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Welcome to the Friday’s Food for Thought post from got geoint? This Sunday marks the 10-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. 2,993 innocent people lost their lives in what is the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Many Intelligence Community leaders are sharing their insights into how this event changed our community and made our nation a safer place. We will be featuring these editorials in this post, as well as other updates regarding this anniversary. And, 10 years may seem like a long time, but the reality is that 9/11 will also be on the forefront of our minds and we will never forget.

Holder, Napolitano, Clapper: We’re Safer Post-9/11
All of us who are old enough remember exactly where we were on September 11, 2001, at the moment we first learned that terrorists had taken control of commercial jetliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center in Manhattan, the Pentagon, and a field in Shanksville, Pa. On that day, our lives, our country, and our world fundamentally changed. Today, a decade later, we remember the loss of the nearly 3,000 innocent victims of the attacks, honor the firefighters, police, and many other first responders, who showed such courage and conviction on that tragic day, and take stock of the fundamental changes that have reshaped our country and improved security for all Americans. While there are no guarantees — and there never will be — we have accomplished much to minimize the risk that a successful terror attack like 9/11 will ever occur on American soil. Check out the full USA Today Op-Ed by Eric Holder, the U.S. Attorney General; Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security; and James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, here.

How 9/11 Transformed the Intelligence Community
It has been a decade since our nation suffered the greatest strategic surprise on American soil since the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the aftermath of September 11, as the country sought to understand how such a complex attack could go undetected, much attention was focused on the intelligence community. Pundits, scholars, commentators and others quickly labeled 9/11 an intelligence failure. Some suggested that on 9/11 the intelligence community was still operating in a Cold War mindset with too much of its attention and resources focused on threats from nation-states. Others argued that intelligence agencies were resistant to change and unwilling to work together. The belief that intelligence agencies failed to link critical fragments of information that could have revealed al Qaeda’s plot, and prevented the attacks, began to take hold. Read the full WSJ Op-Ed by General James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, here.

Congressman Rogers Says U.S. “Safer” Today Than Before 9/11
U.S. Representative Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said the U.S. is safer today than before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. “I think we are,” Rogers, a Michigan Republican, said in response to a question today on Bloomberg Television. The improved security situation does not make terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda “less dangerous,” he said. Rogers said the U.S. intelligence community is more aware of terrorism threats and has been “more vigilant” in targeting financing and other infrastructure. “We’ve made it difficult for them to operate in normal banking channels,” he said. Read the full Bloomberg story here. Be sure to check out Congressman Roger’s joint keynote with Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger at GEOINT 2011 next month.

Post-9/11 U.S. intelligence Reforms Take root, Problems Remain
U.S. intelligence agencies will forever be scarred by their failure to connect the dots and detect the September 11 plot, but a decade later efforts to break down barriers to information-sharing are taking root. Changing a culture of “need-to-know” to “need-to-share” does not come easily in spy circles. Some officials say they worry, a decade later, about a future attack in which it turns out that U.S. spy agencies had clues in their vast vaults of data but did not put them together, or even know they existed. Yet significant changes, both big and small, have broken down barriers between agencies, smoothed information-sharing and improved coordination, U.S. intelligence experts say. Check out the full Reuters article here.

Jeff Buckley – Hallelujah
Jeff Buckley’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s classic song will always remind us of 9/11. This song seemed to embody what everyone was feeling on that September day 10 years ago.

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