Excerpt from WP article:
Link to the WP article here
Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge said yesterday that criticism of the administration's intelligence actions before Sept. 11 is unfair.
"What you have are some folks trying to do -- and unfortunately in a fairly accusatory way -- take the benefit of 20-20 hindsight with pre-9/11 information and trying to impart upon it a post-9/11 wisdom," Ridge said in an interview.
Ridge said there were no formal mechanisms in place before Sept. 11 to guarantee that the FBI's activities in Arizona and Minnesota were put into the overall intelligence picture, and that he and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III were talking about ways to coordinate key agencies.
"The FBI's working on it; the CIA's working on it; we're working on it with them," he said. He added that the solution "is not more spies and satellites" but an analytic team devoted to intelligence about domestic terrorism.
Under growing criticism for a failure to act on the Phoenix memo and other potential warning signs, Bush administration officials have said repeatedly that U.S. intelligence analysts never envisioned the possibility that terrorists would use jetliners as suicide missiles and slam them into such buildings as the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
"I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people . . . would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile," Rice said Thursday.