  Category: Politics The oddest thing I've come across in the 9/11 Commission Report so far is this item on page 3: "The Hazmi brothers (two of the hijackers, checking in at Dulles), were also selected for extra scrutiny by the airline's customer service representative at the check-in counter. He did so because one of the brothers did not have a photo identification nor could he understand english, and because the agent found both of the passengers to be suspicious. The only consequence of their selection was that their checked bags were held off the plane until it was confirmed that they had boarded the aircraft. " The report, which just sort of&nbsp;moves on from here, doesn't seem to find this as odd as I do. I mean, even before 9/11 you had to have ID to get on a plane, didn't you? One of the funny and surprising&nbsp;things about the report's account of the hijackings is how&nbsp;sloppily it&nbsp;seems to have been&nbsp;planned. Seriously,&nbsp;what kind of self-respecting terrorist shows up at the airport without an ID or basic English skills?
Later on, these same brothers set off the metal detectors at Dulles... twice . Some of the terrorists at other airports were frisked also and appeared uncomfortable,&nbsp;sort of as if&nbsp;they'd never been to airports before. Papers everywhere have headlined Thomas Kean's statement that the attacks were not stopped because of a " urlLink failure of imagination " by government officials, but the failure of imagination mainly occurred at lower levels - for instance the customer service rep. at Dulles must just not have imagined that even a suspicious looking Arab who&nbsp;had no&nbsp;ID was going to hijack an airplane. Government officials, on the other hand, had imagined everything that happened. In fact, this is one of the watershed findings of the Commission (that Richard Clarke, Sandy Berger and others had imagined almost exactly what&nbsp;occurred years ago), which is what makes Kean's statement&nbsp;kind of puzzling.
urlLink Fred&nbsp;Kaplan puts it best : "The failure was not one of imagination but rather of incentives. It turns out that many individuals, panels, and agencies had predicted an attack uncannily similar to what happened on Sept. 11, 2001. The problem was that nobody in a position of power felt compelled to do anything about it.
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