Where Was the Air Force?: “George W. Bush, writes former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, ‘failed to act prior to September 11 on the threat from Al Qaeda despite repeated warnings and then harvested a political windfall for taking obvious yet insufficient steps after the attacks.’ That incendiary charge, coupled with his apologetic testimony before the commission investigating the attacks, has reignited a long-simmering debate: What did Bush know when and how quickly should he have done something about it?

But both the 9/11 commission and liberal opponents of the Bush Administration are focusing on the wrong question. Nothing has surfaced from the 2001 ‘summer of threat’ beyond a bunch of vague they’re-up-to-something caveats. The specific details intelligence agencies would have needed to stop the attacks before they happened–potential hijackers’ names, dates and times, targets–were maddeningly elusive.

The really big unanswered question of September 11, 2001 is this: Once it became obvious that at least four passenger jets had been hijacked–at one point that Tuesday morning, Clarke says the FAA thought it had as many as ‘eleven aircraft off course or out of communications’–why didn’t our government intercept them?” —Ted Rall, CommonDreams