corrente

I guess this glossary thing is catching on. Slate's William Saletan has a good one: "Decoding Rice's self-serving testimony". My favorite:

Chance: Factors that the administration couldn't be expected to influence because they were non-systematic. Example (answering charges that the administration might have disrupted the 9/11 plot by holding regular Cabinet "principals" meetings on terrorism): You cannot depend on the chance that some principal might find out something in order to prevent an attack. That's why the structural changes that are being talked about here are so important. Synonym: Lucky. Example: I do not believe that it is a good analysis to go back and assume that somehow maybe we would have gotten lucky by "shaking the trees." … We had a structural problem.

Bottom line: They didn't have the information because they didn't make it a priority to get the information. Just like Clarke said (back here).