What he said

I'm heading off to holiday festivities in a few minutes, so I don't have time to dig deeper into something I think I blogged about a couple of years ago. Greg Saunders writes at This Modern World about how the main intelligence problems blamed by the Congressional Inquiry and the 9/11 Commission for the failure to detect the 9/11 plot had to do with connecting existing dots--not that there weren't enough dots to connect. Legally intercepted communications remained untranslated, FBI memos went unread or ignored, known al Qaeda types were shacking up with government informants, and so on. Adding more dots, say by listening in on thousands or millions of additional calls, wouldn't have simplified the task.

I know I wrote something about that before--any reader who has more time than I do today and finds it gets a gold star! Because I do get a kick out of being right once in a while.