"Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaida's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency , or the White House," the September 1999 report said.

That's the AP talking. Today.

Maybe they finally got around to reading what Brasscheck reported eight months ago. If so. Bravo. I'm glad they were able to finally find the time to research the story. Brasscheck got its information in turn from a mass market paperback written by the head of the US House of Representatives Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare published in 1993.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&ncid=716&e=1&u=/ap/20020517 /ap_on_go_pr_wh/attacks_1999_warning_6

By the way, something that has always puzzled me about the Pentagon attack.

It turns out those masterminds of terrorism weren't so smart after all. You see it was public knowledge that a section of the Pentagon was undergoing renovations and would therefore be relatively empty on 9/11. Yet of all the ways the terrorists could have attacked that huge and vulnerable structure, they chose to fly into a mostly empty area thus keeping casualties at the Pentagon to an absolute minimum.

Contrast that with the World Trade Tower attack in which engineer Osama bin Laden is reputed by the US government to have calculated precisely the building-collapsing impact of the collisions in advance from his cave in Afghanistan.

By the way, not a single general or other member of the upper level brass died in the Pentagon attack. Quite amazing when you realize that generals are as common in the Pentagon as paper clips.

Equally strange, to me at least, is that Bush did not consider two jetliners flying directly into the World Trade Center to be significant enough to merit a pause from his reading of a story to a small group of children in a Florida grammar school.

So let's get the official story straight:

1. The government was so concerned about violence against commercial aircraft in the US that attorney general John Ashcroft was told to stop flying on commercial planes in the summer of 2001. - Reported in the UK. Not here.

2. Bush went to Genoa in July of 2001 where the threat of a suicide plane attack was so high that the Italians put anti-aircraft batteries at the airport. - Amazing media amnesia on this one. You'd think it happened 100 years ago not two months before 9/11.

3. The week of 9/11, the FAA sent an alert to all US airports warning of an impending hijacking of a US plane. Mob bagman and San Francisco mayor Willie Brown was warned off planes that week. Check it out in the San Francisco Chronicle. The Brown story was reported a day or two after 9/11

4. Then on 9/11 when four commercial jetliners simultaneously left their flight paths and stopped communicating with air traffic control. The FAA - which has just issued a hijack alert - and its military partner, NORAD, with which it is fully functionally integrated, couldn't figure out what to do and did nothing even though standard operating procedures of what do to in the event of air hijackings are in place and have been for years.

5. The mastermind terrorists were smart enough to do the impossible: neatly drop two massively tall office towers with two very different types of collisions, but failed to pick up a US newspaper and learn that the portion of the Pentagon they targeted was the ONLY part of the building that could be hit without killing thousands.

6. In order to catch the villain, it was necessary to remove a sovereign, albeit entirely screwed up, government from power and replace it with an equally screwed up government. That the new government is agreeable to terms for a new oil pipeline tapping hundreds of billions of dollars worth of energy and the old one wasn't is pure coincidence.

7. And even though we didn't catch the bad guy and have no idea where he is, that's OK. Instead we'll embark on a 'money is no object' global military campaign to 'stamp out terrorism where ever it is found' and install laws that restrict the movement and financial privacy of US citizens. That these two reactions happen to enrich and advance the agenda of the very same people who were negligent (at best) in allowing the attack to happen in the first place is pure coincidence.

That's the story they're asking you to believe.

I'm glad to see some people are finally questioning it though I imagine when Bush & Co. find a way of paying off or extorting the Democrats, the issue will go away.