Teribus, I see you conveniently ignored my question on AQ KHan,
and why there wasnt a peep from the BUsh administration on the nuclear black market.

as far as Im concerned the wake up call should have been the 93 bombing of the World Trade Centre. At the time experts said that if the van had been in another location it could have brought down the tower and you would have had a lot more than 6 dead.
(when the mastermind - Ramzi Yousef was caught, it came to light that he had planned to blow up at least a dozen airliners over the pacific)
Imagine how many people would want to fly the next day.

and of course other wake up calls would have been the East African embassy bombings, bombing of the Khobar towers in Saudi, the USS Cole,
the attempted millennium bombing. the columnist Judith Miller wrote that top people in the CIA and Pentagon couldnt sleep that summer as they were expecting another attack especially around 4th July 2001.

and Condoleeza's comment that no once could have predicted using airliners as missiles - is incorrect anyway, a terrorism expert from Vancouver wrote an article months before about such a possibility
(the CIA even investigated him after 911)
and a similar incident had happened before when an Algerian airliner was hijacked and the hijackers threatened to crash it into the Eiffel tower (in 95), in the end the plane was stormed on the tarmac by French special forces.

an ominous sign of things to come is reports of ships being hijacked in the south pacific - whereby the hijackers quickly leave, making it look like a practice run. (I remember reading about a pentagon terrorism think tank in the late 70s that comes up with scenarios and simulates what might happen - one of their simulations was a hijacked oil tanker in New York harbour - with 3/4 of the oil dumped thereby turning it into a huge bomb.