Norman Podhoretz and WW 4

NP is one of the founders of the neo-con movement. In a recent article in Commentary, he presents the ne0-con world vision:
{ World War IV:
How It Started, What It Means,
and Why We Have to Win
Norman Podhoretz
Commentary, Sept. 04}
Here, I will pull out some quotes from that article and show the factual and logical mistakes. These will be separate entries because there is so much that is wrong about the article. Page numbers refer to those in the original.

The point I wish to stress is not that Clarke was exaggerating or lying. It is that the attack on 9/11 did indeed come out of the blue in the sense that
no one ever took such a possibility seriously enough to figure out what to do about t. (pp. 18-19)

FALSE: Clarke had been concerned about the danger posed by aircraft since at least the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. There he had tried to create an air defense plan using assets from the Treasury Department, after the Defense Department declined to contribute resources. The Secret Service continued to work on the problem of airborne threats to the Washington region. In 1998, Clarke chaired an exercise designed to highlight the inadequacy of the solution. This paper exercise involved a scenario in which a group of terrorists commandeered a Learjet on the ground in Atlanta, loaded it with explosives, and flew it toward a target in Washington, D.C. Clarke asked officials from the Pentagon, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and Secret Service what they could do about the situation. Officials from the Pentagon said they could scramble aircraft from Langley Air Force Base, but they would need to go to the President for rules of engagement, and there was no mechanism to do so. There was no clear resolution of the problem at the exercise.16
In late 1999, a great deal of discussion took place in the media about the crash off the coast of Massachusetts of EgyptAir Flight 990, a Boeing 767. The most plausible explanation that emerged was that one of the pilots had gone berserk, seized the controls, and flown the aircraft into the sea. After the 1999–2000 millennium alerts, when the nation had relaxed, Clarke held a meeting of his Counterterrorism Security Group devoted largely to the possibility of a possible airplane hijacking by al Qaeda.17
(911 Final Report, p. 345)