Bruce Reidel
Reidel has followed al-Qaida since American intelligence first became aware of the group in the mid-1990s. His experience in counterrorism began with his first assignment at the Central Intelligence Agency in 1977, when he worked against Fatah founder Abu Nidal. In the 1990s, he was named national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia before moving to the Pentagon to become assistant secretary of defense for the same region.
He eventually was brought to the White House during President Clinton’s second term as a special assistant to the president on that region, and held that job through the first 12 months of the Bush administration
And your point is?
“Reidel has followed al-Qaida since American intelligence first became aware of the group in the mid-1990s.”
Yes, American intelligence was tardy, and not for the first time; even though American intelligence had many “allies” who not only knew about the philosophical and political origins and funding for “Al Queda” but were “allies” who had nurtured and funded those who provided those origins, since long before the 1990s.
American “intelligence” went through a wholesale internal destruction of our own humit (person to person human intelligence on the ground in the trenches) beginning in the 1970s. By the time of Gulf War one the U.S. had almost no humit of our own on most of the Middle East and zero in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Our “intelligence” was limited to our electronic intelligence and what Middle East and European intelligence agencies were willing to share with us from their actual humit. Mr. Reidel rose through the ranks during this period and for all I know he might even epitomize the problems we currently suffer from because of that period.