Sorry Prof

You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.
Rice had been NSA for, what, all of 7-1/2 months before the attacks. That doesn’t excuse her from failure of imagination per se — one assumes she was competent prior to the election or Bush wouldn’t have hired her — but you’re tarring her with a wide brush. Perhaps she meant that the attacks were unimaginable from the standpoint of being made by a government. That’s probably true; if Saddam or the ayatollahs had ordered the 9/11 attacks, I’m sure they were fully aware that there would likely be a deadly response. Ain’t nobody that stupid.
On the other hand, ordering the attack by proxy, or letting a proxy attack happen, where you have plausible deniability as a nation, that’s another story. I don’t think anyone (not even Tom Clancy) ever mooted the idea that an international terrorist organization would have the resources — or the help of rogue regimes such as Iraq or Iran — to mount the kind of operation that al-Qaeda did.
Additionally, everybody likes to point at Clancy because he had a disaffected Japanese pilot drive a 747 into the Capitol, and say, “Gee, Clancy had it right! We should have paid attention!” But the problem with that is that the situations were completely and totally different. Clancy’s protagonist acted pretty much on the spur of the moment; he was not a terrorist, he was a nationalist who went a bit off his rocker when his son and brother (if I remember correctly) were killed in a seriously stupid war started by his country against the US; there was no organization behind him; and he did not hijack a plane full of people (the plane was deadheading on a fictitious flight plan and only his copilot was aboard). The only real parallel was that he killed his copilot with a knife and that he drove the plane into a building, destroying both. The plot lines that got from original intent to completed attack otherwise had zero convergence.
That being said, I’ll agree that there was definite fault in our intelligence agencies for not reading Clancy and thinking outside the box, eg, “what if a terrorist organization decided to hijack planes and drive them into buildings based on the Clancy scenario?” But I’m not going to blame Rice for that; a systemic lack of vision is what led to the intelligence failure, and it’s clear that that lack of vision was long-standing and did not begin with the Bush Administration.
You could probably make the point that the best time to attack this country is within the first few months of a new administration, when everybody is still learning the ropes and trying to make good on political promises. Attention is elsewhere. This is not to say that the attacks would have failed if they had been made in September 2002, or in September 2003 (although you could make the case that September 2000 or September 2004 would have been better if you were trying to bring down a particular administration). However, as has been observed by better people than me, when Flight 93 went down, the idea of hijacking planes and driving them into buildings pretty much went out the window. Only a want of vigilance will ever allow that to happen again.
But my point (from which I have wandered) is really this: Get over Condi’s statement, Professor. If it’s the worst thing she says in the next decade, we’re not doing too badly.