-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: August 21, 2007 2:06:27 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Tenet's CIA Was Unprepared for al-Qaeda Threat
Declassified Report:
Tenet's CIA Was Unprepared for al-Qaeda Threat, 9/11
(Tenet, of course, disagrees)
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post, August 21, 2007; 3:34 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/21/
AR2007082101104.html?hpid=topnews
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 report, which in part sought to determine whether any
intelligence officials should be held accountable for pre-Sept. 11
failures, said that as early as December 1998, Tenet signed a
counterterrorism memorandum declaring, "We are at war." But neither
Tenet nor his deputy "followed up these warnings and admonitions by
creating a documented, comprehensive plan to guide the
counterterrorism effort," the report said. Tenet's deputy chaired
at least one related meeting, "but the forum soon devolved into one
of tactical and operational, rather than strategic discussions."
Moreover, the Counterterrorist Center (CTC) "was not used
effectively as a strategic coordinator of the [intelligence
community's] counterterrorism efforts," the report added.
The executive summary noted that the spy community's understanding
of al-Qaeda "was hampered by insufficient analytic focus," which
resulted in important issues being "covered insufficiently or not
at all." For instance, the report said, the CIA had made no
comprehensive report on Osama bin Laden since 1993, had not
examined the potential for terrorists to use aircraft as weapons,
and had done only limited analysis on the potential of the United
States as a target.
Tenet, in his statement, said "there was in fact a robust plan,
marked by extraordinary effort and dedication to fighting
terrorism, dating back to long before 9/11" and the report "vastly
under appreciates the challenges faced and heroic performance of
the hard working men and women of the CIA in general and CTC in
specific."
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