I’m all for every possible investigation into 9/11, and believe that both the FBI and CIA obviously could have done better jobs. But the focus on them, driven by last week’s 9/11 report, seems misplaced. Neither Louis Freeh nor George Tenet was president of the United States. We knew Afghanistan was a terrorist sanctuary. We knew bin Laden was a threat. According to George Tenet’s testimony, “as early as 1993, [CIA] units watching him began to propose action to reduce his organization’s capabilities.” We knew that he might target American civil aviation. The CIA warned as early as 1998 that al Qaeda had already conducted successful tests to elude security at a major US airport and that it had developed plans to hijack a plane on the east coast of the United States. All of this represents most of the important big-picture intelligence that we needed. What did we do about it? Almost nothing. That’s a failure of policy, not intelligence.