I am glad you rethought your position on Condi Rice. She seems like a pretty solid person who knows what she is doing.
As for the intelligence issue surrounding 9-11 i think the problem there was not lack of intelligence but inability to utilize it effectively. The guys were over-saturated with info, and by the time they could get through it all it was effectively too late.
It is somewhat akin to being given a bank code that will open a vault with 700 million bucks, and you have to open the vault within an hour or the offer gets reneged. But the catch is that correct bank code is mixed with thousands of other codes that are obviously shams. And the clock is ticking!
Although the analogy is crude that is what faced the intelligence organizations. Furthermore they were not even communicating effectively with each other. The FBI knew stuff the CIA did not know, the CIA knew stuff the NSA did not know and so forth. In essence they each had piecemeal information that if put together might have prevented 9-11, but it was never brought as one cohesive whole!
Actually there was an interesting case a couple of months ago when a radioactivity detector at the US-Canada border picked up a spike in radioactivity, meaning a vehicle had crossed from Canada to the US with a load that had radioactivity inherent in it. The problem is that by the time that information got processed 2 days had passed! This cargo could have been something benign as medical equipment, or even ceramics that were emitting a higher level of radiation than the 'normal' natural levels. Or it could have been a nuke! The problem is that even though the stuff was detected there was a lapse betweent he detection and when the information could be utilized.
Acquiring pertinent information in my opinion is only 30% of intelligence work .....the other 50% is being able to utilize it effectively! The other 20% in my opinion is luck!
Collecting information (especially for the United States) is relatively easy. The US informaion gathering assets are not only legion but they are mighty effective! The problem is getting that information and being able to use it before it expires. Just think about the many gigabytes of info that stream into the NSA and CIA every single day! Information from around the globe, all of it amorphous and some of it quite threatening. And then there are sleeper cells in the US. There is so much information that needs to be sorted out that it is very hard to not make a mistake and miss some vital clue that could prevent a 9-11 scenario!
By the way in the Cold War most of the information collected by 'spies' was through what was known as 'white sources' meaning the spooks would go to Russia (and Russian spooks would travel to the states) where they would purchase magazines and newspapers and get a feel of the general situation in that nation. This was more ubiquitous than more 'orthodox' spy stuff like taps and moles (although obviously moles would provide the really juicy info ....for example the Walker spy ring that shovelled vital secrets to the USSR). And what was important was being able to use the info retrieved.
Any intelligence org can collect information. The crux is being able to break it and use it before it expires.
Before 9-11 the various intelligence agencies seemed to be competing against each other and in effect getting portions of info instead of the whole picture. Luckily they have solved that problem today (and i believe forever, i hope). However they still have the other problem of information saturation. And this is an area that does not only require great skill but will always require loads of luck as a vital necessity.