I am too touched to respond adequately to John’s kind words – I’m a lot less an “American hero” than I am a guy who reads Mark Steyn and John Podhoretz to try to figure out what to think.

Other than that, I’m getting increasingly agitated about why we still don’t know whether John’s partial vindication is going to end up being full vindication. Which is to say: What does the Pentagon have to say about all this? I repeat: it has been four years and there have been a zillion investigations during which the Defense Department (and other organs of government that may be relevant here) have been directed, re-directed, and re-re-directed to probe every scrap of paper, every databyte and every source in their possession in order that the country could understand what the state of our intelligence was prior to 9/11 and why we were unable to thwart the attacks. Why does it take more than 10 seconds at this point, August 2005, for DoD to say: “yes, we have documentation showing an identification of Atta and/or other hijackers prior to 9/11,” or “no, we don’t.”

I don’t know whether to be more baffled or outraged by the seeming inability or unwillingness to answer that very simple question.