WATCH: Biden Warned About Terrorism ‘In The Belly Of A Plane’ The Day BEFORE 9/11 Attacks

Then-Senator Joe Biden warned about a terrorist attack arriving “in the belly of a plane” in a speech given the day before the attacks of 9/11.

Monday marked 22 years since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and another Washington, DC-bound plane that was heroically brought down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania when passengers and crew fought back against the hijackers.

President Biden commemorated the occasion with a visit and a speech to servicemembers at Joint Base Elmendorf in Anchorage, Alaska.

But in a 2001 speech less than 24 hours before the attacks, then-Senator Biden delivered several lines that would soon take on an eerie prescience. In a section denouncing then-President George W. Bush’s plan to pull out of an ABM treaty, he cited “certifiable maniac” Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons stockpile — which would come to loom large in post-9/11 America:

I know I face virtual annihilation if I take the following action, but I’m going ahead and I’m going to do it anyway. Saddam Hussein, the certifiable maniac. When George the first said to him, “If you do, we will take you out.” What did he do with 500,000 forces marching on Baghdad? He had those Scud missiles everybody talks about as a justification for building a system. He had chemical weapons. He had biological weapons. Why did he not use them? If deterrence does not work? I just find the basic premise upon which this whole argument rests, and the sense of urgency a little wanting.

And moments later, Biden derided investing in a failure-prone missile defense system to the detriment of defending against a more “likely threat”:

We’ll have diverted all that money to address the least likely threat. While the real threat comes to this country in the hole of a ship, the belly of a plane, or smuggled into a city in the middle of the night in a vial, in a backpack. And I ask you, you want to do us damage? Are you more likely to send a missile you’re not sure can reach us with a biological or chemical weapon because you don’t have the throw weight to put a nuclear weapon on it. And no one’s anticipating that in the near term, with a return address saying it came from us. Here’s where we are. Or are you more likely to put somebody with a backpack crossing the border from Vancouver down to Seattle or coming up the New York Harbor with a rusty old ship with an atom bomb sitting in the hull? Which are you more likely to do? And what defense do we have against those other things?

In his speech Monday, Biden drew fire from critics when he apparently misspoke and said “Ground Zero in New York, I remember standing there the next day and looking at the building. I felt like I was looking through the gates of Hell, it looked so devastating.”

The president was in Washington, DC on September 12, where he and the rest of the Senate unanimously passed a joint resolution condemning the attacks.

When reached for comment by Mediaite, a White House official said “The President first visited the World Trade Center nine days after the September 11 terrorist attacks as part of a bipartisan delegation from the Senate.”

His first visit to Ground Zero came on September 20 when a group of 38 senators toured the site. The president was photographed during the visit:

The Associated Press caption noted, “In this Sept. 20, 2001, file photo Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., left, and Sen. Joe Biden, center, stand by as Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., in orange parka, joins in prayer with rescue workers at the site of the World Trade Center in New York. They were part of a delegation of Senators that traveled by train to New York to view the rubble that once was the World Trade Center.”

Watch above via C-SPAN.