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CIA Report Says Fmr Director
Tenet Bears Ultimate Responsibility For 9/11
Glenn Kessler
Washington
Post
Tuesday Aug 21, 2007
Former CIA Director George Tenet did not marshal his agency's
resources to respond to the recognized threat posed by al-Qaeda
before the Sept. 11 attacks, the agency's inspector general concluded
in a long-classified report released today.
The report, which Congress ordered released under a law signed
by President Bush this month, also faulted the intelligence community
for failing to have "a documented, comprehensive approach"
to battling al-Qaeda.
Tenet, now a professor at Georgetown University, heavily criticized
the report as "flat wrong" in a lengthy statement, saying
the judgments are contradicted by a report issued by the agency
watchdog just a month before the 2001 attacks against the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon. CIA Director Michael Hayden also
said he did not want to release the report, saying it "would
distract officers serving their country on the front lines of
a global conflict. It will, at a minimum, consume time and attention
revisiting ground that is already well plowed."
(Article continues below)
A 19-page executive summary of the report, completed in June
2005, said it could not find a "single point of failure nor
a silver bullet" that would have prevented the attacks, but
went on to fault the senior management of the CIA for failing
to deal with the al-Qaeda threat. "The agency and its officers
did not discharge their responsibilities in a satisfactory manner,"
a team led by CIA inspector general John Helgerson found.
The report, which in part sought to determine whether any intelligence
officials should be held accountable for pre-Sept. 11 failures,
said that as early as December 1998, Tenet signed a counterterrorism
memorandum declaring, "We are at war." But neither Tenet
nor his deputy "followed up these warnings and admonitions
by creating a documented, comprehensive plan to guide the counterterrorism
effort," the report said. Tenet's deputy chaired at least
one related meeting, "but the forum soon devolved into one
of tactical and operational, rather than strategic discussions."
Moreover, the Counterterrorist Center (CTC) "was not used
effectively as a strategic coordinator of the [intelligence community's]
counterterrorism efforts," the report added.
The executive summary noted that the spy community's understanding
of al-Qaeda "was hampered by insufficient analytic focus,"
which resulted in important issues being "covered insufficiently
or not at all." For instance, the report said, the CIA had
made no comprehensive report on Osama bin Laden since 1993, had
not examined the potential for terrorists to use aircraft as weapons,
and had done only limited analysis on the potential of the United
States as a target.
Tenet, in his statement, said "there was in fact a robust
plan, marked by extraordinary effort and dedication to fighting
terrorism, dating back to long before 9/11" and the report
"vastly under appreciates the challenges faced and heroic
performance of the hard working men and women of the CIA in general
and CTC in specific."
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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