This is scary, as well as infuriating. Perhaps you'd already heard this, but it was news to me - actor James Woods thinks (with good reason, I believe) that he had an encounter with some of the terrorists a month before the attack - he was on one of the Boston-LA flights (returning from visiting his mother), alone in first class, except for four "Middle-Eastern" looking men. The men - here's the thing - never ate or drank anything on the trip (cross-country, remember), didn't sleep or read. They just sat, looked straight ahead, and ocassionally spoke quietly to one another. Woods thought this was very strange, said something to the flight attendant, who shrugged it off. When he got to LA, he said something to airport authorities, who also shrugged it off. Let that sink in for a minute. I haven't heard more about this story - if indeed the names of those passengers were the names of the terrorists - I would tend to think that they must be, or else we would have heard confident reassurances from airline and airport authorities. It makes sense for them to try to keep this quiet, for fear of a backlash against such idiocy. For a link to a news article about this, click here . For the John Derbyshire column in which I read about this, click here.