Narrator / Host (Tucker Carlson Show producer/narrator)

The FAA issued a circular to airlines warning of heightened increase in hijackings.

And then in July of 2001, the FAA issued another circular, this one noting that, quote, currently active terror groups were known to plan and train for hijackings and were able to build and conceal explosives and luggage.

Between 1999 and 2001, NORAD, which defends North American airspace, simulated a foreign hijacked airliner crashing into a building in the United States as part of a training exercise.

And they were not alone.

The National Reconnaissance Office,

a little-known intelligence agency that runs our spy satellites and remote-controlled surveillance planes, was planning an exercise in which an errant aircraft would crash into one of its buildings.

That exercise was on September 11th, 2001, and planned to take place just a couple of miles from Dulles Airport.

That's where the American Airlines flight number 77 had taken off before it crashed into the Pentagon.

In other words, the idea of al-Qaeda hijacking an airplane and flying into a building was entirely plausible before 9-11.

Officials knew it could happen, and there were other signs as well.

During the presidential transition in 2000 and 2001, nine months before 9-11, Bill Clinton told President Bush, I think by far your greatest threat is bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

In January of 2001, Philip Zelikow, the future executive director of the 9-11 Commission, attended a briefing in which Condoleezza Rice, the future national security advisor, was warned by Sandy Berger, that would be Bill Clinton's outgoing national security advisor, that, quote, the biggest national security threat facing this country is al-Qaeda.

On July 10th, 2001, the CIA director, George Tenet, and his counterterrorism deputy, Jay Kofor Black, were so alarmed

by intelligence pointing to an impending attack by Al Qaeda that they demanded an emergency meeting at the White House with Condoleezza Rice and her Security Council staff.

In fact, on the morning of the attacks, Director of Central Intelligence Tennant told a U.S.

Senator, quote, I wonder if it has anything to do with this guy taking pilot training.

And of course it did.

By any measure, including according to the heavily biased commission report,

George W. Bush, and particularly Condoleezza Rice, had ample warning that Al-Qaeda was plotting an attack.

And by all accounts, the US intel agencies were fully aware the hijackers were in the United States.