READER FRANK NATOLI says I’ve been too hard on the FBI and the intelligence community:

Has anyone [yet] pointed out that obtaining a piece of intelligence is only step #1? And that separating the “correct” intel from the “incorrect” is not only step #2 but often the tough part?

U.S. military intel knew they had lost track of six Jap carriers in late November 1941, and for days afterward all six maintained scrupulous radio silence. In retrospect, ah-hah, that should have tipped FDR, Kimmel, Short et al that the Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, Soryu, Zuikaku and Shokaku were crossing the North Pacific enroute to Hawaii and the “Day of Infamy”. Right?

Wrong. Because, as Gordon Prange makes very clear in “At Dawn We Slept”, there was a relative avalanche of other intel that indicated that Jap objectives were to the south, to the Dutch East Indies and their oil. There was no divine guidance to direct us to ignore the rational intel and focus instead on the irrational.

And so it probably is with the FBI memo on possible WTC attacks. Would Senator Daschle and Representative Gephardt kindly articulate how this one memo was to be separated from the relative infinity of other memos?

Well, maybe. But what offends me — as I keep repeating — isn’t so much the failure to prevent the attacks. That may well have been impossible, even if they’d had extraordinarily good intelligence. What offends me is the constant repetition (I heard Condi Rice say this just yesterday) that no one could have imagined the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That’s not only absurd, it’s an insult to our intelligence.