A nice piece of disinfo in the NY Times today. They are trying to reinforce this image of the intelligence agencies pre-9/11 as a bunch of teenagers working on TRS-80s. A former DIA agent explains how his home computer was better than what US intelligence had:

"Something had gone horribly awry, Burton realized.... This control over the flow of information, as the 9/11 Commission noted in its final report, was a crucial reason American intelligence agencies failed to prevent those attacks. All the clues were there — Al Qaeda associates studying aviation in Arizona, the flight student Zacarias Moussaoui arrested in Minnesota, surveillance of a Qaeda plotting session in Malaysia — but none of the agents knew about the existence of the other evidence. The report concluded that the agencies failed to “connect the dots.”"

This is obviously intended to justify the Pentagon's announcement that it is stepping up its online propaganda.

Typical of this propaganda campaign is a story in yesterday's Houston Chronicle on a recent military report, The Militant Ideology Atlas. The report downplays the importance of catching Bin Laden, and instead claims, according to the Chronicle,

"U.S. officials fear the next generation of terrorist attacks could be carried out not by militants trained in al-Qaida camps but by fighters influenced by radical texts posted online."

In light of this report, The NY Times piece seems like a coordinated propaganda assault by the Pentagon, as business leaders are calling for more "basic research" funding. The Times piece says,

"So perhaps, they argue, it’ s time to try something radically different. Could blogs and wikis prevent the next 9/11?"