Dear god. It's been 9 years. About ~3,000 random people died. Do you have any idea how many random people have died in the last 9 years? Could we maybe solve car accidents rather than <i>potential terrorist attacks</i>?<p>I'm sorry for being callous, but <i>damn</i>, let's agree to prioritize...
> There were a lot of us in the run-up to Sept. 11 who had seen warning signs that something devastating might be in the planning stages.<p>With 20/20 hindsight, yes. Intelligence services are constantly going through <i>massive</i> amounts of information trying to pick out credible threats. When they eventually miss one, sure, it looks obvious in retrospect. But I bet there's dozens of "kill the evil Westerners" speeches happening in third world countries around the world right now. And then when there's a military raid or drone attack on someone who gives such a speech, people get outraged. It's a no gratitude, no-win business for the intelligence services, who actually seem to be doing a pretty outstanding job that's really difficult and important.
In this case, the rot had spread from the top. There aren't really any formal organizational remedies for that, beyond changing the regime at the top. Check out the first two pages of the preface to <i>The One-Percent Doctrine</i> (<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=gV3m6sYhnrsC&printsec=frontcover&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false" rel="nofollow">http://books.google.com/books?id=gV3m6sYhnrsC&printsec=f...</a>)<p><pre><code> ...at an eyeball-to-eyeball intelligence briefing during this urgent Summer,
George W. Bush seems to have made the wrong choice.
He looked hard at the panicked CIA officer.
"All right," he said. "You've covered your ass, now."</code></pre>