How the CIA really caught bin Laden's trail

A new documentary has startling new information

Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan before it was torn down.
(Image credit: Getty Images)

Early on in Greg Barker's documentary, Manhunt, about the CIA's search for Osama bin Laden, the CIA analyst responsible for the "Bin Laden Determined to Attack United States" briefing for President Bush, Cindy Storer, is not a fan of those who criticized the agency before September 11 for failing to connect the dots.

"Connect the dots? Everything on the page was black," she says. That is, the problem before 9/11, as she saw it, was the agency was awash in information and unable to figure out how to effectively and efficiently turn it into effective, actionable intelligence. It's a sobering reminder as we hear lawmakers begin to criticize intelligence agencies for a failure of dot-connecting before the Boston Marathon bombing. In hindsight, it's very easy to see which dots should have been connected, and how, and it's just as easy to make assumptions about how we would have reacted had certain dots been connected. But that's ALL guesswork. No one really knows and the rest are just demagogues.

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Marc Ambinder

Marc Ambinder is TheWeek.com's editor-at-large. He is the author, with D.B. Grady, of The Command and Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry. Marc is also a contributing editor for The Atlantic and GQ. Formerly, he served as White House correspondent for National Journal, chief political consultant for CBS News, and politics editor at The Atlantic. Marc is a 2001 graduate of Harvard. He is married to Michael Park, a corporate strategy consultant, and lives in Los Angeles.