Spies, strategies, and missed opportunities: what lessons the world continues to learn from September 11

The most important duty of any government, as countless political leaders have stated for decades, is to ensure the safety of its citizens. On September 11, 2001, the United States clearly failed in this task. Intelligence was available, but no one managed to piece together the individual fragments into a coherent picture in time, leading to tragic consequences. September 11—or 9/11, as those attacks in the U.S. came to be known—along with the subsequent response, largely shaped foreign policy, approaches to national security, and the work of intelligence agencies for an entire generation throughout the first two decades of the 21st century. On September 11, 2001, when al-Qaeda suicide terrorists (designated as a terrorist…