From: "John Beamish" 

We may be looking at different "tools".  I tend to see them as
legislative and judicial while your comment brings in a broader panorama
including inter-agency and intra-agency processes.  (btw, as for the FBI
and CIA not talking, I'm not certain that is necessarily a bad thing.  The
FBI is charged with upholding the law; the CIA is not restrained by that
stricture.)

My perception is that there were already sufficient tools in place and that
the issue wasn't the tools but, rather, a failure to give the threat a
level of importance commensurate with the information already flowing in. 
My perception, again, is that a variety of recently legislatively enacted
tools are unlikely to withstand court challenges and the direct fallout
from that will be cases dismissed because of the way the
"evidence" was gathered.  If already existing tools had been used
then those tools would (likely, not certainly) have already been subjected
to judicial scrutiny and cases brought forward with information that was
gathered using the existing tools would have been more likely to withstand
judicial scrutiny.

So ... the threat was certainly already well identified with the bombings
of two US embassies, the Cole and the first attack on the Towers.  Because
of that, Clinton was already aware of the on-going nature of the threat and
passed that information along to the incoming administration and it was
their set of priorities (not the tool set) that governed their subsequent
actions.  I think it has been well (possibly conclusively) documented that
the current administration in spite of all the information flows made a
conscious decision to focus elsewhere.

And that brings us to the second item:  if the new processes (your broader
term) or new legislation (mine) were in place, can there be any assurance
that the attack on the towers would have been prevented.  Clearly, there
can not be such assurance.

In short ... it's not that the existing American "tools"
prevented timely handling of information flows concerning the impending
attack but, rather, it was an unintended consequence of other policies and
initiatives.  Well, policies are the perogative of governments and they
will change from administration to administration.  But blaming the tools
instead of the policies for events is not placing the onus for
accountability where it correctly belong.

"Mark"  wrote in message
news:4169ddd7{at}w3.nls.net...
> How so John? Prior to 9/11 the FBI couldn't talk with the CIA. Then even
> after the first attack on the WTC in '93, where their lack of ability to
> communicate was particularly harmful, rather than fix it, that firewall
was
> strengthened even further by Jamie Gorelick in '96 or so. Then Torricelli
> pushed through a demand that the CIA only hire pristine informants, thus
> destroying their ability to hire people that might actually know something
> or be capable of infiltrating to find out anything.
>
> But I am interested in why you think it revisionist.
>

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