The 9/11 Commission staff made a report based on the April 13, 2004, hearing, which summarized the way data was gathered by the FBI: “Information was gathered to prosecute individual cases, not to be widely disseminated, analyzed, and acted upon. A piece of evidence was a clue to a particular case, not a dot to be connected to other information scattered throughout the government that might help us understand an organization such as al Qaeda. Intelligence was not widely available within the FBI, or made available to other intelligence agencies. …These factors…painted a picture of an institution ill suited to taking the lead in preventing terrorist attacks before September 11, 2001.”
– Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, Without Precedent, Page 192