefing on the morning of 12 September 2001 covered.

'Clarke, by all accounts, is natively more arrogant than any of the above, but the difference is, he was capable of learning humility when he needed it.'

Some people don't feel any obligations because they know they are better than anyone else, other people feel a lot of obligation because they know they are better than everyone else. These are the varieties of arrogance.

Picking nits - just to be polite of course by making this a self referent plan b - that might be mes freres -

How about remembering the Cessna that crashed on the White House lawn and caused the Secret Service to deploy Stinger missiles to the roof of the building.

Exactly how many bad WWII movies have featured an heroic pilot deliberately crashing his aircraft into the enemy target?

What is supposed to be the giant leap of understanding between driving an explosives laden truck into the Marine barracks in Lebanon and using an aircraft?

In her defense, Dr. Rice is a Soviet/East Europe wonk and the Soviets didn't do things like that.

A close friend, someone I consider a good judge of others, had a class with the good Dr. Rice. His assessment of her was as follows:
First, she is brilliant. Remarkable memory, incredible grasp of her field.
Second, she is blindered. As of '99/'00, her primary concern for national security was state actors in Eastern Europe and Northwest Asia.
Third, she is batshit insane. Not only an ideology-justified Coldwarrior, but clearly paranoid, and possibly psycho-, or even socio-, pathic.

Either of the latter two traits could explain her statements -- either she did not think it was possible, because that was not in the Soviet character, or she did, and is simply lying and does not care

It must be frustrating for her, to have to deal with all these questions about Arabs distracting her (and the country) from the Red Menace.

A couple of decades ago, when I first encountered the concept "Pentagon", I read a description of a building that had been designed with high security in mind. Concentric rings, so that the inner ring was throughly protected against missile attack. And I looked at the pretty diagram and thought, "And what happens if someone uses a hijacked 747 as a missile?"

But then, my mother's just old enough to remember doodlebugs...

There seems to be a trend of increasingly transparent lying. So, I wonder to myself, "Why aren't they even bothering to do the thing properly anymore?" Self answers with several scenarios:

A. They think the American People are stupid/malleable/gullible (there may some statistical support for this theory).

B. Their heads have gotten too filled up with events/other lies they have told/random data, and they therefore are incapable of performing a cool analysis of what they should say. In other words, they panic.

C. They are (to quote Mr. Moles) all batshit crazy.

C.1. Perhaps they think they are perpetrating a giant Jedi-Mind-Trick on mass populace.

Bonus point: how do voting patterns support answer A, especially in light of data available at the time which refuted the use of the word "compassionate" as applied to GWB?

whoops - apologies. Was quoting BSD.

I'm surprised that in such a geeky group that no one has yet mentioned an even more direct fictional prediction: the pilot episode of the Lone Gunmen. Aired in early 2001, featured a airline flight hijacked to be flown into the WTC. *Showed* the plane barely avoiding it on screen, as I recall -- visuals that makes me wonder if that episode will ever make it out on DVD.

Being in the X-Files universe there was a level beyond the surface 'plane hijacked by foreign terrorists' that was the public story, of course. It was hijacked by remote control by a government agency to give them an excuse to wage war. Comments come to mind.

Hmm, poking around on the net, there's some good screen caps at this site.

Tricksy men try and make us touch nasty Bible... it burnssss usss, yes...

whoops — apologies. Was quoting BSD.

I agree, though. With both of you.

(Actually, I can come up with a theory that would explain at least some of the Administration’s behavior without requiring them to be insane or even particularly evil. I just don’t happen to think it’s the right one any more.)

Re Tavella's information:

So the Pentagon or the NSA or the CIA should hire people to watch television? Where do I sign up?

Jill S.: You may be being too nice dear. There's another scenario. The lies and their transparency don't matter because they have no intention of handing over power to anyone else no matter what. It's still not too late to declare a red alert/martial law/whatever and cancel the dammed election. There is literally nothing I would put beyone the pale for these people.

MKK

Lois: "X Days of the Condor" (where X equals 3 or 6, depending on whether your attention span is movie-length or book-length) postulated an intelligence agency hiring people to read books, looking for good ideas and/or evidence of leaks. These days, it probably would make as much sense to monitor television.

MKK: Wow. I almost never get accused of being nice, let alone "too nice." I'll take it as a compliment (and thank you very much!), even though nice may equal "naive" in this instance. ;-)

You may be right, though. I can believe anything of an administration that acts as though it won in a landslide, despite having the minority of the popular vote.

New term, perhaps: Despite Despots?

Some random thoughts:

My first literary thought on 9/11 was Donald Kingsbury's "The Moon Goddess and the Son." In that book Afghan rebels build cruise missiles and launch them against Soviet targets (the old Soviet Union is still occupying Afghanistan). For jollies, they target one on the Kremlin. It actually hits the Kremlin and takes out the Politburo. World War III nearly ensues. I enjoyed the book immensely. But on 9/11 I thought "Damn -- somebody decided to use airplanes as cruise missiles."

Second thought: I don't think Bush is stupid. He is, however, very narrow and incurious. I suspect the same can be said of much of the administration. People in the SF world are quite intelligent and curious and open minded. We tend to think all intelligent people share those attributes. They don't. I find it easier to believe that the Bushies just don't think about the broader consequences of their ideas/policies/actions than they are some sort of Machiavellian geniuses.

Reading BSD's commentary above about Rice does scare me. There is a personality type known as "high functioning" psychotic. Such people can mask some pretty disturbing mental problems. Being intelligent helps in this activity. Choosing a life where clear behavior and thinking patterns are obvious is also a help. Rice is clearly intelligent -- and she's picked a group of people who do pronounce clear standards of behavior and thinking.

Bryan: there was a Covert Action Quarterly, which still might be published. Topics in the early nineties were Central America, Vietnam POWs and the rise of the Angry White Man. I was too politically green back then to know where they were comin' from, so the magazine's demo could have been Soldier of Fortune-esque or Foreign Affairs-ish.

I was never able to see The Running Man (starring Governor Arnie) cinematically, but in the book the protagonist crashes a plane into the boardroom, high in a skyscraper, of the company persecuting him during a meeting.

I doubt the film ended like that, preferring a 'happy ending', but did they use the general idea at all? (Running slightly late as usual.)

belaborer: http://www.covertactionquarterly.org/

Your friendly neighborhood serials librarian (ret.) at your service.

MKK

Peter Van Greenaway used planes as weapons in his novels at least twice, most notably in "Take the War to Washington" (1974).

In World War 2 the Soviet air force pilot's manual had a section on ramming other planes written by a guy who had done it four times. I'm not aware that any other nation did, though I'm not at all familiar with Japanese military history.

Epacris — they tossed it, in favor of having him feed Richard Dawson into the pneumatic tube used to . . . Oh, never mind. Let’s just say the story and the film didn’t have very much at all in common.

President Gore has an invisible cohort. They're doing a damn fine job, too.

"A. They think the American People are
stupid/malleable/gullible (there may some
statistical support for this theory)."

There is overwhelming support for it: any poll that shows Bush with more than a few percent support--and that is being charitable--demonstrates clearly that there are large numbers of Americans who cannot, to paraphrase Harlan Ellison, think their way out of a pay toilet.

From the outset, this administration has made it vividly clear that their approach is to a target demographic of the stupid and the hating, and that they don't give a rat's ass about the rest so long as they can convince enough of "their" demographic that they are God's Good People. No reasonably bright 12-year-old can swallow the bilge they put out, on all topics, but their calculation was and is that at least half the population cannot reason at the level of a reasonably bright 12-year-old, and they have been proven correct.

If we had a functional press beyond Molly Ivins, perhaps the margin would be slightly different, but "the liberal media" continue to act as if Karl Rove were editor-in-chief--though what is coming out stronger day by day is hard even for the patty-cake press to fully ignore, and even the slowcoaches are beginning to scratch their heads and mumble.

On the positive side, it seems impossible to imagine anyone, anyone at all, who voted for Gore in 2000 voting for Bush in 2004, whereas it seems quite possible to envision at least a few who voted for Bush in 2000 to vote Democratic in 2004. And Gore won in 2000.

(The scandal in Florida was not the one that caught all the attention but rather the rankly illegal and obviously purposive purge of about 90,000 voters from the rolls shortly before the election on the ground that they were convicted criminals with no right to vote, though--whoops!--87,000 of those purges were "clerical errors" restored to the rolls after the election; need one ask if they were virtually all blacks?)

But the negative, the most frightening negative of all, is the thought someone mentioned above, which occurred to me many months ago: if the polls look bad, cancel the election (after staging some cheap-excuse event). Ridiculous paranoia? Keep in mind that most of the history of, oh, say the last 25 years would have looked, from 25 years ago, like ridiculous paranoia.

Another pop culture mention of a plane crashing into a building is a 1994 song by Soul Coughing, which said something like:

A man
drives a plane
into the
Chrysler building

See, if Condi were into alternative rock, 9/11 wouldn't have happened.

Tavella wrote: I'm surprised that in such a geeky group that no one has yet mentioned an even more direct fictional prediction: the pilot episode of the Lone Gunmen.

I'm relieved you mentioned it, because that relieves me of the responsibility of mentioning it. ;-) I never saw the pilot episode of the Lone Gunmen, though, because although Channel 4 bought the first series for UK broadcast, it did not (most uncharacteristically) show the pilot episode. That was in late 2001, as I recall...

However, I got to read the Television Without Pity recap, here.

The use of planes as missiles was factored into the 1996 Olympic security plans, according to many sources: this is the "I feel lucky" link from Google:

FBI feared suicide planes during '96 Atlanta Olympics

It's a bit creepy to read this now, since a. I lived in Decatur, close by Atlanta, during that time, where b. Atta, one of the WTC pilots, was allegedly seen, perhaps contemplating an attack.

And like one of the posters above, my first reaction to the WTC attacks was to recall the B-25 story.

quote from chuck devine: "My first literary thought on 9/11 was Donald Kingsbury's "The Moon Goddess and the Son."

my first thought was donald kingsbury's "psychohistorical crisis", since one of the main themes of the book was that tiny forces, applied at just the right time, can change the course of history.

for example, a tiny force of three airplanes recruited american armies into PNAC's "war on terror", which everyday seems more like a war for oil and global domination.

i dont have to remind you, do i, of the sept 2000 PNAC document, signed originally by cheney, wolfowitz, rumsfeld, perle and the rest of the likud crazies, that stipulated the need for "a new pearl harbor" to kick off this global reordering.