The lib media are drooling over the CIA report released on Tuesday that lays out the missed opportunities to thwart the 9/11 attacks.
From The New York Times:
C.I.A. Lays Out Errors It Made Before Sept. 11
A report released Tuesday by the Central Intelligence Agency includes new details of the agency’s missteps before the Sept. 11 attacks, outlining what the report says were failures to grasp the role being played by the terror mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and to assess fully the threats streaming into the C.I.A. in the summer of 2001.
The 19-page report, prepared by the agency’s inspector general, also says 50 to 60 C.I.A. officers knew of intelligence reports in 2000 that two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, may have been in the United States. But none of those officers thought to notify the Federal Bureau of Investigation about the potential domestic threat, the report says, evidence of what it calls a systemic failure.
The inspector general recommended that several top agency officials, including former director George J. Tenet, be held accountable for their failure to put in place a strategy to dismantle Al Qaeda in the years before Sept. 11, 2001. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the current C.I.A. director, and his predecessor, Porter J. Goss, have declined to seek disciplinary action against Mr. Tenet and others named in the report.
The outlines of the report have been known since shortly after it was completed in 2005, but it had never been made public, and its release reignited a debate about whether the C.I.A. should have done more before the attacks and whether Mr. Tenet and other officials should be held accountable.
Blah, blah, blah....
From The Washington Post:
CIA Finds Holes in Pre-9/11 Work
Agency Reluctantly Releases 2-Year-Old Document Critical of Tenet
Former central intelligence director George J. Tenet and his top lieutenants failed to marshal sufficient resources and provide the strategic planning needed to counter the threat of terrorism in the years before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to a summary released yesterday of a long-secret CIA report.
Despite promises of an all-out war against terrorism in the late 1990s, leaders of the spy agency allowed bureaucratic obstacles and budget shortfalls to blunt the agency's efforts to find and capture al-Qaeda operatives, said the report, by the CIA's inspector general. It also faulted agency leaders for failing to "properly share and analyze critical data."
The 19-page document -- a redacted executive summary of a classified report given to congressional intelligence committees two years ago -- called for the creation of a special board to assess "potential accountability" for Tenet and other former CIA leaders. Its stark assessments triggered a sharp response, with Tenet and other former and current intelligence officials denouncing the inspector general's conclusions.
"The IG is flat wrong," Tenet said in a lengthy statement.
The CIA reluctantly released the report summary after Congress demanded that it be made public. Congressional leaders had requested the study specifically to determine whether individual CIA officials should be held accountable for intelligence failures before Sept. 11. or, alternatively, rewarded for outstanding service.
"Agency officers from the top down worked hard" against al-Qaeda but "they did not always work effectively and cooperatively," the investigators concluded. While finding no "silver bullet" or single intelligence lapse that might have prevented the Sept. 11 attacks, the report identified numerous "failures to implement and manage important processes" and "follow through with operations."
The report said Tenet bears "ultimate responsibility" for the CIA's lack of a unified, strategic plan for fighting al-Qaeda. The intelligence community "did not have a documented, comprehensive approach" to al-Qaeda, the document said, and Tenet "did not use all of his authorities" to prepare one.
Blah, blah, blah....
From AP:
CIA missed chances to tackle al-Qaida
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 and its officers did not discharge their responsibilities in a satisfactory manner," the CIA inspector general found.
"They did not always work effectively and cooperatively," the report stated.
Yet the review team led by Inspector General John Helgerson found neither a "single point of failure nor a silver bullet" that would have stopped the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.
In a statement, CIA Director Michael Hayden said the decision to release the report was not his choice or preference, but that he was making the report available as required by Congress in a law President Bush signed earlier this month.
Blah, blah, blah....
We've heard this stuff before.
And we've heard plenty of this crap, too.
The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, said the CIA has learned from the past and has corrected many of these shortcomings, but has to do more.
"Sadly, the CIA's 9/11 accountability review serves as a sobering reminder that the Bush Administration policies for the past six years have failed to capture or kill Osama bin Laden," the West Virginia Democrat said. "Nor have the administration's policies deprived Osama bin Laden and other senior al-Qaida leaders of the safe haven they need to plot against the United States."
The Democrats and their mouthpieces in the lib media are exploiting the release of this report as yet another chance to target and condemn the Bush administration.
It's allows them to trot out the tired, old talking points once again.
Jay Rockefeller's comments are so predictable and so lame. His comments are a "sobering reminder" of just how shameless the Democrats' spin is.
Forget about national security. What matters to them is scoring political points.
It drives me nuts when they talk about Bush's failure to capture or kill bin Laden.
It really bugs me when our former co-president Mrs. Bill Clinton yaps about that.
If the Democrats want to talk about failed policies, let's.
Byron York's article "Clinton Has No Clothes : What 9/11 revealed about the ex-president - President Clinton's handling of terrorists' acts" reviews the slew of missteps made by Clinton.
Kathryn Jean Lopez interviewed Richard Miniter, author of Losing bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror. The Q & A on "how the previous administration fumbled on bin Laden" is sobering to say the least. I recommend it to Jay Rockefeller.
Want a liberal source? Do you think the two above would have a conservative slant?
OK. The PBS Frontline program "Hunting bin Laden" is very good. It was done by "a Pulitzer Prize-nominated team of New York Times reporters and FRONTLINE correspondent Lowell Bergman."
It's ridiculous for Rockefeller to use the CIA report to bash the Bush administration for its failure to capture bin Laden.
Rockefeller has been a U.S. senator for over two decades, far longer than the time Bush has been in office. What has Rockefeller done? What did the Clinton administration do, besides let bin Laden get away?
In short, it's out of line for Dems to be pointing fingers at the Bush administration and whining about its failure to get bin Laden.
They act as if the moment Bush took office, an instance of spontaneous generation gave the world the monster bin Laden.
Not so.
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Here's an interesting editorial from the liberal rag New York Times.
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