Tom Clancy novels aside, someone has already tried to hijack a commercial plane and crash it into the White House. Yep, it's been done, back in 1974. From September 1, 2000: Hollywood buzz is that he next portrays yet another cuckoo in Niels Mueller’s "The Assassination of Richard Nixon," based on the real-life Samuel Byck, who wanted to crash a plane into the White House . . .
Yes, it's the Honolulu Advertiser, which is exactly my point. This was tossed off as known fact, and as a totally plausible idea for movie plot based on reality. Just, you know, in a casual conversation between a PR person and a reporter.
But I can corroborate the Samuel Byck story with the government's own documents in this White House Security Review from 1995: Samuel Byck (February 1974). Samuel Byck, a failed businessman with a history of mental illness, was investigated by the Secret Service in 1972 on the basis of reports that he had threatened President Nixon. In 1974, he hatched a plan called "Operation Pandora's Box" to hijack a commercial airliner and crash it into the Executive Mansion.
Contrast that with this, per Condoleeza Rice on May 17, 2002: "The government did everything that it could — in a period in which the information was very generalized, in which there was nothing specific in which to react — and had this president known of something more specific or known that a plane was going to be used as a missile, he would have acted on it,"
How could they be so dangerously stupid? I have to believe they are incompetent because the alternative, conspiracy, is so much worse. I can't help but notice that the government is riddled with what is apparently life-threatening bureaucracy. How on earth do we undo this? Surely, the government can't be expected to downsize itself?
Between this and the Mueller story, I could just scream. I got *so tired* of hearing the Republican leadership call Bill and Hilary liars (as well as anyone else they could think of) and now we have these two spouting what have to be lies. Because if they aren't lies, they are stunning admissions of incompetence.
Posted by nicole at May 29, 2002 08:13 AM