In a press conference several months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 , National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said: “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people . . . would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.”

President Bush expressed similar surprise when he told the press corps on April 13, 2004 : “Had I had any inkling whatsoever that the people were going to fly airplanes into buildings, we would have moved heaven and earth to save the country.”

Yet long before September 11, social scientists had warned that an attack might occur. According to an overlooked 1999 report on “The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism,” by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress, “Al-Qaida’s expected retaliation for the U.S. cruise missile attack against Al- Qaida’s training facilities in Afghanistan on August 20, 1998 , could take several forms of terrorist attack in the nation’s capital.” Among the possibilities listed in the report: Suicide bombers might crash an aircraft into the Pentagon or other buildings.

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