Anyone who wants to learn the importance of prepping the president before an announcement should see the recording of Bush announcing Tenet's resignation recently. (It was even worse than when he thanked Clinton for "his service," even when Bush knew that if Clinton could have run again he would have beat Bush so soundly he'd still be crying.)
People wonder why Tenet lasted so long, and there's buzz that he fought the good fight against the neocons for a while and then gave up. It honestly seems hard to believe that the Director of Central Intelligence would stay with his job, simply because "it's a job, after all." I don't think a memoir is forthcoming, but this is a bizarre story.
If you believe other buzz, the CIA is in bad shape because Clinton had too many scruples about putting shady characters (e.g., Noriega) on US payroll, and the agency came to rely on satellite reconaissance instead of human intelligence.
We'll never know whether and how badly the CIA screwed up.
It's not like there's a lot of accountability for the CIA, and even less for the NSA. And having seen quite a few movies on clandestine warfare, I'm convinced there's lots of other governmental agencies that are so secret you'd get shot for even acknowledging their existence. Come to think of it, the CIA may be the most transparent of all the intelligence agencies out there.
I think it's time to disaggregate the "intelligence failure" that "led to" 9/11. Were intelligence agencies not collecting the right information? Did they have the information but lacked the means to interpret it meaningfully? Did they have the means to interpret it, but lacked the wherewithall to take it seriously? Did they escalate, but to no avail? Or were they unable to do anything about the threat, even if they knew about it?
This is all about the signal to noise ratio. The weaker the signal and the louder the noise, the harder it is to extract information. On any given day, a lot of things get said and done in the U.S. Just like real spies try to look as ordinary and forgetable as possible, the 9/11 terrorists probably tried to go unnoticed as well.
It is impossible for us regular folks to know why the 9/11 terrorists weren't stopped, and I'm not sure all the commissions and congressional hearings will figure it out soon, either. George Tenet didn't decide the priorities of US military and foreign policy, and even the methods employed by the CIA are subject to policy review. Add to that the fact that the CIA can't do much domestically, and you have to wonder how much the CIA could have found out with no informants when Al Qaeda's base of operations could be almost anywhere in the world, except Israel.
And as it turns out, most efforts to stop terrorism now focus not on traditional CIA methods but on coercing information from "detainees" in Guantanomo Bay and other undisclosed locations. (This may explain why Al Qaeda hasn't indulged in a series of smaller-scale attacks with death cult bombers, etc. - each such incident leaves clues that can be tracked back somewhere.)
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