US intelligence didn't fail to prevent 9/11 purely because of incompetence. The assumption is always that we're so much more capable than the rest of the world. They don't win matches, we sometimes drop the ball. Wrong. Sometimes the bad guys win because they're as good as we are. Strength of will and purity of hate will make up a huge technology gap. To believe otherwise is to be a country still stuck on Spring Break, goggle-eyed with the contents of our culture's wet T-shirts, the first heart-stopping whupping of our life just visible on the horizon.

- Michael Marshall Smith