An oft‐​repeated scene in the Washington, D.C. kabuki dance recently began with the release of former CIA director George Tenet’s memoir At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA.


I don’t find it particularly interesting to watch a mighty ego defend his honor — mighty egos in the U.S. government are as common as pigeons in the park. (It has to be that way, doesn’t it? Only an inflated ego thinks it can run a government as overlarge as ours.) But I’m pleased by the healthy airing of differences the book has spawned.


This morning in the Washington Post, Richard Perle takes after Tenet about factual inaccuracies in the book. (Puffing pigeons.) The rift starts to reveal some important, but long overlooked, information.


Perle writes, “the CIA failed to make our leaders aware of the rise of Islamist extremism and the immense danger it posed to the United States.” An example I would offer is the presence of Nawaf al‐​Hazmi and Khalid al‐​Mihdhar inside the United States — terrorists linked to the USS Cole bombing. Of al‐​Mihdar, the 9/11 Commission reported, “No one was looking for him.” The story is recounted in brief in my Cato Policy Analysis (with Jeff Jonas) Effective Counterterrorism and the Limited Role of Predictive Data Mining.


A conclusion of that paper: “In the days and months before 9/11, new laws and technologies like predictive data mining were not necessary to connect the dots. What was needed to reveal the remaining 9/11 conspirators was better communication, collaboration, a heightened focus on the two known terrorists, and traditional investigative processes.”


As U.S. government officials turn against each other, they help reveal that their agreement to turn against us — in the USA-PATRIOT Act, domestic spying, and myriad other laws and programs — was a salve for those wounded egos. They didn’t want to admit that they outright missed the 9/11 attacks.