http://www.guardian.co.uk/alqaida/story/0,12469,1287015,00.html
snip:
The conclusion of the September 11 Commission - that the al-Qaida plot might have been broken up if the intelligence agencies had cooperated better and shared more information - was accompanied by recommendations for the creation of a national counter-terrorist centre and a national director of intelligence to coordinate the CIA, FBI and other agencies. Scheuer believes this is a classic bureaucratic fix. "I've never known a dysfunctional bureaucracy made better by being made bigger." His answer to the al-Qaida threat, unsurprisingly, is to give his old unit at the CIA, the Bin Laden station, more resources and more firepower.
It is a solution forged by the accumulated bitterness of missed opportunities. In one year under his watch, from May 1998 to May 1999, Scheuer reckons the US had up to a dozen serious chances to kill or capture Bin Laden. Only one was taken - a missile attack on an Afghan training camp in August 1998 - but either the al-Qaida leader was not there, or he had left before the missiles landed.
Months earlier, however, Scheuer believes there was a far better opportunity to grab Bin Laden. The CIA had made a deal with a group of Afghan tribesmen to raid Bin Laden's headquarters near Kandahar and then take him to a desert landing strip, where a US plane would take him either to America or another country for trial. The plan, rehearsed several times over many months, was in Scheuer's view "almost a perfect operation in the sense that there was no US hand visible". But on May 29 1998, according to the narrative in the September 11 Commission's report, Scheuer was informed that the operation had been cancelled because of the risk of civilian casualties.
The pattern was repeated on December 20 the same year, when Scheuer's agents were virtually certain that Bin Laden would be staying the night at a guest house in the Kandahar governor's compound. President Clinton's principal national security advisers once more decided that the danger of collateral damage was too high. Afterwards Scheuer wrote to the top CIA agent in the region, Gary Schroen, saying that he had been unable to sleep after this decision. "I'm sure we'll regret not acting last night," he predicted. Yet another opportunity, in Afghanistan, was missed in 1999.
