Hindsight is 20/20 - The story continues
Parts of the press, and of course the loyal opposition, are rather desperate to pin blame to the Bush administration for 9/11. Worldwide media today reports that the Bush administration had received warnings that al-Qaeda planned operations inside the US involving aircraft and explosives, and since this is roughly what happened, you can say that the Bush administration was "warned" and (ghasp!) failed to act on intelligence.
Once we get more specific, however, the picture is quite different:
The Congressional report last year, citing efforts by Al Qaeda operatives beginning in 1997 to attack American soil, said that operatives appeared to have a support structure in the United States and that intelligence officials had "uncorroborated information" that Mr. bin Laden "wanted to hijack airplanes" to gain the release of imprisoned extremists. It also said that intelligence officials received information in May 2001, three months earlier, that indicated "a group of bin Laden supporters was planning attacks in the United States with explosives."
Most readers will not see that press statements are likely to be deceptive. First, you will see that the only accurate information described above is the claim that al-Qaeda had cells within the US. Hardly actionable intelligence. The rest just sounds like an accurate prediction of 9/11.
The warnings about airplanes above describe classic hijacking scenarios, where the hijacked planes are landed, the terrorists demand release of captured comrades, negotiations are underway, and it is typically concluded by special forces storming it and either victory or disaster are achieved. The expection that this would happen when a plane is hijacked was precisely the reason terrorists could take over a plane with box cutters. Once passengers learned what was really going on, they stormed the terrorists. What happened on 9/11 can never happen again, because next time, passengers will know they have nothing to lose by fighting.
The report, which is not yet declassified, also supposedly mentioned explosives. That is hardly unexpected when it comes to terrorism, but fact is no explosives were used on 9/11. The terrorists claimed they had a bomb to pacify passangers on the hijacked flights, but the "explosives" used to bring down the twin towers and make a big hole in the Pentagon were jet fuel.
Finally, the most overlooked word in the report is going to be "uncorroborated." This was single source information, of questionable validity (as we know, it was mostly wrong). When we are discussing the issue of WMDs in Iraq, critics have (sometimes correctly) chided the Bush and Blair administrations for relying too much on single source information.
There is something called the Texas sharpshooter fallacy (really!), and that is precisely the fallacy critics of the Bush administration commit in this case. The name refers to the story about the Texas sharpshooter, not the president I hasten to add, who fires repeatedly at the side of a barn and then afterwards he draws a bull's eye around the place where most of the bullets have hit. This tactic can allow even the worst shot to look like an ace.
To determine whether the Bush administration, or indeed the earlier Clinton administration, failed to take appropriate action, we would have to look at all the intelligence the officials received prior to the attacks. Even if this particular memo contained a more credible prediction of what happened, we simply don't know how many such also uncorroborated threat evaluations the intelligence community passed on. Hindsight is always 20/20. Criticism of the administrations' decisions should be based not on what we actually know today, but what they could reasonably be expected to understand at the time.
Update: The actual text of the memo, as it has now been released. Dr Rice's description of it was accurate. Apparently, CNN political analyst Bill Schneider is living in an alternative reality where another memo was released.
What this says is, the White House knew what bin Laden was capable of planning, where he intended to do it, which was New York or Washington, D.C., how he was going to do it. There was only one thing missing, which was exactly when he was going to do it, which turns out to be September 11.
That is such a deceptive way of describing the memo that it is breathtaking.
If this is the closest US intelligence came to being forewarned of the 9/11 attacks, it is a safe conclusion that they were entirely clueless. That, obviously, is the scary part. Are they still clueless about al-Qaeda's plans and operations?
4:36:23 PM 
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A Belgian driver was caught 
