Future 9/11 Commissioner Fantasized About Crashing Plane Into Building

Here's a rather bizarre coincidence. For anyone unaware of this fact, a 1994 bestselling novel by Tom Clancy--Debt of Honor--ended with a Japanese pilot deliberately crashing his Boeing 747 into the U.S. Capitol building during a joint session of Congress with the President attending, thus decapitating the political leadership.

This is odd in itself, in light of what happened seven years later on 9/11. But check out the following quote from the New York Times' review of Debt of Honor:

[T]he President and the entire Congress must be eliminated in an inadvertently comic deus ex machina piloted by a sullen Japanese airman who miraculously does not grunt "Banzai!" as he plows his Boeing 747 into the Capitol. Former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman has recently had the arguable taste to remark, apropos this episode in "Debt of Honor," that this particular fantasy has long been his own. I don't like Congress either, but Abraham Lincoln, Lehman's fellow Republican and mine, did go to some pains to keep the Capitol's construction going during the Civil War as a symbol of the Union's continuity.

As is well known, John Lehman went on to become one of the members of the 9/11 Commission.

Now isn't that odd? A man who would later be one of the official investigators of 9/11 revealed that he fantasized about using a commercial jet as a weapon, and crashing it into a landmark building in the U.S.