Houston Chronicle: The signs were all there.
This is what jumps out at you in perusing postmortems of the two greatest surprise attacks in American history. In the days and weeks leading up to Dec. 7, 1941, and Sept. 11, 2001, there were numerous clues that seem neon in hindsight, but which no one pursued.
Or, as then-CIA Director George Tenet famously said of 9/11: "The system was blinking red."
In response to each attack, exhaustive probes were launched to determine whose incompetence allowed the disaster...