So the Sept. 11 attacks weren’t unthinkable? Getouttahere!

Breaking news flash, folks: Even if not one memo or briefing or analysis or report or bagel was uncovered that showed that U.S. spooks had considered the possibility of slamming planes in to buildings, that still wouldn’t mean they were unthinkable. If they were unthinkable, they wouldn’t have happened. It would just mean OUR guys didn’t think of it.

Clearly Osama and The Bastards thought of it. They thought a lot about it. Then they planned and executed the plot before any single person or agency on our side put the pieces together.

Not that the attacks could have been prevented. As the editorial board wrote in today’s Daily, the Bush administration should not be blamed for failing to anticipate Sept. 11. Without the benefit of hindsight, none of the critics claiming that the attacks could have been prevented would have even the foggiest notion that we should have acted aggressively on the particular threat that turned out to be real. Their arguments are weak at best, considering that there are plenty of other, worthy reasons to criticize the American intelligence community.

At the top of that list is this whole “unthinkable” nonsense. I don’t find it troubling that we didn’t act on obtuse memos and analysis reports. What I find troubling is that even when we go back and scour those documents, apparently only a memo here and a briefing there even begin to ponder the potential threat of planes flying into buildings.

If our counterterrorism experts hadn’t thought of that, what the hell do they do all day? If thousands of U.S. government agents trained specifically to combat terrorism are given billions and billions of dollars and told to review all possible way terrorists could attack, and they don’t consider the possibility of using airplanes as missiles, our problem isn’t the lack of field intelligence or feuding agencies. Our problem is our agents have no imagination.

Osama’s guys thought of it, and ours didn’t. Forget actually stopping terrorist threats. First we have to realize they exist.

I’m not suggesting that we should be able to anticipate EVERY possible way that terrorists could attack us. But planes into buildings? Come on, folks, Tom Clancy had already written about that. A plot to do just that at the latest G8 summit had already been uncovered. It’s really not that obscure of an idea, even without the corrective lenses of time.

Our agents aren’t dumb, but perhaps they’re just not the right kind of people. There’s a suggestion floating around the Internet that I find very appealing. The basic thrust is this: If our FBI and CIA agents are such by-the-book nancies that they couldn’t even conceive that simple and destructive plan, we should call upon America’s top experts when it comes to concocting doomsday scenarios and ways in which our country could crumble at the hands of a few.

Our science fiction writers.

Me, I’m not a big science fiction fan. I can’t tell one post-apocalyptic story of the struggle between the remaining members of humanity and the horrific reality they created from another. But I do know of the genre, and it seems to me the best science fiction takes something already known or in existence, be it a philosophy or current or future technology, and extrapolates that kernel of reality to a plausible conclusion – a conclusion that seems to usually involve the death of most of the known world. What skill could possibly be more useful in dreaming up how Osama plans to strike next?

There’s precedent. America collected a group of creative minds, science fiction writers among them, during World War II to try to think up ways to stop Japanese suicide pilots. They didn’t come up with much of anything, but it was still a good idea.

It’s just a fact of life that people who make their living selling stories are, as a whole, going to be more creative than cops and spooks. And creativity is a great weapon in the struggle to thwart terrorists. If we allow these supposedly unthinkable terror plots to remain unthought, we’re going to have a lot more U.S. citizens unalive.

Sure, it might be a tad embarrassing for our terrorism experts to break down and admit that they don’t possess the creativity to match wits with our enemies, but the egos of the FBI and CIA have already proven to be too expensive to protect. Our inability to expect the worst cannot continue.

Especially when you realize that there’s no reason to believe they’re getting any better at this. When pipe bombs starting going off in rural mailboxes across the Midwest earlier this month, postal officials said they had no contingency plans. They uttered that ridiculous word again: unthinkable. Not to harp on this point, but what the freaky frack! Postal officials hadn’t considered the possibility that someone could put bombs in mailboxes?

Now that’s unthinkable.

Dave Roepke is a senior in journalism and mass communications from Aurora. He is the opinion editor of the Daily.