Kurt Eichenwald's op-ed at the New York Times and his subsequent appearances on CNN and MSNBC serve as a reminder, welcome or not, of an elephant that remains in the room even after being acknowledged and discussed in public.
The consensus view of how the events of 9/11 came to be are generally and politically filed under ... "failure of intelligence" i.e ... a failure of those in the intelligence community.
If someone, if something has to "carry the can" into the pages of History for the slaughter in New York City it will have to be CIA, NSA, FBI, "firewalls", political overseers...
It would make sense to me that guilty or not.. the "intel community" would have reason to fight back, to rectify, to squirm if duty implies that they will wear the sackcloth with resignation.
What Eichenwald has reminded us of, what we need to rethink is that the conspiracy that brought about 9/11 was penetrated. It was compromised.
Somebody, or a number of somebodies, knew, saw, found out, reported, got cited and finally got included in presidential security briefings.
So ....