Gwen Graham: “on Saturday the Nation paused to observe the third anniversary of the horrible tragedy of September 11, 2001. In the…”

“on Saturday the Nation paused to observe the third anniversary of the horrible tragedy of September 11, 2001. In the first hours and weeks after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Nation was shocked by what had been the unthinkable--a terrorist plot carried out on the soil of the United States of America. We have seen grisly images of terrorism on our television screens from the Middle East, from Africa, from the Baltics, even from Great Britain. But now we have been hit here at home seemingly without warning, without the chance to have prevented the loss of over 3,000 innocent lives. We now know that the terrorist attack of September 11 was the result of a sophisticated plot, a plot that developed over many months, a plot that required the coordination among a number of individuals and we know that had our national intelligence agencies been better organized and more focused on the problem of international terrorism this tragedy would have been avoided. Incredibly, it is now more than 3 years after that tragic event and the basic problems in our national intelligence community that contributed to our vulnerability on September 11, 2001, are now for the first time being seriously considered. Let me be clear. These problems were not a mystery before September 11.”