"Seriously, in today's world, I can not think of a single situation where a terrorist could use an aircraft as a weapon in America."
I recognize your point that it is doubtful that a terrorist could recreate 9/11. Passengers and crews would not be as compliant and the Air Force would react much more rapidly and forcefully as well.
The use of an aircraft as a weapon was not seriously considered prior to 9/11. Our real mistake was that we were only concerned with thwarting the terrorist tactics used in the past and were not imaginative enough to anticipate other tactics. We make that same mistake when we look at middle eastern muslim males with boxcutters as our only threat. Therer are other ways to induce terror into the aircraft and we should not overlook that fact.
Officials 'Never Thought of an Airplane Being Used as a Missile'
Capitol Hill (CNSNews.com) -
Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta told the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the 9/11 Commission) Friday that, prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, aviation security officials had not considered that a hijacker might commandeer an airplane for any reason other than taking hostages.
"I don't think we ever thought of an airplane being used as a missile," Mineta declared.
But former Rep. Tim Roemer (D-Ind.), who now serves on the commission, challenged Mineta's claim. Roemer noted that there was consideration within intelligence agencies that terrorists might plan an attack such as the one carried out on 9/11.
"Wouldn't you view it as a failure of our intelligence community not to tell the secretary of transportation that there was such a conceivable threat, that the people like the Coast Guard and the FAA should be thinking about?" Roemer asked.
"We had no information of that nature at all," Mineta replied. "There was nothing in those intelligence reports that would have been specific to anything that happened on the 11th of September," Mineta said. "There was nothing in the preceding time period about aircraft being used as a weapon or of any other terrorist types of activities of that nature."
But those statements directly contradict documentation compiled by aviation security analyst Andrew Thomas in his new book Aviation Insecurity: The New Challenges of Air Travel .
"With all due respect to Secretary Mineta, either he's incredibly in denial or just simply not the sharpest tool in the woodshed," Thomas told \b CNSNews.com Friday. "There were clearly - well before 9/11, years before 9/11 - numerous instances where we knew of both al Qaeda and other terrorist groups threatening or actually putting into place the hijacking of commercial airliners and slamming them into targets on the ground."
Al Qaeda started planning suicide hijackings years earlier
Thomas details a 1995 warning from Philippine authorities to the FBI about a plot by the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, and an accomplice, Abdul Murad.
"During intense and often brutal interrogations by Philippine authorities, Murad told of detailed plans to simultaneously blow up several planes over the Pacific Ocean," Thomas wrote, "while he and another suicide hijacker would each carry out kamikaze suicide attacks on the CIA and the Pentagon, respectively."
Yousef later bragged of the plot to federal agents transporting him back to the U.S. after his arrest in Pakistan later in 1995.
"Yousef reportedly told FBI agent Brian Parr and other agents guarding him that he had narrowly missed several opportunities to blow up a dozen airliners in the Pacific in one single day," Thomas wrote, "and carry out a suicide attack on CIA headquarters."
Retired FAA agent warned 9/11-type attacks were possible
In a May 7, 2001, letter to Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), retired FAA Special Agent Brian Sullivan wrote that the FAA needed to change its security focus from hijackings to take hostages to the possibility of terrorists targeting airliners for much more sinister purposes.