Speaking of intelligence...explain why U.S. government intelligence didn't pick up and stop 911 attacks. These attacks happened from within the country not someone shooting missiles into the country.
There’s actually a pretty good podcast on the topic of all the various 9/11 intelligence failures. Its called the Long Shadow and was turned into a miniseries on Hulu called The Looming Tower.
Short answer is that the FBI and CIA had separate interests, with the FBI, as a law enforcement agency, looking for Al-Qaeda members in order to arrest and prosecute them but the CIA, as an intelligence agency, looking for Al-Qaeda members for the purpose of spying on them and leveraging them for intelligence. So it wasn’t in the CIA’s interest to share info with the FBI and risk a possible intelligence asset being arrested.
Had they shared intelligence, there’s a very strong chance that the US stops 9/11, as the CIA knew of some terrorists that were in the country but never shared those names with the FBI. The FBI knew the names of Al Qaeda members that were involved in a possibly massive attack plan, but didn’t know they were already in the country. Had the CIA just said “hey, there’s this dude in country, his name is so and so” The FBI would have been able to tell them that there was immediate and imminent danger and that these weren’t people to just sit back and spy on.
Lots of other failures around 9/11, including a catastrophic failure of NYC’s emergency communication systems, panic and blind decision making at the white house, and a strong possibility that the Bush administration’s timeline/narrative of events on 9/11 (like the ordering of shooting down passenger planes) was largely falsified.