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| The Report the CIA Didn't Want You to See |
| 2007-08-23 |
| The CIA failed to tell the State Department to “watch-list” the two Al Qaeda men, and the inspector general could find no evidence that the agency ever told the FBI about their presence in the country. The report called this a “potentially significant” lapse, since an alert to the Bureau might have led to “surveillance” and ultimately vital information about the 9/11 plot itself. “In the period January through March 2000, some 50 to 60 individuals read one or more of six Agency cables containing travel information related to these terrorists,” the report stated. It concluded: “That so many individuals failed to act in this case reflects a systemic breakdown” within the CTC. (The report recommended that along with Tenet, two former CTC chiefs should also be reviewed by an accountability board.) The report also criticized intelligence problems when Bill Clinton was president, detailing political and legal “constraints” agency officials felt in the late 1990s. In September 2006, during a famous encounter with Fox News anchor Wallace, Clinton erupted in anger and waived his finger when asked about whether his administration had done enough to get bin Laden. “What did I do? What did I do?” Clinton said at one point. “I worked hard to try to kill him. I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since.” Clinton appeared to have been referring to a December 1999 Memorandum of Notification (MON) he signed that authorized the CIA to use lethal force to capture, not kill, bin Laden. But the inspector general’s report made it clear that the agency never viewed the order as a license to “kill” bin Laden—one reason it never mounted more effective operations against him. “The restrictions in the authorities given the CIA with respect to bin Laden, while arguably, although ambiguously, relaxed for a period of time in late 1998 and early 1999, limited the range of permissible operations,” the report stated. (Scheuer agreed with the inspector general’s findings on this issue, but said if anything the report was overly diplomatic. “There was never any ambiguity,” he said. “None of those authorities ever allowed us to kill anyone. At least that’s what the CIA lawyers told us.” A spokesman for the former president had no immediate comment.) More at the link.. |
| Posted by:Deacon Blues |
| #4 Time to do away with the CIA and bring back the OSS operating under WWII rules. |
| Posted by: Silentbrick 2007-08-23 23:07 |
| #3 Guys, nothing in this report will soung all that unfamiliar to those who have heard me bitch loud and long (but in an unclassified manner) around here for the past few years. The CIA is a fundamentally defective organization and needs to be ripped apart and restructured - and the eastern elites need to be forcefully removed. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2007-08-23 15:30 |
| #2 Kapow. |
| Posted by: newc 2007-08-23 14:41 |
| #1 I wonder how many of these Al Qaeda men were cut from the due-diligence to-follow-list altogether due to Jamie Gorelick's WALL Program? hummm...guessing.. Those lists were irretrievably lost from the National Archives after they were spirited out in Sandy Berger's Socks. |
| Posted by: Red Dawg 2007-08-23 13:48 |