How Washington Missed 9/11

The CIA Inspector General's report declassified on Monday makes it painfully clear: We missed 9/11 because no one in Washington talks to each other.

It is a story that has been told over and over but bears repeating because it is at the heart of what went wrong in the lead up to that fateful day. In January 2000 a CIA field station in East Asia found out that two known Qaeda terrorists, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, were on their way to the United States — and they weren't coming on vacation. But it wouldn't be until August 2001 that CIA headquarters finally would tell the FBI, too late for the agency to track the two down.

During the eighteen months between January 2000 and August 2001 50-60 people at the CIA were aware of al-Hazmi and al-Midhar traveling to the U.S. But no one did anything because the assumption was that someone else had told the FBI. And presumably the FBI was covering the two.