BY JAMES TARANTO Friday, May 17, 2002 2:11 p.m. EDT

The Phantom Menace
By all means, let's have an investigation of any intelligence shortcomings that may have helped make the Sept. 11 atrocity possible. But there's something awfully unseemly about the way some Democrats have been strutting about, patting themselves on the back for their 20/20 hindsight.
On Wednesday CBS News reported that President Bush received an intelligence briefing in August that mentioned that al Qaeda terrorists might hijack airplanes. As the New York Times reports, the warning was hardly news:
The information Mr. Bush received in the Aug. 6 briefing had been public for months. The Federal Aviation Administration published a report called Criminal Acts Against Aviation on its Web site in 2001 before the hijackings that said that although Osama bin Laden "is not known to have attacked civil aviation, he has both the motivation and the wherewithal to do so." It added, "Bin Laden's anti-Western and anti-American attitudes make him and his followers a significant threat to civil aviation, particularly to U.S. civil aviation."
Nonetheless, some Democrats suggested that President Bush was somehow complicit in Sept. 11: "I think what we have to do now is to find out what the president, what the White House knew about the events leading up to 9/11, when they knew it and, most importantly, what was done about it at that time," said Rep. Dick Gephardt, the House minority leader.