Posted on 03/27/2005 8:59:53 AM PST by Brian Mosely
A report from the White House intelligence panel, expected to be unveiled this week, will detail how three years after 9/11, many of the problems within the nation's intelligence agencies that were blamed for the failure to detect the hijacking plot remain today, Newsweek reports in the current issue.
The panel was originally created last year to examine how U.S. intelligence could have been so embarrassingly wrong about Saddam Hussein's nonexistent WMD arsenal. But the president gave it a broader mission to look at ongoing problems inside the intelligence community as a whole. Its report is the first major assessment of the intelligence community's post-9/11 efforts to reform itself. The report, one U.S. intelligence official tells Newsweek, is "tough" on all the agencies, and will highlight gaps in the U.S. government's knowledge of the nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea. "Everybody takes a hit," says an intelligence source.
After so much criticism about the failures of the nation's intelligence agencies to get along, President Bush created the Terrorist Threat Integration Center two years ago, which was to be a showcase of the government's new dedication to intelligence sharing. The new agency's mission was to "fuse" the various strands of information collected by the government's 15 intelligence arms, including the FBI, CIA, NSA and Homeland Security. But when members of a White House commission paid a visit to the threat center, now renamed the National Counter-Terrorism Center, they were dismayed by what they found. Though they sat side by side, agents and analysts from the different agencies were still playing by the old rules: trust your own, and be wary of the other guy, report Investigative Correspondent Michael Isikoff and Washington Bureau Chief Daniel Klaidman in the April 4 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, March 28).
(Excerpt) Read more at biz.yahoo.com ...
No big surprise here.
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