THE HUMAN TRAGEDY: William Saletan defends the Bush administration against the hindsight-based charges of negligence regarding the threat of September 11 in a fascinating way, by comparing the reports of Al Qaeda warnings to parallel warnings of Tamil attacks.
His analogy is wrong, though, in one fundamental way: it ignores the simultaneous notifications & warnings that Al-Qaeda terrorists were in fact in the U.S., training at flight schools. Someone should have put that information together with the predictions cited by Saletan and sounded an alarm.
If we had, or do have, intelligence that Tamil terrorists are in the U.S., training to steer submarines (however one would obtain such training) or other activities consistent with their past attacks, then someone should have the foresight to put that intelligence together with the predictions cited by Saletan and sound the alarm. The problem isn't that the government didn't follow every possible mode of attack. the problem was that the government ignored distinguishing intelligence which would have told them which possibilities to focus on and which to ignore.
Has this problem been fixed? I doubt it.