<I was watching Rice say "Who would have thought they would turn airplanes into missiles and fly them into buildings?" Well, a lot of people had, and I would have hoped the National Security Advisor might have. That seemed disingenuous.

Maybe, maybe not. Humans tend to be kind of dense sometimes, and bureaucracies particularly so. Mental inertia.

When the first big meteor knocks out a city somewhere, no one will be able to say that someone hadn't pointed out the possibility of this happening. It has, in fact, been pointed out hundreds of times by hundreds of people. Yet, I still don't see the government knocking itself out to track NEOs in a major way, do I?

Despite some people having theorized on the possibility of planes as missiles; even after the planes were hijacked, it still didn't seem to occur to anybody that they were going to fly them into buildings until after it actually happened. Mental inertia.

BTW, Ashcroft was told to stay off of airlines because of some kind of personal threat, not a general threat to all airliners.