// BBC WORLD NEWS — MONDO
Spies, strategies and missed opportunities: How the lessons of 9/11 are still being learnt
Spies, strategies and missed opportunities: How the lessons of 9/11 are still being learnt
The first duty of a government, countless leaders over the decades have said, is to safeguard its population. On 11 September 2001 the US manifestly failed to do that. The intelligence was there, yet tragically, nobody joined up the dots in time.
9/11, as the attacks on the US became known, came to define – along with the response – a generation of foreign, security and intelligence policy for the first two decades of this century.
On 11 September 2001, as al-Qaeda's suicide pilots flew those hijacked planes into the World Trade Center, I was just finishing a deployment in our Middle East bureau. As a Palestinian taxi driver drove me through the pine-clad hills west of Jerusalem to Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport he suddenly turned up the car's radio. "Something big has happened in America," he said. He wasn't exaggerating. 2,977 victims died that day.
The attacks did not come out of nowhere. The CIA had been aware of the al-Qaeda network and its exiled Saudi leader, Osama Bin Laden, for years prior to 2001. It even had a taskforce dedicated to hunting him down.
Nine days after the 11 September attacks, then US President George W Bush declared the "War on Terror".
9/11 victims remembered 25 years on from September 11 attacks
In the ensuing 25 years there have been numerous intelligence successes as well as failures on both sides of the Atlantic. The successes include plots that have been foiled, suspects who have been arrested, brought to trial, convicted and jailed.
But what of the bigger picture? How has intelligence-gathering, counter-terrorism and strategic planning changed in the 25 years since the worst terrorist attack in US history?
George W Bush was in a school in Florida when the attacks happened