Another Brush With Disaster
So now we see how close we came to another 9/11 scale attack in 2003:
"U.S. officials received intelligence that al-Qaida operatives had been 45 days away from releasing a deadly gas into the city's subways when the plan was called off by Osama bin Laden's deputy in 2003 ... Ayman al-Zawahri had canceled the plan in January 2003, despite the likelihood that the strike would have killed as many people as the Sept. 11 attacks."

Aint it just a shame Bush didn't capture the Al-Qaida leadership when he had the chance? But of course, his mind was already on other things:
"Despite the importance of finding al-Qaeda's leaders, by early 2002 the United States was already shifting its attention and resources away from Afghanistan. (That shift began early: according to Bob Woodward, in late November of 2001 President Bush had asked the Pentagon to revamp its Iraq war plan, an 800-page document known as Op Plan 1003.) For more than a year and a half the search for bin Laden was given relatively low priority ... Intelligence and military assets that might have been directed at bin Laden were directed largely at Iraq."