Tenet gives ominous testimony on CIA

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Tenet gives ominous testimony on CIA
3
Wed, 04-14-2004 - 12:43pm
George Tenet testified before the 9/11 commission that the CIA is 5 years away from being ready to handle terror threats.

This is pretty scary, and shows the damage done to the CIA throghout the last decade and more. It looks as though the budgetary cuts under GHW Bush and Clinton did more harm than originally estimated to the CIA's ability to effectively gather and analyze intelligence.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4738424/

NBC, MSNBC and news services

Updated: 11:49 a.m. ET April 14, 2004WASHINGTON - CIA director George Tenet told the commission investigating the Sept. 11 terror attacks that it will take ���another five years of work to have the kind of clandestine service our country needs” to combat al-Qaida and other terrorist threats.



“The same can be said for the National Security Agency, our imagery agency and our analytic community,” Tenet testified.

Tenet's testimony followed the release of a report by the panel’s staff that concluded that while U.S. intelligence agencies issued “hundreds” of reports warning senior officials about the al-Qaida terror network blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks, the lack of strategic analysis left the policymakers with a "fundamental uncertainty" about the scope of the threat.

In response to questions by commission members, Tenet said he had "serious issues" with some of the report's conclusions, insisting that the CIA and other intelligence agencies had a strategic plan to deal with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.

‘A system that's broken’

But John Lehman, a former Navy secretary and commission member, characterized the document as a “damning report of a system that’s broken, that doesn’t function.”



Lehman made clear he wasn’t faulting Tenet personally, whom he praised. But, noting that President Bush has recently signaled an interest in overhauling the nation’s intelligence-gathering structure, Lehman said change was coming.

Tenet, who has held his job for seven years across parts of two administrations of different parties, said he would welcome it, though he asked the commission to recognize and incorporate changes instituted since the Sept. 11 attacks in restructuring recommendations it is expected to issue.

In his testimony, Tenet acknowledged that intelligence officials could be faulted by not assembling clues that could have alerted authorities to the plot.

“We made mistakes,” he said. “...We all understood bin Ladin's intent to strike the homeland but were unable to translate this knowledge into an effective defense of the country.”

Budget cuts seen as contributing to ‘systemic weakness’ But he also charged that budget cuts imposed following the end of the Cold War contributed to the "systemic weakness" that allowed the Sept. 11 plot to go undetected. When he became the nation's top intelligence officer in 1997, he said, agencies had lost "close to 25 percent of our people and billions of dollars in capital investment" in the preceding several years.

Tenet also faulted the organization of the web of agencies and offices that were working on various aspects of the al-Qaida issue, noting that there was neither regular communication nor a clear chain of command.



He maintained that the threat posed by al-Qaida was well understood by senior government officials, but that the federal bureaucracy wasn’t able to respond to a threat that didn’t fit into previous experience.

“Most profoundly we lacked a government-wide capability to integrate foreign and domestic knowledge, data, operations, and analysis,” he said. “Warning is not good enough without the structure to put it into action.”

FBI chief Robert Mueller, whose agency also has come under strong criticism from the commission, also was scheduled to testify Wednesday.

Tenet's testimony followed the release of the commission staff report faulting U.S. intelligence agencies for taking a piecemeal approach to al-Qaida.

Foreshadowing some of Tenet's comments, the report found that budget cuts in the national foreign intelligence program through the 1990s "caused significant staffing reductions" at the same time that the advent of the 24-hour news cycle was increasing demand for timely reports to policymakers.

Piecemeal approach criticized

The shortage of intelligence analysts contributed to a piecemeal approach to assessing the threat posed by al-Qaida that failed to resolve a "fundamental uncertainty" among senior U.S. officials about the threat posed by the terrorist network, the report said.

"Before the attack, we found uncertainty among senior officials about whether this was just a new and especially venomous version of the ordinary terrorist threat that America had lived with for decades, or was radically new, posing a threat beyond any yet experienced," it said.

A more-comprehensive look at clues prior to Sept. 11 could have unveiled the plot behind the attacks, the report added.

Such an analysis could have identified that the plot might need suicide hijackers who would take flight courses, the commission said. Establishing such "tell-tale indicators" could have raised red flags following a July 2001 FBI report of terrorist interest in aircraft training in Arizona, and the August 2001 arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui because of suspicious behavior in a Minnesota flight school, it said.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Fri, 04-16-2004 - 11:22am

CIA's Tenet did speak to Bush before 9-11, spokesman says.


http://www.sltrib.com/2004/Apr/04162004/nation_w/157713.asp



CIA Director George Tenet met with President Bush at least eight times in the 42 days before the catastrophic terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, a CIA spokesman said Thursday, correcting Tenet's testimony that he hadn't talked with the president during the entire month of August.

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Fri, 04-16-2004 - 12:05pm
Why is Tenet changing his story?

Is he just looking to protect his job?

With all that has come out of the commission to date, I personaly would have fired him last week, especially after reading the story in the New York Post this morning.

It appears that the CIA had knowledge of what the terrorist may do as far back as 1995 and updated in 1997. Why are we only now being made aware of this?

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Fri, 04-16-2004 - 12:31pm

There's so much conflicting 'evidence'. e.g., There's Ashcroft stating there were

 


Photobucket&nbs