Details of the 9/11 Report.

The NYT's has an article that illustrates how many of the commonly held beliefs about the 9/11 attacks are incorrect.  Of particular interest is the notion that nobody could have any indication that terrorists would use planes as missiles.  According to the article:

"I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center," Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, said in May 2002. As recently as this April, in testimony to the Sept. 11 commission, Mr. Freeh said that he "never was aware of a plan that contemplated commercial airliners being used as weapons."

But in its investigation, the commission found that an attack described as unimaginable had in fact been imagined, repeatedly. The commission said that several threat reports circulated within the government in the late 1990's raised the explicit possibility of an attack using airliners as missiles.

Most prominent among those reports, the commission said, was one circulated in September 1998, based on information provided by a source who walked into an American consulate in East Asia, that ''mentioned a possible plot to fly an explosives-laden aircraft into a U.S. city." In August of the same year, it said, an intelligence agency received information that a group of Libyans hoped to crash a plane into the World Trade Center.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command had gone so far as to develop exercises to counter the threat and, according to a Defense Department memorandum unearthed by the commission, planned a drill in April 2001 that would have simulated a terrorist crash into the Pentagon.

Then there's this:

In the first hours after the Sept. 11 attacks and ever since, the White House has consistently insisted that President Bush and his deputies had no credible evidence before the attacks to suggest that Al Qaeda was about to strike on American soil.

But the assertion has been questioned as a result of the commission's digging. After its most heated showdown with the Bush administration over access to classified information, the commission pressured the White House to declassify and make public a special intelligence briefing that had been presented to the president at his Texas ranch on Aug. 6, 2001, a month before the attacks.

The existence of the document - but not its detailed contents - had been known about since 2002, when the White House confirmed news reports that President Bush had received an intelligence report before Sept. 11 warning of the possibility that Al Qaeda might hijack American passenger planes.

In testimony this April to the Sept. 11 commission, before it was made public, Ms. Rice insisted that the report was "historical."

"It did not, in fact, warn of attacks inside the United States," she testified. "It was historical information based on old reporting. There was no new threat information.''

But there were gasps in the audience in the hearing room when she disclosed the name of the two-page briefing paper: "Bin Laden Determined to Attack in U.S."

The document was made public several days later and contained passages referring to F.B.I. reports of "suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York." It noted that a caller to the United States Embassy in the United Arab Emirates that May had warned that "a group of bin Laden supporters was in the U.S.," planning attacks with explosives.

The commission's final report revealed that two C.I.A. analysts involved in preparing the brief had wanted to make clear to Mr. Bush that, far from being only a historical threat, the threat that Al Qaeda would strike on American soil was "both current and serious."

That bitch! Now I think that she may have been completely full of shit when she testified before the 9/11 commission.  I mean, the report seems to be saying that she should've known about places being used as missiles, but she said this was impossible.  Then the whole line she gave aboutthe PDB being nothing more than a "historical document" seems to be complete bullshit.