The term failure of imagination has been used to describe one of the causes of the intelligence communities failure to forsee, anticipate, predict, and to thereby prevent the events of September 11, 2001. More properly, the term refers to the failure of imagination within the George W. Bush administration or within the various agencies of goverment such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Central Intelligence Agency.

During the summer of 2003, following the issuance of the now de-classified report about the September 11th attack, many government officials such as Senator Bob Graham began to make criticisms that the September 11th attack might have easily been predicted, if not outright prevented in part or altogether. Following these criticisms, President Bush declassified the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing which indicated that "Bin Laden Determined to Attack United States", and which indicated that hijackings might be one possible mode of attack.

The apparently intentional crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 by its co-pilot on Halloween, 1999, and a similar intentional crash of PSA Flight 1771 by a disgruntled former airline employee on December 7, 1987, offered a precedent in history of persons intentionally crashing airliners. Nonetheless, representatives (Condoleezza Rice?) of the Bush administration in early 2004 stated that "nobody could have imagined that ... hijackers would intentionally crash .... hijackers usually want to live." That is to say that the open source historic record with respect to widely observed behavioural patterns of criminal and terrorist entities directly contradicts statements about such behaviours made by the National Security Advisor.

It was later found that some US government organs had been doing much more than imagining it: on 9-11, the CIA and the National Reconnaissance Office were conducting a full-scale exercise studying a scenario remarkably close to the 9-11 events and what to do about it.[1]