Yesterday's revelation of a terrorist plot to release poison gas in a NYC subway brings to mind the 1995 sarin nerve gas attack in Tokyo -- an attack that might have killed tens of thousands if the gas had been more effectively disbursed. In fact, Clinton officials would cite the attack in explaining why Saddam Hussein must be disarmed.

On November 15, 1997, for example, President Clinton told an audience that Americans should not view the current crisis with Iraq [at the time the administration was preparing the nation for possible military action] as a “replay” of the Gulf War in 1991. Instead, he told people to

think about it in terms of the innocent Japanese people that died in the subway when the sarin gas was released [by the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo in 1995]; and how important it is for every responsible government in the world to do everything that can possibly be done not to let big stores of chemical or biological weapons fall into the wrong hands, not to let irresponsible people develop the capacity to put them in warheads on missiles or put them in briefcases that could be exploded in small rooms. And I say this not to frighten you.

The same month Time magazine ran a piece, "America the Vulnerable," that stated:

officials in Washington are deeply worried about what some of them call "strategic crime." By that they mean the merging of the output from a government’s arsenals, like Saddam’s biological weapons, with a group of semi-independent terrorists, like radical Islamist groups, who might slip such bioweapons into the U.S. and use them.

We still don't know what intelligence these officials based their "deep worry" on or whether that intelligence made its way into any of the president’s daily intelligence briefs.