The New York Times talks about warnings we are getting right now about something "as big as or bigger than the Sept. 11 attacks."

Again, as before, the warnings are "so general that they have left President Bush and his counterterrorism
team in the dark about the time, place or method."

The good news is that is seems like a fire has been lit under the security apparatus of this country, and that we may have learned something from experience:

...For the first time, the C.I.A. and F.B.I. now compare notes on all terrorist threat information that comes in each day, filtering the intelligence through what they call an analytical "matrix" to determine which threats are the most credible and deserve the most attention. Their daily threat report is distributed to senior policy makers, including the White House director of homeland security, Tom Ridge. It provides a structure for debates among senior officials about whether to issue public threat warnings.



President Bush also now receives daily briefings from both the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, are frequently present during those White House sessions. That way, each agency is able to hear the other's latest advice to the president. Before Sept. 11, he received a daily briefing only from the C.I.A.



This sounds good, although there may be a danger of overloading the President with extraneous information. Ideally, this stuff should be distilled down a lot before he gets it. Having both the agency heads at each others' briefings is also a real good idea.

The bad news is that the terrorists will probably hit us somewhere we are not looking for it, like they did on Sept. 11. They aren't going to try to hijack airplanes. It's going to be something out of left field, like poisoning food or some dirty nuke. The first one would be hideously easy. I worked in a canned vegetable factory, and if there is a toxin immune to cooking, it would have been simple to dump it into hundreds of cans.