Confusion at CIA over bin Laden
From My Way News (AP):CIA efforts to stop Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11 attacks were hindered by confusion over whether intelligence officers were allowed to kill the al-Qaida leader, a federal commission said Wednesday.
The CIA also had depended too much on Afghan indigenous groups to attack bin Laden and CIA Director George Tenet understood its chances of succeeding were only 10 percent to 20 percent, the federal commission on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks said in a preliminary report.
If officers at all levels of the agency questioned the effectiveness of the most active strategy that policy-makers were employing to defeat the terrorist enemy, "the commission needs to ask why that strategy remained largely unchanged throughout the period leading up to 9/11," the report said.
Tenet appeared before the panel Wednesday, the second day of hearings with Bush and Clinton administration officials as the commission examines diplomatic, military and intelligence efforts to stop al-Qaida before the Sept. 11 attacks against New York and Washington.
Matt's Chat
If the CIA was confused...here's the meat of it:President Clinton had issued several orders for "the CIA to use its proxies to capture or assault bin Laden and his lieutenants in operations in which they might be killed. The instructions, except in one defined contingency, were to capture bin Laden if possible."Seems like there was some confusion there to me. In the end though, we missed the opportunity to get him before 9/11. Whining about it now seems silly to me. Let's fix the problems: the biggest stumbling block to that appears to be politicizing intelligence...
While Clinton administration officials believed those orders authorized the CIA to kill bin Laden, many CIA officials - including Tenet - believed they were authorized only to capture bin Laden. "They believed the only acceptable context for killing bin Laden was a credible capture operation," the report said.
An unidentified former chief of the CIA's bin Laden section told the committee that officers "always talked about how much easier it would have been to kill him," it said.
But Clinton's former national security adviser, Samuel Berger said the CIA never complained about the restrictions to the White House, the report said.
Mark's Remarks
You know, those terror reports by CIA were always sent to Mr. Berger. Wasn't it his motto that everything could wait until after the election? Again, let's revisit the truth:
Clinton had four chances for bin Laden's head on a pike from Sudan. This is corraborated by the man who brokered the deal, Monsoor Ijaz, a then-Clinton supporter, as well as by other officials in the Sudanese govt.
Clinton, Albright, and others met to decide whether to go after bin Laden several times. Even as an attack was ready to go, they nixed it, afraid of diplomatic consequences (read, the french would be mad...boo freakin hoo).
John Kerry received a letter from a retired official warning about the hijacks. Yet he did not speak out....and he was supposedly "sounding the warning of terror before 9/11?"
Mr. Clinton gutted the military and intelligence budgets, and through legislation and regulations he proposed and signed kept the law enforcement and intel from talking to each other, further building a systemic wall, as Mr. Tenet said today.
So, while I admit maybe Bush could have moved quicker, we are left with this:
we had a President a few months into a term that began with election controversy. To think that even as Tom Daschle was stalling funding upturns for the military in the Senate that he would have been for going after Osama is ludicrous.
The ball was dropped. We have to fix it. Nuff said.
