During the summer of 2003 , after the now-declassified report about the September 11 attack , many government officials , such as Senator Bob Graham began to make criticisms that the September 11 attack might have easily been predicted and even prevented . Following these criticisms , President Bush declassified the August 6 , 2001 President 's Daily Brief , '' Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US '' , which indicated that hijackings might be one possible mode of attack . After the attacks , representatives of the Bush administration claimed in early 2004 that " nobody could have imagined that ... hijackers would intentionally crash ... hijackers usually want to live . " To the contrary , the apparently intentional crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 by its co-pilot on December 31 , 1999 , and a similar intentional crash of PSA Flight 1771 by a disgruntled former airline employee on December 7 , 1987 , and especially the case of AFR 8969 , offered precedents that indicated otherwise . Prior to the 9/11 attacks , a number of foreign nationals were taking pilot training in the U.S. and raised suspicion by being uninterested in learning how to land safely . The 9/11 Commission found that this failure to " connect the dots " and imagine what was being planned was an important contributing factor to the September 11 attacks , stating " the most important failure concerning the 9/11 attacks was one of imagination . " Failure of imagination has also been invoked in regards to the Apollo 1 fire by astronaut Frank Borman in 1967 when he spoke at the Apollo 1 investigation hearings ( dramatized in the HBO mini-series '' From the Earth to the Moon '' in 1998 ) . It has also been mentioned in reference to design flaws in the RMS '' Titanic '' . Donald Rumsfeld , in the documentary The Unknown Known suggests that the failure of the United States to anticipate the attack on Pearl Harbor was a failure of imagination
EgyptAir Flight 990
EgyptAir Flight 990
Failure of imagination