Thanks for the link to the NP articles. I began reading the first one and I was struck almost immediately by how ill-informed P is. Here’s just one example:
“The point I wish to stress is not that Clarke was
exaggerating or lying. It is that the attack on 9/11
did indeed come out of the blue in the sense that
no one ever took such a possibility seriously
enough to figure out what to do about it.“(pp. 18-19)
There were attempts to figure out what to do about it, as you can see from this excerpt from the 9-11 Final Report:
“Clarke had been concerned about the danger posed by aircraft since at least
the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. There he had tried to create an air defense plan
using assets from the Treasury Department, after the Defense Department
declined to contribute resources. The Secret Service continued to work on the
problem of airborne threats to the Washington region. In 1998, Clarke chaired
an exercise designed to highlight the inadequacy of the solution. This paper
exercise involved a scenario in which a group of terrorists commandeered a
Learjet on the ground in Atlanta, loaded it with explosives, and flew it toward
a target in Washington, D.C. Clarke asked officials from the Pentagon, Federal
Aviation Administration (FAA), and Secret Service what they could do about
the situation. Officials from the Pentagon said they could scramble aircraft from
Langley Air Force Base, but they would need to go to the President for rules
of engagement, and there was no mechanism to do so. There was no clear resolution
of the problem at the exercise.16
In late 1999, a great deal of discussion took place in the media about the
crash off the coast of Massachusetts of EgyptAir Flight 990, a Boeing 767.The
most plausible explanation that emerged was that one of the pilots had gone
berserk, seized the controls, and flown the aircraft into the sea. After the
1999?2000 millennium alerts, when the nation had relaxed, Clarke held a
meeting of his Counterterrorism Security Group devoted largely to the possibility
of a possible airplane hijacking by al Qaeda.17 ”
(911 Final Report, p. 345)
