If you read the article, they didn't even know the warning was from a high-ranking Afghan. It was delivered by an aide without the source being revealed. And again, a warning that "an attack is going to take place" isn't much help. I wrote in a previous post that even had a specific warning been given--aircraft will be hijacked by Arabs and crashed into the World Trade Center--the measures needed to stop the attack, primarily profiling Arab airline passengers, would have been politically difficult, although it would have been exactly the right thing to do. Even so, something else may have fallen through. Remember, the knives and boxcutters used were legal to carry on board at the time, so thorough and careful searches may not have helped. A sweep of all immigrants and visaholders of Arab descent would also have not gone over well with civil libertarians. Were we going to run investigations on every single Muslim in a pilot school? Heck, we're getting crap about bothering Middle Eastern visitors with investigations now, even after the fact.

It just may be that there may not have been a plausible way to stop this from being done just once. We know the trick now, and it probably won't happen the same way again, but what new gimmick might they catch us with?

This was not our intelligence system's finest hour, and there is a lot of blame to go around. But at least the screwup is a lot more plausible than the idea of deliberate murder by the Bush administration that some people find so compelling.

I do note that the standard battle cry of the Left to "abolish the CIA" has died down a bit over the past year.