NORAD drills foreshadowed 9-11 attacks.(Insider Report)

In her April 8 testimony to the 9-11 investigative commission, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice publicly testified that the Bush administration's intelligence assessments prior to 9-11 did not anticipate the use of hijacked airliners as terrorist weapons. In this she essentially reiterated a claim she made at a May 16, 2002 White House briefing: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile...."

Four days after Rice's April 8 testimony, the Project on Government Oversight released documents from the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) describing exercises that anticipated--in eerie detail--the 9-11 terrorist attacks.

"In the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, [NORAD] conducted exercises simulating what the White House says was unimaginable at the time: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets ...