ABSTRACT
The surprise attack of 9/11 is seen by many as a failure of the multitude of American intelligence agencies – collectively and euphemistically called the Intelligence Community (IC) – to funnel their separate intelligence collection streams into a common pool. These observers argue that had the various intelligence collection agencies shared their information more widely and deeply with sister intelligence agencies, analysts might have been better able to put together or “fuse” raw intelligence reports into a finished strategic intelligence assessment which could have warned more concretely President Bush and his key national security lieutenants of al-Qaeda’s plans and intentions. In post-9/11 parlance, this failure to fuse intelligence is commonly referred to as the failure to “connect the dots.”
