Saying "something bad is going to happen tomorrow" is a completely different kettle of fish from a warning that fanatics might crash a hijacked airliner into the pentagon.

You stated:

A non-specific mention about crashing a plane into the Pentagon or the White House isn't exactly enough to do much about.

I beg to differ.

Consider the precautions taken by Italian authorities when warned by the CIA that OBL and his boys might try to crash a hijacked plane into the G8 summit. The Italians came up with the positively ingenious idea of ringing the conference site with air defense assets, things like AAA, SAMs, and the Italian Air Force. The Secret Service, meanwhile, made Pres. Bush spend his nights on an aircraft carrier.

On 9-11-2001, a local TV station in DC was broadcasting the position of AA flight 77 as it bore down on the nation's capital, but the brass in the Pentagon appears to have been blissfully - some might say studiously - ignorant of the approaching plane.

With well over an hour warning, the headquarters of the most powerful military on Earth could not manage to dispatch even one GI with a Stinger to defend itself.

"...the intelligence community had produced various reports over the years suggesting that terrorists might use airplanes as weapons."

All the more reason, one would think, that the Air Force would scramble interceptors at the first hint of a hijacking, as indeed it is required to do, especially any in the immediate vicinity of the nation's capital.

Yet on Black Tuesday, AA Flight 77 meandered around the countryside for an hour or more, overflew several military bases, including airfields, performed a high-G turn over the capital, and was ultimately able to slam into the Pentagon without being intercepted, shot at, challenged, or disrupted in any way.

Surely, there were AAA and SAM around the Pentagon, but there was no reaction from them. At least two squadrons of F-16 and FA-18 were based at nearby Andrews AFB, but none scrambled until much later that morning. There was an ongoing air defense exercise in the Eastern US that morning, but no planes were diverted toward the suicide jets.

It's more than strange, it's unbelievable, and that is why The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States has subpoened the FAA and the DOD for information being withheld, and that is why 911 critics and victims families, among others, are not pleased with the recent agreement between the White House and the committee which will allow select committe members limited access to presidential briefing materials.

S