Posted on 08/21/2007 11:11:12 PM PDT by parousia
The CIA's top leaders failed to use their available powers, never developed a comprehensive plan to stop al-Qaida and missed crucial opportunities to thwart two hijackers in the run-up to Sept. 11, the agency's own watchdog concluded in a bruising report released Tuesday. Completed in June 2005 and kept classified until now, the 19-page executive summary finds extensive fault with the actions of senior CIA leaders and others beneath them. "The agency did not always work effectively and cooperatively."
The executive summary says U.S. spy agencies, which were overseen by Tenet, lacked a comprehensive strategic plan to counter Osama bin Laden prior to 9/11. The inspector general concluded that Tenet "by virtue of his position, bears ultimate responsibility." Tenet said there was "a robust plan, marked by extraordinary effort dedicated to fighting terrorism, dating back to long before 9/11. which enabled the CIA to give the president a plan on Sept. 15, 2001, that led to the routing of the Taliban, chasing al-Qaida from its Afghan sanctuary and combating terrorists across 92 countries."
Basically, there was no coherent, functioning watch-listing program," the report said. However, in a now well-known 1998 memo, Tenant declared, "We are at war."
The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, said the CIA's 9/11 accountability review is a sobering reminder that the Bush Administration policies for the past six years have failed to capture or kill Osama bin Laden,or deprive senior al-Qaida leaders of the safe haven they need to plot against the United States."
(Excerpt) Read more at comcast.net ...
The trouble, the report said, was follow-up, and that represented failure within the agencies limited covert-action capabilities, it's reliance on "a group of sources with questionable reliability" and its reluctance to seek authority to assassinate bin Laden.
The report discusses the run-up to 9/11 which was almost all under Clinton’s watch, and yet the AP clumsily manages to get the Bush Administration into the fourth paragraph, before any mention of Clinton at all.
They’re just shameless.
The CIA doesn’t get all teh balme here. Klintoon gets a lot of it, and for the first 8 months, Bush didn’t do anything about it either.
Gore trying to steal the election I am sure did not help the Bush admin to hit the ground running.
The AP can suck it!
"Former CIA Director George Tenet did not marshal his agency’s resources to respond to the recognized threat posed by al-Qaeda before the Sept. 11 attacks, the agency’s inspector general concluded in a long-classified report released today.
"The report, which Congress ordered released under a law signed by President Bush this month, also faulted the intelligence community for failing to have “a documented, comprehensive approach” to battling al-Qaeda.
"Tenet, now a professor at Georgetown University, heavily criticized the report as “flat wrong” in a lengthy statement, saying the judgments are contradicted by a report issued by the agency watchdog just a month before the 2001 attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. CIA Director Michael Hayden also said he did not want to release the report, saying it “would distract officers serving their country on the front lines of a global conflict. It will, at a minimum, consume time and attention revisiting ground that is already well plowed.”
"A 19-page executive summary of the report, completed in June 2005, said it could not find a “single point of failure nor a silver bullet” that would have prevented the attacks, but went on to fault the senior management of the CIA for failing to deal with the al-Qaeda threat. “The agency and its officers did not discharge their responsibilities in a satisfactory manner,” a team led by CIA inspector general John Helgerson found."
The executive summary itself is a bit of a muddle. It argues that failures occurred in strategic planning, partly because the CIA got too immersed in tactics and operations. The Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) had the mission of providing leadership on all levels to the fight against al-Qaeda, but focused almost exclusively on what corporations call “firefighting” — being in a reactive mode rather than developing a long-term strategy. This led to a string of operational successes but no coordinated strategy to end the threat altogether.
This might explain why the incoming Bush administration wanted to take a time out to think strategically. Some may recall that George Bush and Condoleezza Rice have come under enormous criticism for pulling back operationally and quit engaging in “tit for tat” responses to AQ and Osama bin Laden. On page 202 of the 9/11 Commission report, it details that decision to forego limited operations and put more effort into an overall strategy — “Hadley said that in the end, the administration’s real response to the Cole would be a new, more aggressive strategy against al Qaeda.”
Rather than criticize the administration for that decision, the IG criticizes Tenet for failing to do this earlier. It was only at the point when Bush took office that Tenet finally moved to create an strategy group in the Assessments and Information Group (AIG). It didn’t get created until July 2001, by which time it had missed most of the warning signs of the attack.
Tenet has often complained that counterterrorism funding didn’t give the CIA enough resources to do the job. The IG doesn’t necessarily deny that, but it points out that Tenet transferred significant funds away from CT operations and planning for non-CT purposes. Even after Tenet told the CIA in 1998 that he wanted no resources spared for CT, funds never got transferred from other priorities to CT. The CTC also left money on the table unspent, which indicates that funding wasn’t a big problem at the time.
However, the workload was a big problem. The IG reports that CTC personnel were overworked and underresourced, but also inexperienced and untrained. They missed connections between the 9/11 plotters that they should have caught. Worse, the CTC management team interfered with communications between the task forces working on the various areas of terrorist intel. The lack of communication applies not just to interagency efforts but also inside the CIA itself. In one paragraph, the IG concludes that “there was no coherent, functioning watchlisting program” in the CTC.
One more point seems very damning. Despite Tenet’s claims that he had sounded the alarm on Osama bin Laden, the CIA hadn’t produced a comprehensive report focusing on bin Laden since 1993. Osama and AQ conducted a number of attacks on American assets around the world over the next eight years prior to 9/11, and yet they never revisited their analysis of bin Laden after the first World Trade Center attack.
Tenet has to take responsibility for these failures, although he’s doing his best to duck them today. He claims that the IG’s information contradicts earlier findings, and that the CIA did the best they could with the available resources. The IG emphasizes that the failures it found were not intentional, but were serious enough to create the gap that allowed the attack to succeed. That much seems rather obvious — and Tenet ran the agency for four years prior to the attacks.
UPDATE: Is it fair to paint this report as evidence that the fault for our unpreparedness belongs to the Clinton administration? I’d say that it’s not healthy to think along these lines. It’s better to leave the partisan sniping aside and have everyone learn the lessons than it is to turn this to partisan advantage. Tenet ran the CIA, and he’s responsible for its performance. Bill Clinton appointed him, and George Bush kept him on the job.
I would say that it’s fair to point out that passages such as “No comprehensive report focusing on bin Laden was written after 1993,” and “no comprehensive report laying out the threats of 2001 was assembled” put lie to the assertions by Clinton-era national-security officials that they handed the Bush administration a turn-key strategy to deal with al-Qaeda. The IG’s report clearly shows that no such strategy existed — which is why Bush insisted on developing one.
Source: http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/011819.php
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I disagree with Captain Ed caution against pointing the finger at Clinton admin for failing to protect us against the 9-11 attack orchestrated by OBL and al-Quaida. I refer him to an NRO interview with Richard Miniter, a Brussels-based investigative journalist, whose book, “Losing bin Laden: How Bill Clinton’s Failures Unleashed Global Terror “ evaluates the run-up to the war on terror.
http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/interrogatory091103b.asp
Miniter debunks a myth about the Clinton years that no one knew about bin Laden until Sept. 11, 2001. In fact, the bin Laden threat was recognized at the highest levels of the Clinton administration as early as 1993. What’s more, bin Laden’s attacks kept escalating throughout the Clinton administration; all told bin Laden was responsible for the deaths of 59 Americans on Clinton’s watch.
On this side of the internet debate going on as to Clinton’s culpability, refer you to a post on http://rhymeswithright.mu.nu/archives/237859.php
pointing out that Tenet’s strategic planning system to deal with counter-terrorism was offered less than two months before 9/11, at the specific orders of George W. Bush and Condolezza Rice.
It concludes:
“..seems pretty clear where the failure occurred — not under President Bush, but under President Clinton. Given the failure of leadership and vision that dated back at least three years before Bush became president, there can be only one conclusion about failures to protect the US. Captain Ed says that it is “not healthy” to point at WJC, but Lifelike Pundits points out that this report demonstrates how Bill Clinton and Madeline Albright lied to the American people when they claim that they left a detailed plan for the Bush Administration...”
The health of our nation depends on no more Clintons in the WH failing to protect America and then lied about it afterward.
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