Compare and Contrast III

Condoleeza Rice: We couldn't have known that terrorists would use airplanes as missiles.

President Bush: Nobody told me that terrorists would use airplanes as missiles.

Even planners for Pentagon exercises were thinking about terrorists using airplanes as missiles:

The U.S. military rejected a scenario in which a hijacked airliner flew into the Pentagon as it planned a training exercise months before an airliner was slammed into the building by hijackers in September 2001, defense officials said on Wednesday.

The proposed scenario was rejected by the Pentagon's elite Joint Staff as not in keeping with the April 2001 exercise, which dealt largely with how U.S. forces would be commanded in a confrontation with North Korea if defense headquarters somehow became incapacitated.

Defense officials said several scenarios under which military command had to be moved from the Pentagon were rejected and that the suggestion involving a possible foreign commercial airliner strike not only appeared unrealistic but could have taken over the whole exercise.

While rejected as a part of this particular exercise, this is proof that the meme was floating around the Capitol; that it wasn't some unimaginable pipe-dream scenario which could only have come from the mind of a cave-bound Osama bin-Laden.

See Compare and Contrast II and BushCo. vs Clinton (Compare and Contrast I, effectively).