""I was refering to what Bob Kerrey said Bob Kerrey should have done, not what the US understood"

My bad. Bob Kerrey was speaking about what he himself in his role as a policy maker on intelligence during the Clinton administration thought was wrong. He did seem to imply that he thought it was a flaw in the entire Adminstration's view of the issue.

In the time between our posts I forgot how I phrased my first point and took your post to imply what was "understood" by the US which might have included almost anything whether it was universally understood or understood by one field agent but never brought to anyone else's attention. That doesn't change what I meant, but I can see how my confusion made it hard to follow.

As I said, I'm sure they stopped a lot of plots that they could recognized because they dealt with them before. I'm equally sure they would have been surprised by something new, as history has shown happens over and over. They didn't even remotely stop the Cole attack, for instance.

Just heard the present director of the FBI giving his testimony and it illustrates my point in a different way. He said that prior to 9/11 he had been thinking of all of this in a legal sense, the way he did when he was a prosecutor. Get enough evidence against the terrorists, get an indictment and bring them to trial. After 9/11 he thinks in terms of bringing the information to the attention of policy makers so that steps can be taken. I assumed he meant increasing the security alert for one thing, but I also assumed he meant assasinating the terrorist(s) involved if appropriate. (At least the assasination of Ben Laden's been explored by the Commission ad nauseum, so I assume that's in.) That change in attitude, the diffence in thinking before and after a major event, is what I've been talking about.

While I understand the change in attitude, I'm not sure I like it, particularly that assasination part. Who's to say who is or isn't a terrorist? Can you assasinate them even if they're in the US?