the former iraqi information minister finds new work

According to an article published by Reuters on May 1 2003, or at least posted on Excite.com on May 1 2003, both "American Airlines and United Airlines should be held liable for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks because they did not stop hijackers from entering the cockpits of the four hijacked planes, a lawyer for victims' families said today." Don't laugh (about Excite! Don't be morbid), sometimes you have to take a break from the dog-slow heavy-traffic news sites when you're just scanning for a few quick headlines at lunch. I did follow this up later on "real" news websites. OK, I didn't. Excite is just as good as anybody for popping up the lead stories off the wire, if you just want a quick news fix. They aren't the Enquirer; they get their stuff off the wire, it's relatively current, and I think it faster than Yahoo. Though I do go to Yahoo for other things. And if I want to search big time, I go to Google. "No question! bum bum bada dum baah bada dum dum bada dum!"

If you want an argument, go watch Fox "News". If you want in-depth analysis, start with a place like cnn.com and move on from there.

Further down in the article, it says "But the airlines argue they should not be held liable because the unprecedented attacks were unforeseeable and they had followed safety measures required by the federal government."

"'No remotely similar event has ever happened in the history of aviation,' said Roger Podesta, an American Airline lawyer."

Really? Never? I guess they don't count Samuel Byck, who hijacked an airliner during the Nixon administration and tried to crash it into the White House. That seems remotely similar to me, but then I'm not a lawyer.

I wouldn't count, of course, all the people who have tried to crash private planes into public places. Not even those who succeeded, like the dude who bumped his Cessna into the White House itself during the Clinton Years.

The public was quickly assured that Socks was unharmed, thus assuring the continued magical economic growth that none but few truly understood. A growth that came, almost catlike from the darkness into the dawn of the 1990's, when men were men and cats were mystical economic oracles.

But I digress. No, the nutters in the private planes hadn't actually hijacked them, and least I haven't heard that any of them had done so. Crackpots. Now, if these private pilots had been allowed to have been armed at the time, they could conceiveably have come to their senses, and having done so, overpowered and shot themselves, rendering themselves harmless.

Then again, perhaps that idea, too, needs some work.

So do the stories the government is telling us about preparedness. They "had no way of expecting" an attack that has already been attempted exactly as executed, but also in Hollywood movies well before the fact.

I have said before that this administration ignores history. Now, I say it again and with added vigor. They either ignore it, refuse to believe even the portions of it that they have lived through, or they are idiot savants; able only in the limited field to which they appointed.

How unfortunate that so many of them, with Gen. Colin Powell (Ret.) standing apart as a notable exception, seem to have most unfortunately been assigned the wrong post for their limited abilities.

General Powell has been the sole saving grace of this adminstration. To know that (if he knows that) would be akin to the burden of Atlas.

God bless you, General Powell; if the Republican Party had any sense, they'd put you up against W in 2004. If you knew what was right for your country, you'd do it.