Lehman seems the only commissioner who is doing his job. He posed good questions to Dr Rice, and now he brought up the OKC bombing. Let’s see if he can get it into the final report as well. I wouldn’t bank on it, but if he does that might provide an opening for a new look at the case.
Then someone already mentioned earlier on that a lot of the people who worked on the case are still there (in FBI), and they won’t be very helpful - which may be one of the reasons why the present administration hasn’t been able to do much about it.
Just to show how defensive these large government agencies can be here are some quotes from Ronald Kessler’s 1992 book: Inside the CIA:
”It began on March 1, 1981, when the New York Times Magazine ran an excerpt of Claire Sterling’s book The Terror Network: The Secret War of International Terrorism, which suggested that the Soviets were providing the weapons, training, and sanctuary for terrorists as part of the Soviet effort to undermine Western democracy. The CIA never said anything like this. Casey wanted the agency’s analysts to follow up and discover if Sterling’s facts were right. The CIA director had long suspected that the Soviets were in control of world terrorism, using thugs from all over the world as a front for their own devious purposes.
What came out in the form of a draft estimate was ambiguous and not at all what Casey had wanted. According to those involved in preparing the estimate, the evidence available to the CIA at the time did not support Casey’s or Sterling’s views.
”It was a question of semantics,” says David H. Whipple, later national intelligence officer for terrorism. ”He [Casey] would say, ”They [the Soviets] support them, and therefore they are responsible.” We would both go before a congressional committee. Casey would say, ”They are responsible”, and go back to work at noon and leave me to face the committee in the afternoon. I would try to erase what he said, because I was trying to differentiate between Soviet support for national liberation struggles and actual direction of terrorist activities.
”There was pressure internally to say more than we could professionally justify, and most of us resisted that”, Whipple said. ”Casey was on the right. An NIO can’t be as forward leaning as he was... Everything you say has to be supported by intelligence. You can’t sit there and interpret facts. Casey had a way of going beyond that sometimes”. Whipple said that despite more recent revelations of East-bloc support of terrorists, ”I don’t think they’ll ever prove the Soviets instigated actions of terrorism, but they certainly supported people and groups who did engage in terrorism.”
”The analysts were afraid they would be accused of engaging in some political act”, said Adm. Bobby R. Inman, who was deputy director of Central Intelligence at the time. The first draft bent over backward to avoid that. In any intelligence report, you identify assumptions, It said there is no conclusive evidence that this or that. I read it and put a note on it saying, ”This sounds like the prosecutor’s argument on why he decided not to prosecute the case.”
Casey was more blunt. He wrote on the draft, ”This is a bunch of shit.” According to Inman, Casey was concerned more with the lack of logic and flow than with the conclusion.”
Ok, this speaks for itself; Casey and Sterling were right, as has been shown by all the intelligence gathered after the fall of the Berlin wall and the disappearance of the Soviet Union, but there are two points I would like to make:
The culture of an organization can be just as difficult to combat as a real cover-up. Casey was a very strong-willed man, and even he had difficulties getting correct information. A much less hands-on boss (eg Freeh) would never get to see reports that didn’t fit the policy of the agency.
Secondly, history does repeat itself. Sterling’s book was savaged by left-wingers and sadly denigrated by CIA analysts. And despite the policies of the President and Casey, the USA was never on a war footing even though a war was waged against the West.
It should be a task for the 911 Commission to discuss how much this lack of understanding regarding the terrorism in the 70s and 80s allowed the subject to be forgotten during the 90s (and treated as criminal not political acts) and thus helped to enable never previously seen attacks on the US mainland.
Ping on #91.
S.B. brings out some excellent points regarding the stance our gubmint has taken towards (Islamic) terrorism over the past THREE DECADES.
And we can see where the "politically correct" tip-toeing got us > > 9/11.
I hear the phrase "WAR FOOTING" beginning to come up regularly in the 9/11 hearings and it being used as a crutch of deflection against blames by each of the administrations.
Anyone have the aptitude of a 7th grade junior high student knows and understands that these "terrorists" are comprised of Muslims.
How many "terrorist" groups have run down the streets in broad daylight with world media coverage, whipping their backs till they bleed and cutting their scalps with knives until they can't see to walk from being blinded by their own blood all while screaming "Death to America?"
Right.
These hearings have great potential to finally expose the true roots of just who it is or who "they" are behind this Holy War.
The history of sweeping the problem under the rug by refusing to admit and attack the root of terrorism against America (Islamic fundamentalism) spans at least THIRTY YEARS.
Some of the language of the newsletter of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers is deprecating to any robust counterterrorist effort.
Even the image from the exclusive interviews with Rick Ames by Pete Earley in Confessions of a Spy indicate real intel is the last thing on these people's minds.
Your example of the Soviets' use of terrorists may have its modern parallel in the PLA deal with the Taliban within 24 hours of September 11.
Efforts by Casey and Reagan to pursue an aggressive campaign against the Soviets was opposed by Soviet apologists in the American Left.
The seven-year Walsh vendetta followed a congress which had cut funding to Chiang Kai-shek; South Vietnam, and the Contras.
To this day the current DCI is in denial as to the April meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta and al-Ani.
With that defective personality at the top of the CIA organizational chart, Catastrophe Is Assured.