There appears to have been a considerable intelligence failure in the runup to the invasion some are calling “Israel’s 9/11.” While the Israelis sort it out, Americans might look back at the actual 9/11, which the vaunted Central Intelligence Agency failed to detect or prevent.
The nation was “unprepared,” notes the official 9/11 Commission Report, which leaves little doubt that the CIA underperformed. After the terrorist attack on the U.S.S. Cole in October 2000, the CIA “had no definitive answer on the attack, how or by whom.”
The agency “was not able to find or disrupt al Qaeda’s money flow,” and “analysts stopped distributing written reports about who was responsible.” Counterterrorism director Richard Clarke warned that the CIA bureaucracy was “masterful at passive aggressive behavior” and “a hollow shell of words without deeds.”
The 2012, Zero Dark Thirty purported to show how a beautiful CIA agent tracked down 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. Viewers may doubt the film’s authenticity, but zero is a ballpark figure for the number of CIA bosses disciplined, demoted or dismissed over the 9/11 failure, surely one of the greatest in national history. On the other hand, there is little doubt that the agency has had some strange bosses.
As Commies and The Rosenberg File author Ronald Radosh notes, former Clinton National Security Adviser Anthony Lake failed to become CIA director partly because he believed Stalinist spy Alger Hiss might be innocent. Back in 1976, college student John Brennan voted for the Stalinist Gus Hall, presidential candidate of the Communist Party USA.
As Radosh noted of Brennan, “in a sane world, he would have been turned down.” The CIA duly brought him aboard and in 2013 he came to run the place. Brennan was all-in with the Russia Hoax and in 2020 he was one of the “intelligence community” officials charging that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.” So was former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood is a secular organization.
In 2018, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden compared President Trump’s immigration policies to, yes, Nazi Germany. Hayden posted a photo of Auschwitz captioned “other governments have separated mothers and children.”
As Hayden had to know, that was the policy of the Obama government, defended by White House Domestic Policy Council director Cecilia Muñoz, formerly with the National Council of La Raza. As Hayden also had to know, children of adults who break federal laws do not accompany their parents to prison. Call him Agent 002.98, but the failure goes beyond the CIA.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, responsible for counterintelligence, also failed to prevent 9/11, an attack carried out by terrorist within the United States. The FBI also failed to stop the bomb attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, which killed six people and injured many other. The bureau also failed to stop terrorist mass murders at Fort Hood in 2009 (14 dead), the Boston Marathon in 2013 (three deaths), San Bernardino in 2015 (14 dead), and Orlando in 2016, with 49 dead.
In every case, the FBI played no role in the takedown of the terrorists. If anybody called that intelligence failure it would be hard to blame them.
Exit question: With millions of “migrants” crossing our border, does anyone think our intelligence community has a clue about potential threats that may be gathering?
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