After the fact, everybody sees terrorists everywhere, and almost all such reports are the products of hyperelevated imaginations.

The real trick is to see trouble coming when everyone else is looking the other way, or not looking at all.

An even bigger trick, so it would seem, is to get anybody to pay attention and take the warning seriously, or to even understand what has already come down, as we have seen.

A critical part of analysis is detection of significant items in mountains of trivia and insignifica. It's not quite the same as separating wheat from chaff, for it this process, one knows that some wheat is present, what it looks like, and what obscures it - chaff.

In the case at hand, we received numerous threats from bin Laden and his associates about attacks on American civilians and airliners, we had the evidence from Ramzi Yousef's Manila PC about plans to skyjack and blow up 12 airliners and crash one into CIA headquarters, and we had a couple dozen middle easterners here in the U.S. attending flight school under questionable circumstances.

In the case of Moussaoui, his alert, dedicated flight instructor knew something was amiss, but his warnings failed to generate a timely response from the authorities, i.e. the FBI.

The handwriting was on the wall, but without a court order, the FBI seemed incapable of acting on our hero's timely warning.

This monumental intelligence failure is not the only recent stain on the investigative bureau.

The FBI needs to reinvent itself.

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