The Bush White House is in full-throttle spin mode, attempting to repair the President’s badly tarnished legacy. This afternoon, Fox News lent a hand in the effort to revise history. In an interview with White House press spokesman Tony Fratto, Fox anchor Jon Scott claimed that, prior to 9/11, “nobody was thinking” that terrorists could fly planes into buildings as an act of terrorism. Fratto agreed:

Watch it:

In fact, intelligence analysts had been warning for some time that terrorists could hijack planes. On December 4, 1998, for example, the Clinton administration received a President’s Daily Brief entitled “Bin Ladin Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks.” The Clinton administration responded by convening its top counterterrorism experts and heightening security at airports around the nation.

On August 6, 2001, the Bush administration received a President’s Daily Brief entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike U.S.” The memo warned:

Moreover, the Federal Aviation Administration “had indeed considered the possibility that terrorists would hijack a plane and use it as a weapon,” and in 2001 it distributed a CD-ROM presentation to airlines and airports that cited the possibility of a suicide hijacking.

In response to that threat warning, the Bush administration did nothing. The 9/11 Commission reports, “We have found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 among the President and his top advisers of the possibility of a threat of an al Qaeda attack in the United States.”