IN its final report, the 9/11 Commission described the fundamental weakness of Western intelligence in confronting transnational terrorist networks as a failure of imagination -- the inability to piece together the available information to form clear judgments about how and when terrorists might seek to cause the next mass carnage.
September 11 was a shock, but it should not have been a surprise to anyone in counter-terrorism.
The commissioner's lament led to a series of changes to the work of intelligence communities around the world. Agencies were told to avoid "groupthink", to share rather than hoard information, to be more proactive in turning collection into co-operation. Review after review warned of the dangers that flow when the restrictive "need-to-know" principle is privileged above the requirement to act quickly.
But nine years later we remain stuck in the same bureaucratic inertia. Intelligence analysts and the bureaucratic agencies they work for are not well known for their powers of imagination. Caution is more valued than creativity. Prudential scepticism is a professional badge of honour. Analysts are rewarded more for a well-crafted sentence than their ability to connect the dots and to work seamlessly with the police.
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The problem is exacerbated when transnational threats are involved. The intelligence game is still a class system - if the analytical community is the aristocracy, then the police are the untouchables. Having them work together can be an exercise in cultural clash.
And the hierarchy extends between countries, not just within them. The US, Australia, Canada and Britain are part of the elite "four-eyes" community - an intelligence sharing agreement at the highest levels.
Beyond these four, intelligence relationships become more patchy and unreliable. Terrorist groups understand these vulnerabilities and seek to exploit them. If they were planning another September 11 attack today, terrorists would board the planes in Africa or Europe, not Washington or New York.
To be sure, intelligence and police agencies have prevented more attacks since September 11 than the global jihadists have planned. In Australia alone, we have faced more than six serious plots, any one of which would have caused hundreds of fatalities. None succeeded.
As the jigsaw puzzle of each terrorist plot is revealed, we are reminded that information on individuals planning or preparing the next act of mass murder is often openly available.
In the wash-up from the Christmas Day massacre that Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab had planned for Northwest Airlines flight 253 in Detroit, it is not surprising to learn this attack had plenty of forewarning.
We now know that Abdulmuttalab's father, a prominent Nigerian banker, made several attempts to warn Nigerian and US security services of his son's radical state of mind in the months before the attack.
We learn from his former classmates and teachers that Abdulmuttalab was increasingly belligerent, angry and susceptible to the radical Islamist narrative. And we know that much of his communication with terrorist plotters in Yemen was conducted openly through the internet. It is highly likely that much of this information was passed around the world, readily available to intelligence agencies in Washington, London and Canberra. Unfortunately, it does not seem to have reached the airport security officials in Lagos where he boarded the plane or in Amsterdam where he departed on the final leg of his journey towards Detroit.
The immediate response will be to tighten airport security procedures. Passengers wanting to fly to the US will now be subjected to a "pat-down" search. But these reactive measures only deal with the symptoms of the problem, not the disease.
The key recommendation of the 9/11 Commission's report, that the policy of "need-to-know" should be replaced by a requirement to share information, remains languishing on the to-do list of intelligence managers everywhere. The unity of effort that the commission called for is still a distant goal at best.
For intelligence agencies, the most valuable asset they have is the ability of analysts to piece together information into a coherent set of assessments about the likelihood or probability of emerging threats.
If that information is weak, incomplete or otherwise tainted by bureaucratic bottlenecks, our ability to counter this global terrorist threat will be diminished.
Carl Ungerer is the director of the national security project at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and a former senior analyst with the Australian Office of National Assessments.
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