In an interview on The FBI and Crime

The Cell by John Miller, Michael Stone and Chris Mitchell is all about terrorism.

I like this book because there have been a million books and some movies, many very good, about 9/11 and post-9/11 and that day in particular. But this book really focused on the decade building up to 9/11 and it talks about many of the plots that occurred, all leading up to 9/11. The FBI, MI5 and MI6 were all trying to get their arms around what was going on in their desperation to try to piece together where this was going and then 9/11 kind of happened out of the blue. When you go back and have that ability of hindsight it is really is rather eye-opening.

And what were the failures – why didn’t they see it coming?

The quote that you hear most often is the failure to join the dots and the inability of some of the intelligence community to share information as well as it could have.  Would it have prevented a 9/11? I don’t know.

Linguistics was another problem, the lack of translators, the lack of understanding of different cultures. Now, all around the world, whether it is Britain, America, Canada, Australia or Germany, we are all better at sharing information and seeing ourselves as a global community. Everyone now thinks we can’t let something that big happen because we have seen it can happen.