Our Man in Arizona
I guess nothing short of a copy of Mohamed Atta's Travelocity itinerary would have stirred the F.B.I. from its stupor. It couldn't call a few flight schools? I always thought F.B.I. agents were paid to lose sleep over imprecise but alarming details and lucky hunches. Even a month later, when they got Moussaoui, who told flight instructors he didn't need to know how to land, they didn't connect those darned dots.

The F.B.I. has known for years that American flight schools were breeding grounds for Al Qaeda pilot-wannabes. And the idea of planes as weapons was nothing new. In 1994, an American crashed his Cessna 150 at the White House — and Islamic militants were thwarted trying to slam a plane into the Eiffel Tower.

The F.B.I. was warned in 1995 by Philippine police that Ramzi Yousef, who planned the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, had schemes to hijack and blow up a dozen U.S. airliners on the same day and to hijack a plane and dive it into the C.I.A.

A 1999 intelligence report for the C.I.A. warned that bin Laden's terrorists might hijack a plane and slam it into the C.I.A., the Pentagon or the White House. The Italians told U.S. authorities last summer at the Genoa summit meeting that Islamic terrorists might try to ram a plane into the summit headquarters.

After an Islamic fundamentalist shot Meir Kahane in 1990, the F.B.I. seized 29 boxes of evidence from the killer, including bomb formulas and speeches by the blind sheik in the '93 bombing about "destroying the edifices of capitalism," with pictures of the Washington Monument, the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center. The F.B.I. did not bother to translate this stuff for three years — until after the '93 bombing.

Even if all President Bush learned at his Crawford briefing on Aug. 6 was that bin Laden was gearing up for hijackings here, why not order tougher airport security and fortified cockpit doors? After all, the 9/11 attacks started as old-fashioned hijackings.

The Bushies were still fixated on their Maginot line of missile defense in the sky when the threat was Al Qaeda freaks with box cutters. They cast themselves as the pros from Dover, the generals of the Gulf war with the right stuff.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/19/opinion/19DOWD.html?todaysheadlines