George W. Bush inherited 'crumbling' intel community from Bill Clinton: Tenet

The Washington Times ^ | February 15, 2016 | Rowan Scarborough

[Kaslin]

GOP presidential hopeful Donald Trump blames Bush for failing to stop 9/11 attacks

As Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump hammers away at former President George W. Bush for not stopping the September 11 attacks, another factor could be added to the debate: Mr. Bush inherited from Bill Clinton an intelligence community in terrible shape.

This fact comes not from a Republican partisan but from George Tenet, President Clinton's CIA director, a post that at the time made him the country's top intelligence officer.

Mr. Tenet wrote in his memoirs, "At the Center of the Storm," that Mr. Clinton left Mr. Bush with a CIA that was in "Chapter 11." The eavesdropping National Security Agency was "crumbling" and "going deaf," he said.

It is one explanation for why the intelligence community failed to discover and stop the September 11 plot.

Mr. Clinton is an integral part of Hillary Clinton's Democratic presidential campaign. The record shows that, as commander in chief, he shrunk the CIA at the very time al Qaeda was expanding.

On his watch, the Osama bin Laden terror group declared war on the U.S. and carried out the first World Trade Center attack, as well as the bombings of a destroyer and two American embassies in Africa.

[DugwayDuke]

“An immediate Intel based screening for travelers that met red flag criteria. It’s my understanding that foreign Intel services had done of those guys on lists. I’m not saying that we could have definitely made a stop, but by most accounts, the effort want there. They were suspicious of the sources of the warnings.”

Bush took office on 20 Jan 2001. The towers fell on 11 Sep 2001. Some, if not most, of the attackers were already inside the US When Bush took over. Do you really think anything new security system Bush could have implemented would have forestalled this attack?

Sure, we could have done better but the fault lies with Clinton, not Bush.

BTW, I’d really like to see such a security system. Problem is, you’d never get it approved since any system good enough to be effective would be criticised as ‘spying on American citizens’.

[Homer1]

or even after Iraq...not tearing that agency a new one....how many ill-advised wars will the CIA get us into while passing culpability to the right v left etc.