In her recent article in the Washington Post, cited in the Independent article linked above, Condoleezza Rice claims that "Despite what some have suggested, we received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles..."

Previously, in 2002...

On May 16, Rice held a press briefing; she insisted that no one could have envisioned the events of September 11. “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people…would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile,” Rice said.

Even some Republicans rolled their eyes skyward in disbelief at Dr. Rice's statement, and as this article goes on to illustrate,

a 1999 report prepared for the National Intelligence Council, an affiliate of the CIA, warned that terrorists associated with bin Laden might hijack an airplane and crash it into the Pentagon, White House or CIA headquarters.

Operation Bojinka, the Genoa G-8 and Olympic precautions, and numerous other official threat assessments vividly highlight the well-recognized threat posed by skyjacked jetliners. It is ludicrous to an extreme for a national security advisor to claim that nobody had any idea aircraft might be used in this way.

In addition, those who have been paying attention will recall that, in the days and months leading up to Black Tuesday, there were frantic efforts by FBI field agents to call attention to the highly suspicious activities of Middle Eastern men enrolled in flight training schools in Arizona and Minnesota. Notwithstanding the fact that the efforts of the field agents were rebuffed by their superiors, Ms. Edmonds' account makes clear that "...information ... was circulating within the FBI in the spring and summer of 2001 suggesting that an attack using aircraft was just months away and the terrorists were in place."

Obviously, Condoleezza Rice is not being truthful. There is abundant information in the public record underlining the well-recognized threat posed by hijacked aircraft that could be flown on suicide missions and crashed into high value targets. Dr. Rice's dissembling raises two very interesting questions:

Why is she lying, and what is the 911 Commission going to do about it?

S