"9/11 could have been prevented, Strick.
Does that not piss you off wholesale?"

I was refering to what Bob Kerrey said Bob Kerrey should have done, not what the US understood. Turns out Kerrey was involved in part of Clinton's policy efforts on this. He said that we never realized that Al Qaeda was an army and should be attacked like an army, not a criminal group. If he had it to do over again, he would treat them completely differently. If he had it to do over again...

You know, Jim, it doesn't piss me off, because I understand the dynamic. Did you know that the Union could have ended the Civil War in 6-8 months? All they had to do was promote Grant instead of McClelland to lead the Army of the Potomac and buy 200-500 Gatlin guns after the Union tested them in 1862. It's perfectly true, honest. We'd have saved what, 300,000-400,000 lives? Shouldn't I be pissed off given that would have prevented the total destruction of the South (their army would have been defeated in the field not by burning their homeland) and Lincoln would have lead the instead of Reconstruction instead of Congress? Then again, do you have any idea what it would have taken for someone with sufficient authority to recognize that and overcome all the obstacles to keep these two things from happening?

The question is not whether 9/11 could have been prevented. Hell, I could have described senarios that would have prevented it without one word from this Commission. The question is whether the senarios are realistic given the obstacles that existed in the real world, not the healthy imagination of the people looking back on the situtation.

By and large the world doesn't work the way it's supposed to. That mutiple, somewhat competing organizations siloed information and didn't connect the dots the way they should have shouldn't be a surprise. That they couldn't respond effectively to something they had never encountered before shouldn't be a surprise. It's the real world, after all.