One of Ours

...Given the advantage of hindsight, it’s easy to go back and look at all the information gathered throughout the government before 9/11 and conclude that somebody should have been able to put all the pieces together and prevent the attack. On September 10, 2001, though, no one had all those pieces. George Tenet, the man who theoretically should have all those pieces (he is, theoretically—but only theoretically—in charge of the entire U.S. intelligence community) and a common denominator in both the Clinton and Bush Administration failures to fix the system, looks incompetent. But it’s grossly unfair given the realities of the day.

Bureaucracies are incredibly resistant to change. It usually takes catastrophic failures to force major reforms. But even two and a half years after 9/11, the transformation is just barely underway...