Posted on 04/10/2004 12:55:15 PM PDT by Maria S
WASHINGTON -- The month-long series of Congressional intelligence hearings that ended this week produced a detailed and disheartening portrait of the U.S. spy community as it groped its way toward Sept. 11.
It also reshaped thinking about the most basic lingering question: could the attacks have been prevented?
For months after Sept. 11, the answer, high-level government officials insisted, was no. The new answer is that preventing or disrupting them certainly seems to have been possible.
"It really is impossible to say whether the attacks would have been stopped," Eleanor Hill, staff director of the inquiry, said in an interview Friday: "But I think we would have had a much better chance" if intelligence agencies had acted on critical clues.
The spy agencies were portrayed as displaying dazzling skill and earnest effort, but in the end overwhelmed by the task and undone by some of their own worst tendencies.
(Excerpt) Read more at detnews.com ...
From the article: "The parade of intelligence officials who appeared before the joint committee rightly complained that funding and resources for their agencies were depleted significantly during the 1990s."
It seems to me, after reading this article, that this Congressional hearing was much fairer to the Bush Adm., and was actually trying to find a solution. Maybe just the way I read it...I don't know.
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