9/11 Report: Planes were seen as terrorists' weapons as early as 1994

The 9/11 Report, co-authored by Senator Bob Graham, will be released tomorrow, although smaller excerpts have become available already.

<<"From at least 1994, and continuing into the summer of 2001, the intelligence community received information indicating that terrorists were contemplating, among other means of attack, the use of aircraft as weapons. This information did not stimulate any specific intelligence community assessment of, or collective government reaction to, this form of threat."

"Despite intelligence reporting from 1998 through the summer of 2001 indicating that Osama bin Laden's terrorist network intended to strike inside the United States, the United States government did not undertake a comprehensive effort to implement defensive measures in the United States." >>

Summer of 2001, eh? I remember Dubya vacationing in Crawford. You can't put all the blame on Clinton this time, Dub. And wasn't Rumsfeld saying how no one could've predicted planes used as weapons? Clearly, federal agencies were well aware of the possibilities!

Read more excerpts courtesy of the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel:

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/nationworld/politics/wire/sns-ap-attacks-intelligence-excerpts,0,5270642.story?coll=sns-ap-politics-headlines

Considering the Iraq WMD debacle, and this, one begins to wonder just how incredibly at risk we really are.

I find this pretty scary. The first time (9/11) ok, let's give em the benefit of the doubt. But two years later the guys at the top are still so screwed up they "forget" critical peices of evidence about nuclear arms?

I swear, they need to ALL be keeping notebooks like Graham, and be forced to sit down like a bunch of kindergartners and compare notes. Jeez.

"The question that started much of these inquiries was the question, could September 11 have been avoided. Different people may read this report and come to a variety of conclusions. In my own position I think the answer is yes, that there were enough gaps, turf protections, and lack of the standard of professionalism that we would expect of intelligence agencies."

http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0307/23/lkl.00.html

Strong words from Florida's senior Senator!

(Senator Graham also pushed the idea that we ought to get many more foreign troops to aid us in Iraq so a sizeable amount of American troops can come on home. He also said more and more people are bugging him about why are we still there, and he noted that Bremer's main responsibility while he's here in the US is to convince the people that it is justified, because given the casualties it is not clearly justified as we at DU would agree!)