TAPPED is too easy on Ashcroft — or at least on the FBI, an organization that is usually — for better and worse — only under nominal control from the Department of Justice. But this language is unfairly nice to both:

It’s easy to play Monday morning quarterback on this sort of thing. Certainly it would have been hard, before 9/11, to take seriously the idea of terrorists flying a plane into the World Trade Center.

This is the part that makes me mad, and I heard quite a few FBI and antiterrorist folks say this. But it shouldn’t have been hard at all to imagine such a thing. First, I’ve flown into New York many times, and never looked down without noticing how close those buildings were and how easily a plane could crash into them. (And who hasn’t played Flight Simulator and done that?)

Second, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two Columbine killers, had planned to hijack a jetliner and crash it into Manhattan — I don’t know if they mentioned the WTC or not, but that hardly matters. Surely the FBI’s heard of them? Mightn’t that have made the idea just a trifle more imaginable?

Third, the FBI knew there were suspicious people in flight school, and was told by Moussaoui’s flight instructor, as part of his extensive lobbying efforts (!) to get the FBI interested in the case, that a loaded airliner was a fearsome weapon. And they had similar, if not quite as explicit, warnings from people at the Phoenix flight school.

Fourth, crashing a plane into a building (the Capitol) is in a friggin’ Tom Clancy novel for chrissakes!

Now, the dangers of Monday-morning quarterbacking are real. It might be that the FBI couldn’t have stopped these guys no matter what. But if they really couldn’t imagine anyone doing anything like crashing a plane into the World Trade Center, then we should fire them and hire someone a little more, um, imaginative.

And for not doing that, Ashcroft is definitely to blame.

UPDATE: Reader Kirk Parker adds: “Don’t forget this other should-have-made-it-conceivable: the terrorist ring in the Phillipines that were planning to hijack a bunch of airliners and crash them. When was that exposed? 1995 or 1996, I think?” Oh, yeah. I had forgotten that one. It’s hard to keep track of all the reasons they should have imagined this.