Guardian - We could have stopped him (Bin Laden)

[ChavezSpeakstheTruth]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/alqaida/story/0,12469,1287015,00.html

snip
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.
/snip

[truthspeaker]

1. Good! The CIA should not take this lying down

[NewJeffCT]

2. No shit - if we had had President Gore

...the chance of stopping 9/11 would have increased exponentially. While it still may very well have happened, I'm guessing we may have gotten a small blurb buried on page 19 in the Washington Post & the NY Times on Sept 12 that read something like: "15 men of Saudi origin were among a group of 19 men arrested by the FBI that were suspected of allegedly planning terrorist strikes or hijackings at airports around the Northeast. The men categorically deny the charges and accused the FBI of racial profiling."

[ChavezSpeakstheTruth]

3. and that would be that!

I like that scenario

[sweetheart]

4. Bush is weak on security

He is completely insecure and has spread his virus like wildfire.
Another another another another leak from an ex-republican who
has discovered that bush's version of security is to expose americans
to long term destruction of our values and goodwill.

It is a travesty, that more people sworn to defend the constitution
do not speak up. This anonymous is brave. Most of the generals in
the US military are cowards just like bush. They defend their jobs,
not the constitution.