We Could Have Stopped Him

[Charles Brown <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

" These are not happy times at the CIA."

Poor little spy agency.

CB

^^^^^^


<http://www.guardian.co.uk/alqaida/story/0,12469,1287015,00.html>

            We Could Have Stopped Him
            By Julian Borger
            The Guardian

            Friday 20 August 2004

                The CIA has taken much of the blame for the security lapses
that led to 9/11 and the false intelligence on Iraq's WMDs. But now one spy
has broken ranks to point the finger at the politicians - and warn that the
war on terror could plunge the US into even greater danger.

            These are not happy times at the CIA. In the space of a few
short months, two official reports have found the agency principally to
blame for failing to prevent the September 11 al-Qaida attack and for
claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt there
is a lot of blame to go round. The twin fiascos rank as the worst
intelligence failures since the second world war. But the two reports, by
the September 11 Commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee
respectively, were also testaments to political expedience. Both panels were
made up of Republican and Democratic loyalists who reached a political
compromise by going relatively easy on both Clinton and Bush
administrations, and focused on institutional culprits. The CIA, without a
defender after the resignation in July of its long-serving director, George
Tenet, presented the easiest target.

            Yet most of the agency's rank and file believe they have done
little wrong. They were the first to raise the alarm over the danger posed
by Osama bin Laden, long before the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa. In
1996 they set up a unit called the Bin Laden Issue Station, codenamed
"Alex", dedicated to tracking him down, only to have one operation after
another aborted as too politically dangerous.

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