After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America, many people wondered why the nation’s intelligence community had not uncovered the plot ahead of time and done something to stop it. Political science professor Jack Citrin explains, “People are asking, ‘why didn’t [U.S. intelligence agencies] prevent this from happening? Were they asleep at the wheel"” Time magazine writers Massimo Calabresi and Romesh Ratnesar claim that “the CIA and the nation’s other intelligence bureaucracy were caught flat-footed by the September 11 attack.” Other commentators argued that it was unfair to blame the intelligence community for the attacks. Thomas Houlahan, director of the Military Assessment Program of the William R. Nelson Institute at James Madison University, asserts that “the CIA had been looking in the wrong direction in terms of threat assessment...