"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," Rice said.
This an old refrain or meme from Rice..And yet she gets promoted from National Security Advisor to Secretary Of State because of these howlers

US aviation received 52 al-Qaeda warnings before 9/11 By Jenny Booth, Times Online

America's aviation authority received numerous warnings about al-Qaeda attacks in the six months before 9/11, including five that mentioned hijackings and two that mentioned suicide operations, it has emerged.

A previously published report by the commission set up to investigate the September 11 attacks on the United States reveals that the US Federal Aviation Authority received 52 intelligence reports on al-Qaeda between April and September 2001.

The 911 Commission report criticises the FAA for failing to strengthen security measures in light of the reports, and accuses it of allowing a false sense of security to prevail.

The aviation industry was more concerned with hijacking threats overseas and did not appear to give serious credit to the idea of hijackings at home, the report added.

"The fact that the civil aviation system seems to have been lulled into a false sense of security is striking not only because of what happened on 9/11 but also in light of the intelligence assessments, including those conducted by the FAA's own security branch, that raised alarms about the growing terrorist threat to civil aviation," the report said.

The striking findings of the staff report, dated August 2004, emerged after an investigation by The New York Times.

The full version of the report was blocked from public release by the White House for more than five months. A declassified and heavily edited version was filed in the National Archives two weeks ago.

So many reports on Osama bin Laden or his al-Qaeda terrorist network were received by the FAA in the months before 9/11, that between March and May it conducted classified briefings on the al-Qaeda threat for security officials at 19 of the busiest airports in the United States.

The report said that the 52 warnings on al-Qaeda sent to the FAA in that period amounted to half of all the intelligence reports it received.