That's not the narrative here. The narrative here is that they did have the tools they needed to identify the threat in advance, but for reasons basically of venal nest-feathering corruption those tools were not used, and so the attack proceeded unhindered.
You've only got Bill Binney's word for it, to be sure. But let's not lose sight of the matter at hand in the rush to make points which are strongly held but tangential.
Binney is currently saying mostly the right things. That isn't to say that his story is especially believable. His team of heroes developed a system that "would have worked", had it been used. Yet he also tells us it has been used quite a bit since then, only with all the human rights protections stripped out. It seems as though "terrorism" still happens? Also, in future, we ought to build fewer super-powerful surveillance machines with "To Violate the Constitution, Press This" buttons.
If the system has facilities for classifying data by its "relevance", one would expect those to be used by those who fired Binney yet arranged for his system to be installed anyway. If the system relies on only "relevant data" ever being entered, then it's useless and always was.
You've only got Bill Binney's word for it, to be sure. But let's not lose sight of the matter at hand in the rush to make points which are strongly held but tangential.