Pre-911 Threat Assessments

This Slate article is over two years old, but it is very timely in light of all the Monday morning quarterbacking going on about connected dots and missed leads.  

Bum Rap 
 

The NIC [ National Intelligence Council  ] report advised policymakers, "The world leaders in terrorist suicide attacks are not the Islamic fundamentalists, but the Tamils of Sri Lanka." The report warned that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE, was "the only terrorist group to have assassinated three heads of government" and that it posed a threat to the United States.

And

In retrospect, it seems obvious to many people that the FBI, the CIA, and the White House should have "connected the dots" and anticipated al-Qaida's use of hijacked planes to hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But everything seems more obvious in retrospect, because you know which things are true and which aren't. What makes hindsight so easy is that you know not just what you needed to worry about, but what you didn't need to worry about. Identifying threats and mobilizing to prevent them isn't as easy as finding a single pattern. Intelligence is full of patterns involving numerous groups, targets, and methods. If you're the president of the United States or one of his intelligence advisers, you have to decide which threats are most worth investigating, mobilizing for, or disrupting people's everyday lives for.

It's easy, after the fact, for reporters and political opponents to go back and dig up reports that hinted at what eventually happened. They don't have to sort through the false leads and alternative scenarios. They know how the story ends.