Patterns


Hat tip to King of Zembla.
Condi then: "No one imagined" [planes being used as weapons].

In July 2001, a few weeks before Bush received the "Bin Laden" PDB, Italian authorities warned the U.S. Secret Service that terrorists connected to al-Qaeda were planning to hijack a plane and crash it into George W. Bush's hotel at that month's Genoa summit of the G-8 nations. As a result of these warnings, the Italians shut down the Genoa airport and airspace and installed anti-aircraft batteries to protect the summit (also see LA Times, Sept. 27, 2001). George W. Bush and his entourage - presumably including Condoleeza Rice - spent a night on a U.S. aircraft carrier for protection, even as the other G-8 leaders boarded a luxury ship to go on an Adriatic pleasure cruise.

Condi now: "I've asked why nobody saw it coming," Ms. Rice said, speaking of her own staff. "It does say something about us not having a good enough pulse" . . . .

Ms. Rice pointed out that the election results surprised just about everyone. "I don't know anyone who wasn't caught off guard by Hamas's strong showing..."

From the New Yorker, 2/6/06 (via our stalwart colleagues at Cursor):
[Shalom] Harari, who served as an intelligence officer in the West Bank and then as the adviser on Palestinian affairs to the Israeli Defense Ministry, is still closely connected to his former colleagues, and he said he had heard that, some weeks ago, the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, who was afraid of a Hamas rout at the polls, begged Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to exert United States pressure and postpone the scheduled elections. Rice refused, Harari said, and told Abbas to go forward. (A State Department spokesman declined to confirm the details of their conversation.)