In a bunch of mostly uninteresting detail, he basically says that although hindsight can pick out missed facts, at the time they are lost in a sea of data with no reason to favor them over other, useless facts. This has been know to intelligence agencies for many decades, there is nothing new here that makes it worth the time to read.
This has been know to intelligence agencies for many decades, there is nothing new here that makes it worth the time to read.
Well that's the thing, and what makes it worth the time to read it: while intelligence agencies have known about this for decades, regular people don't know it. Worse, the Congress doesn't seem to know it.
Don't forget that this article was written in March 2003, when the whole country - or at least the government - was still on a "how did we miss 9/11?" kick.
Sure it's useful -- in a world of ever-increasing specialization it helps to have a few people who take breadth-first approaches to learning and to effectively spread the knowledge of subfields to masses. But I've always had the feeling that both (1) he often musses the message for the sake of the yarn and (2) he might be trying to play it off as if he were more than a reporter.
