How is that possible? If I understand you correctly, you're saying that they can gather information but can't act on it. That's the whole purpose of intelligence, is to acquire vital information and use it to either prevent what it can cause or use it in any other manner. All of the intel services have their own enforcement task forces that act on the gathered information. So unless I misunderstood you, I don' think that's the case as for example, the FBI has quite the task force for raiding operations and even use SWAT teams and units of the sort. They get intel on a drug pin in the mountains of Minnesota, they're there in hours with 100 personnel taking down the culprit. Just like they did with the Uni-Bomber. They could've easily raided these quacks and foiled the entire operation.
You did not got me wrong, and yes, sometime, you can have intelligence but you cannot act on it, nor can you share it with other agency (sometime even other people within your own agency) That is the inherit flaw of the method of dissimilation. It's quite hard to explain, but I will try.
The problem associated is that say if you are my Confidential Informant (CI) who is working on a very high echelon within a terrorist organisation, if you tell me there is going to be an attack tomorrow at XXXX time at XXXX location. And if it is only you who are privy to this information, and I act on it (whether or not I use my own resource or resource from other agency), then it will directly blown your cover, as the people you are spying for (The terrorist organisation) would know because only you know this. And after this, you can no longer be working as my CI on this organisation, in the business, it's call burning your source.
Now, back in WW2, GCCS Bletchley park (the organisation that decoded the enigma machine) followed a 2 man rules, that is what it meant was they will only act on intel coming from Decoding the Enigma Machine unless the information they obtained via enigma can be reasonably obtained by other source (like you can pin it to the German submarine being spotted by bomber or such) in order to protect the fact that the UK have decoded the Enigma Machine, but if the Brits act without a second reasonable source, then the German would know the UK broke the code and change the Enigma Machine and render what the Brits have irreverent. And some time that mean even if the Brits intercept a communique between German U Boat to the Sub Base, but since there are no other secondary source (Such as no other shipping or too far from any Allied Airfield), they would have to let the sub attack merchant ship in order to protect the fact that the Bris had in fact decoded the Enigma Machine.
Senate hearings don't happen until after the fact by months, sometimes years. If any of these intelligence services had information that they needed to pass on to a separate law enforcement unit, they don't need to tell them anything about where or how they got their intel. That's the whole purpose of intelligence is to keep your sources and methods in house and they never have to reveal them. Even on much smaller local enforcement units like state police detectives or crime units or even the DEA, they have their sources and informants and all they have to do is cite the information acquired from an informant and act on it. No need to reveal any sources or how the information was squired.
The problem is, even the event is after the fact for several year, you will still have to tell the senate how and where you got the information from, and it does not really matter how people know you have the leak, but the existence of the leak itself is more than enough for anyone to plug the leak and make your task harder.
We are not talking about drug bust, but high level espionage, and the time to replace the leak would have been taken you years to plan and years to execute, drug dealer may trust a CI when they spend 2 or 3 months in jail, but if you are talking about other states and terrorist organisation, it take years to establish relationship, and if we told the senate or congress what had happened, even if we do not disclose the source, you still are saying you know something about it, and the organisation you are spying on will relocate or even cease to operate and the years of espionage work is gone.
Many in the intelligence community avoid talking to senate or congress hearing, that is because even it is totally secure, and all the people are vetted, that would still mean I know something about you and that knowledge itself is enough for your enemy (the one you are spying on) to dismantle the whole network and rebuild it, for them it would take months, for you, it would take years, if not more to re-infiltrate.
And that was the biggest problem with 911 is that between the FBI, NSA and CIA, there was no open channels or even intel sharing or cooperation, which led to a lot of this information being directed in different directions instead of centralized so it can be acted upon. That has changed since then and yes, I'll give you that was a flaw. But still, it doesn't mean there couldn't have been a proper channeling of the intelligence that was gathered on these terrorist (which was plain as day and they knew almost every one of them was up to no good) and they could've easily acted independently and rounded them up and questioned them, possibly foiling the plan entirely. But they never did that and that's where they failed. They knew half these guys were connected to Al Qaeda.
Although I cannot tell you whether or not what I am about to say is true or exist and if you ask for a confirmation, I will denied that and say I can neither admit or denied such work did exist, but let's just say it's easier to blame it on the "Lack of Open Channel" than have to give up my work on something than have other people to spoil it. Now, again, I cannot admit or denied there exist private cooperation between intelligence agency. But let just say the need to protect our source is greater than the need to communicate to each other.
In the intelligence business, unless that is the end piece of move you are getting there (so, afterward, there is nothing) otherwise, the little the people who know about it the better. There exist a term called "Association" to the fact, and the principle of intelligence is to compartmentalize it (which in short is everybody only know a fraction to knowledge you are supposed to know) so that it can protect the integrity of both the people behind it and the organisation behind it. But again, that would mean it would work against the intelligence gathering capability, either by design or by chance.
Hungary, no one is asking any of these groups to reveal any of the methods of their intelligence gathering. We're asking them to do their jobs correctly and use that information and act on it. This is where they failed and failed in a very big way. They have 1 job to do, and they didn't do it because they didn't act on their intelligence and the way the system was set up, it created a division between them instead of having a unified procedure of sharing intelligence so that they can act on it quickly. But even with the division, the onus was on all three of those organisations to act on their own and they didn't. What happened was the information went only so far up chain of command and then it got blocked by red tape and silly bureaucratic nonsense. This was an epic intelligence failure.
I do understand why you would think like that, it's very normal to think as an intelligence agency, all they need to do is to gather information, but what you do not know is the trick to tell people in a "good" way about these intel you collect. And due to the fact that the aftermath, the media all putting the pieces together and say "Why don't our alphabet agency did not do anything when The FBI have this, the CIA have that and the NSA have that...?"
The problem, for us, unless you have worked in the field, is much more complex, first of all, I only know a fraction of the information I want to know, the first problem is that, it's easy when the bomb exploded and you piece the information together and put it back into the event, but for us, without the event, all we got is information that may or may not be of substance. Contrary to many people believe, or watched on TV show, what you got from your source is very cryptic, and what you are doing is to supposedly put these cryptic information together and try to make sense of it. Which is quite hard if you do not have a full picture, unlike the public, because the attack already did happened, the full picture would have emerged, and then it's a lot easier to put the pieces together after the fact.
It's like I give you a 500 pieces of puzzle and without giving you the box that contain the picture on what it would look like after you have finished. You basically just have 500 pieces of puzzle, and you are asked to complete the puzzle without knowing what the puzzle looks like after it is finish, how hard it is to do that? I will let you be the judge.
Then it come the compartmentalize and dissimilating issue. Even if I can make sense of the intelligence I have on my hand, I still cannot do anything about that unless I have a sure fire way to tell people without burning my own resource, call us selfish or whatever, but sources for us is basically the only thing putting up the intelligence business afloat, and giving them up because you told people that piece of information is bad for business, basically in our circle, you are done, because other potential source will know what you did (Intelligence Community is not a big community) and they will refuse to work for you, and basically, once that happens, you are done.