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Intelligence Of The Intelligence System

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It is practically impossible for a nation’s intelligence community to detect and prevent every attack on its soil. However, the American failure to uncover the 9/11 plot should be considered a massive failure considering the scope of the attack which involved careful planning, training many perpetrators, and a high profile target with many victims. Furthermore it can be demonstrated that there were many signals and opportunities to discover the plot that the intelligence machinery missed. “Hindsight is 20/20” and there needs to be an understanding of how easy it is to look back at how the intelligence gathered before the attacks should have signaled a serious threat, and thus provoked the unraveling of the 9/11 plot had the intelligence community picked up on and discriminated the signals from the noise. . However, there is evidence that the US intelligence community’s failure to link the information they had differentiated from the “background noise” as representing a possible terrorist threat points to the entire failure of the intelligence system. Therefore, while a nation’s intelligence system and the communities supporting it cannot be expected to succeed 100% of the time, this incident pointed at a 100% failure of the American intelligence community. Although it is recognized that many factors contributed to this failure, there is evidence that the organizational structure and culture both within the individual intelligence agencies and amid the intelligence
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