Won't the 9/11 commission ask those questions?

The PDB clearly stated:

"Bin Ladin implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America."

From that and other failed attempts the PDB was tiled - Bin Laden Detrmined to Strike in the USA - No "might" about it pdc - but none of this was anything new - in short it was historical.

The PDB mentions of possible attacks being planned in 1998

"Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of "Blind Shaykh" 'Umar 'Abd al-Rahman and other US-held extremists."

"FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."

"The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Ladin-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives."

So the sum total of what those assessing and evaluation intelligence comes up with, amounts a possible threat of hijacking, and a possible threat of attacks on federal buildings in New York, the latter substantiated somewhat by the report from the US Embassy in the UAE.

Now where out of that lot do you get the clear and clarion warning, let alone the vaguest impression, that nineteen men are going to hijack four aircraft and fly them into buildings.

Some of this had been around for rather a long time - Richard Clarke didn't manage to join the dots togther in 1998, he didn't manage to join the dots together in May 2001 and to be perfectly fair to the man he did come right out and say that nobody could have joined the dots together prior to the attacks themselves. So why do most in this forum think that a non-professional should have, hells teeth, the professionals charged with this task, couldn't see it and they'd been dealing with it solely, day in day out, for the best part of four years, or more.

All the chatter about millions of pieces of information - some on this forum have picked that up on there being millions of pieces of information relating to the attacks of 9/11 - there wasn't. What Samuel Berger actually said was that there was a mass of information being reported world-wide on Al-Qaeda running to a million pieces of paper. Of that mass of paper only a handful related vaguely to the attacks of 9/11.