Today's Times has an absolutely tragic story detailing the way the Cole investigation came close to turning up bits and pieces of the 9/11 plot. It is well worth a careful read.
And I draw two different conclusions. First, this is an example, to an extent, of the lesson I articulated earlier this morning. Sometimes everyone can do everything right and things can still go wrong. Now, clearly things went wrong in this story, but before they went wrong systemically, intelligence officers, people who are hard working, and loyal, and brave, looked and looked, and did not see. Because they are human, and what is obvious now was not obvious then, and that doesn't make them incompetent, it makes them less than infallible. Richard Clarke can harrumph that in situation X or Y he is sure that he would have connected the dots, but in truth there is just no way of knowing that.
And second, hey, doesn't this prove the Patriot Act is, you know, useful? Every time the question of blocks on communication between intelligence and criminal investigators comes up, it's interesting to me that they never, ever, seem to put in a phrase that says, "a problem since corrected by the Patriot Act." If I'm wrong, I have no doubt that one of our lawyers will correct me in the comments, but certainly the internal "wall" in the FBI was taken down by this administration's efforts.
Update: My argument here and below has been that you can be perfect, and still be attacked. Pejmanesque makes and links to a savvy point: the Commission has to find someone responsible. Because if there isn't a "magic moment" as I've been calling it, a single instant where a single mistake was made that if reversed could have stopped the attack, then it means you can be perfect and still be attacked in the future -- and no one wants to admit that to the public.
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