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Originally Posted by RougeUnderoos
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The enemy of your enemy is your friend.
Sure its a cliche, but it was true at the time.
In the 80's...Islamic fundamentalism was a minor problem compared to the Cold War, and as far as the US was concerned, giving a few billion to the Afghanis and help them beat the Soviets wasn't a big deal.
Too bad Congress and Bush1 completely ignored the plea of Charlie Wilson and many other intelligence people who were working in Afghanistan after the Soviets had left about the impending problem with terrorists.
Not only did they ignore it....they just fired their best intelligence people, cut off funding for just about ALL the bases in the Middle East, cut back the military, gutted the intelligence services, ignored Afghanistan, and like Ron Paul said, created 9/11.
Ron Paul would be better served to tell the whole story.
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During the late 1980s and early 1990s, as many as one-third of the estimated three dozen case officers at the CIA's Paris Station resigned or retired because they were disgusted and disillusioned with DO's leadership. But no one at HPSCI or SSCI changed the DO's culture, forcing it back into the spying business by demanding audacity, risk-taking, and out-of-the-box thinking.
According to Agency insiders much of the DO's internal rot can be traced to the stewardships of CIA directors Stansfield Turner (1977-1981), Judge William Webster (1987-1991) and his successor, intelligence analyst Robert Gates (1991-1993).
And it wasn't just Webster and Gates, either. The DO's downward spiral actually accelerated during John Deutch's tenure as DCI (1995-1996). Neither Deutch (a former MIT professor), nor his executive director Nora Slatkin (a former assistant secretary of the Navy), nor his deputy director George Tenet (a former congressional staffer and National Security Council aide), had any experience in clandestine operations. The situation worsened more after Deutch named David Cohen, a career intelligence analyst in the Robert Gates mold, to head the DO.
It was during the Deutch/Slatkin/Tenet/Cohen administration that case officers working the counterterrorism area were forbidden -- on pain of firing -- to recruit any agents who might have unsavory backgrounds, even though, according to EDKINS, the clandestine service supergrade, "it takes a terrorist to catch a terrorist."
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Moreover, given congress's PC structures, many case officers stopped recruiting altogether. Instead, they relied on the liaison services in the countries in which they served to provide them with information, and agents. DCI George Tenet said as much in a February 5 speech at Georgetown University. "We did not ourselves," he admitted, "penetrate [Saddam's] inner sanctum...[but] we had a steady stream of reporting with access to the Iraqi leadership come to us from a trusted foreign partner."
No unilateral sources inside Saddam's inner sanctum. And yet, Iraq had been a primary target for more than a decade. Incredible. Did HPSCI or SSCI ever bang heads when Gates, Woolsey, Deutch, or Tenet admitted this... deficiency during oversight hearings?
In fact, from Turner's SNAFUs, to Webster and Gates's TARFUs, to Deutch and Tenet's FUBARs, scores of intelligence oversight hearings were conducted by the nation's Congressional mushrooms -- the members of HPSCI and SSCI. And where are the tangible results of all that oversight, you'd like to know. The awful truth is that you and I and the rest of the world saw the consequences of their delusional oversight efforts on the morning of September 11, 2001.
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http://www.military.com/NewContent/0...021004,00.html
If you remember the argument we had about Iraq and WMD back in the day, where I said that much of the intelligence failure could be attributed to the US not having boots on the ground in Iraq doing the actually work? Case in point.
Maybe now you'll understand why I don't blame Bush, well not specifically, for the massive intelligence failure. In fact, from the start I have always maintained the opinion that the failure went back a lot longer than Bush, Clinton, or even Bush 1.
Each of them contributed to it....but none of them shares all the blame. The blame specifically falls upon the actions of the CIA from 1977-1993.