Have the intelligence agencies corrected the problems that kept them from recognizing the 9/11 plot?
They’re certainly more sensitive to the problems. And there’s been movement on a lot of the 9/11 Commission* recommendations and our report’s recommendations, including the creation of the Director of National Intelligence, for example, and an expanded role for the Counterterrorism Center. I am not in government now. I’m not on the inside. I do hear from people in the intelligence community that things have improved. But we’re not there completely yet. There are still problems. There are still issues in sharing information. You’re still dealing with a huge intelligence community, lots of different agencies. You’re still dealing with a threat that involves a vast amount of information, a vast number of different terrorist groups. It’s a very hard threat to deal with. I would say we’re safer. But we’re not perfectly safe by any means. *Editor’s note: Hill’s Joint Congressional Inquiry pre-dated the 9/11 Commission, which had a broader focus beyond examining the intelligence community. In
