SENATORIAL HINDSIGHT
From: ABC News

Asked Monday if he believed the [9/11] attacks could have been prevented, [Sen Bob] Graham (D-Florida) gave "a conditional yes.It would have required several things to have happened, which in fact did not occur."

That included having a single person with the job of reviewing all the information collected by different organizations, "a creative mind that would have seen the pieces of this puzzle start to form a plot that would have triggered a law-enforcement response."



I also heard these comments by Sen. Graham, a Democratic presidential candidate, on CNN last night. There, he mentioned the part about eliminating (or diminishing) turf wars between agencies. He said that plus the puzzle piecing together plus a little bit of luck might've prevented 9/11.

The part that really left my stupefied was "a creative mind." Frankly, I thought this was a b.s. observation. To me Graham's "a creative mind" remark is nothing more than Senator-ese (or more likely Candidate-ese) for 20/20 hindsight! In retrospect, everything seems so obvious, clear as the nose on our face. Now, we know which intelligence was important and which was not. That's the benefit of hindsight. If Sen. Graham is such a visionary that he can see as well into the future as he so obviously can into the past, perhaps he should become CIA director.

It seems to me the problem is not lack of the ephemeral "creative mind," but rather the sheer avalanche of intelligence the CIA and company surely receive every day. How does a finite staff analyze a nearly infinite amount of information? More "creative minds" won't help if they don't know where to begin.


It's perfectly reasonable to analyze what mistakes were made and how they can be avoided in the future. The critique about addressing turf wars, although a difficult challenge, is emminently fair. It's entirely another thing to engage in unreasonable hindsight finger-pointing.