MoveOn.org sent along this oft-cited tidbit in their 'persuade the White House to make Condi testify' email today:
* RICE CLAIM: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 5/16/02
* FACT: On August 6, 2001, the President personally "received a one-and-a-half page briefing advising him that Osama bin Laden was capable of a major strike against the US, and that the plot could include the hijacking of an American airplane." In July 2001, the Administration was also told that terrorists had explored using airplanes as missiles.
[Source: NBC, 9/10/02; LA Times, 9/27/01]
Interestingly enough, just the other day, one of the HBO channels ran a movie from 1996 in which a 'Middle-Eastern terrorist faction' hijacks a jetliner, with the secret intention of crashing it in Washington DC. They plan to use some kind of nerve gas/biological weapon to create a 'do-it-yourself' WMD which will kill millions on the East Coast when the plane crashes.
The movie? 'Executive Decision' starring Kurt Russell.
Of course in the movie, Russell figures out that 'this is no mere hijacking,' Steven Seagal experiences decompression at altitude, and US Special Forces retake the plane with only a few dead b-actors and a lot of dead terrorists, saving the Eastern Seaboard from the homebrew WMD.
If they hadn't, then the president would have been forced to make the 'Executive Decision' to shoot the plane down. Hence the title.
So let me see - in 1996, when Bush 41 was still in office, Hollywood screenwriters had figured out that you could turn a commercial jetliner into not just a missile, but a WMD-equipped missile, millions of people saw the movie, yet "[nobody] could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."?
<COUGH>Bullshit</COUGH>