These are not happy times at the CIA. In the space of a few short months, two official reports have found the agency principally to blame for failing to prevent the September 11 al-Qaida attack and for claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt there is a lot of blame to go round. The twin fiascos rank as the worst intelligence failures since the second world war. But the two reports, by the September 11 Commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee respectively, were also testaments to political expedience. Both panels were made up of Republican and Democratic loyalists who reached a political compromise by going relatively easy on both Clinton and Bush administrations, and focused on institutional culprits. The CIA, without a defender after the resignation in July of its long-serving director, George Tenet, presented the easiest target.
Yet most of the agency's rank and file believe they have done little wrong. They were the first to raise the alarm over the danger posed by Osama bin Laden, long before the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa. In 1996 they set up a unit called the Bin Laden Issue Station, codenamed "Alex", dedicated to tracking him down, only to have one operation after another aborted as too politically dangerous.
There are a lot of angry spies at Langley, and one of the angriest is Mike Scheuer, a senior intelligence officer who led the Bin Laden station for four years. While some of his colleagues have vented their frustrations through leaks, Scheuer has done what no serving American intelligence official has ever done - published a book-length attack on the establishment.
His book, Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, is a fire-breathing denunciation of US counter-terrorism policy. In it, Scheuer addresses the missed opportunities of the Clinton era, but he reserves his most withering attack for the Bush administration's war in Iraq.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/alqaida/story/0,12469,1287015,00.html
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(34 posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
