[kmeisthax]

>Would FISA courts and secret warrants have prevented 9/11, who knows.

We already could have prevented 9/11 with the intelligence that we had at the time. Al-Qaeda was already known to be targeting US assets since the USS Cole bombing, every branch of the intelligence agency was already trying to spy on al-Qaeda[0], and the FBI specifically were already aware of the hijackers[1]. We even had multiple warnings from foreign governments about al-Qaeda[2].

The problem was a matter of correlating all that intelligence into some kind of actionable intervention. All the things I mentioned needed to be put together into a comprehensive list of people to arrest and where to find the evidence necessary to keep them behind bars for a decade. Anything less renders the whole effort futile - if you miss some hijackers, the attacks still happen; if you fail to make the charges stick, then the attacks happen later. More SIGINT doesn't always help: if anything, it means more information overload and more potentially missed threats.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Tenet#Al-Qaeda_and_the_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijackers_in_the_September_11_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks_advance-k...