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By Root 6829 0

much of the past decade, and the best parts of The Cell recount his own experiences in covering the terrorist story. He is an extraordinary reporter. At the time of the first World Trade Center attack, in February of 1993, he clapped a flashing light on the dashboard of his car and followed the wave of emergency vehicles downtown. (At the bombing site, he was continuously trailed by a knot of reporters — I was one of them — who had concluded that the best way to learn what was going on was to try to overhear his conversations.) Miller became friends with the FBI agents who headed the New York counterterrorist office — Neil Herman and John O’Neill, in particular — and he became as obsessed with Al Qaeda as they were. He was in Yemen, with the FBI, after Al Qaeda bombed the U.S.S. Cole. In 1998, at the Marriott in Islamabad, he and his cameraman met someone known to them only as Akhtar, who spirited them across the border into the hills of Afghanistan to interview Osama bin Laden. In The Cell, the period from 1990 through September 11 becomes a seamless, devastating narrative: the evolution of Al Qaeda. “How did this happen to us?” the book asks in its opening pages. The answer, the authors argue, can be found by following the “thread” connecting Kahane’s murder to September 11. In the events of the past decade, they declare, there is a clear “recurring pattern.”

The same argument is made by Senator Richard Shelby, vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, in his investigative report on September 11, released this past December. The report is a lucid and powerful document, in which Shelby painstakingly points out all the missed or misinterpreted signals pointing to a major terrorist attack. The CIA knew that two suspected Al Qaeda operatives, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, had entered the country, but the CIA didn’t tell the FBI or the NSC. An FBI agent in Phoenix sent a memo to headquarters that began with the sentence “The purpose of this communication is to advise the Bureau and New York of the possibility of a coordinated effort by Osama Bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civilian aviation universities and colleges.” But the FBI never acted on the information, and failed to connect it with reports that terrorists were interested in using airplanes as weapons. The FBI took into custody the suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, on account of his suspicious behavior at flight school, but was unable to integrate his case into a larger picture of terrorist behavior. “The most fundamental problem… is our Intelligence Community’s inability to ‘connect the dots’ available to it before September 11, 2001, about terrorists’ interest in attacking symbolic American targets,” the Shelby report states. The phrase “connect the dots” appears so often in the report that it becomes a kind of mantra. There was a pattern, as plain as day in retrospect, yet the vaunted American intelligence community simply could not see it.

None of these postmortems, however, answer the question raised by the Yom Kippur War: was this pattern obvious before the attack? This question — whether we revise our judgment of events after the fact — is something that psychologists have paid a great deal of attention to. For example, on the eve of Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China, the psychologist Baruch Fischhoff asked a group of people to estimate the probability of a series of possible outcomes of the trip. What were the chances that the trip would lead to permanent diplomatic relations between China and the United States? That Nixon would meet with the leader of China, Mao Tse-tung, at least once? That Nixon would call the trip a success? As it turned out, the trip was a diplomatic triumph, and Fischhoff then went back to the same people and asked them to recall what their estimates of the different outcomes of the visit had been. He found that the subjects now, overwhelmingly, “remembered” being more optimistic than they had actually been. If you originally thought that it was unlikely that Nixon would