Decision Making

The following passage is from today’s The New York Times article
(perhaps needing password) summing up the
9/11 commission hearings
of the last few days:

Whatever the missteps of the government in the
months and years before the attacks, there was always a lonely chorus of
experts, mostly at lower levels of the intelligence community, warning that the
worst could really happen, even if they did not know how, where or
when.

It may be that whatever ideology of the persons doing the
governing, rather than the volume of the information, it is the distance between
the person informed and the decision-maker that is the critical weakness. A
failure of hierarchy.