Our 30-year campaign to maleducate Americans begins to pay off

Fred Kaplan, on the myriad mistakes that led to 9/11: "In the vast majority of these foul-ups, the problem wasn't with the agencies' organizational charts but rather with the quality of the people filling those charts. The trouble wasn't so much the flow of information but rather what people did with information when they got it. The key question is not so much how the government was structured but rather who did what, when?

Washington is now debating how to restructure the intelligence community -- whether to break up the CIA, expand the CIA director's powers, or create a new national intelligence authority. This is an important debate. But the chronicle of 9/11 tells us that a much more important debate should be going on over how to reward smart people inside the intelligence community -- and how to recruit more of them."