Posted on 09/12/2001 8:05:00 PM PDT by truther
A former CIA official said late Wednesday that U.S. spy recruitment had been decimated by strict Clinton administration rules that tied the agency's hands in its war against terrorism, a development first reported by NewsMax.com's Executive Editor Christopher Ruddy.
"We don't have enough people on the ground in the right places," former Iraqi bureau station chief Whitney Bruner told Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly.
"Partly it's because there's a culture that I think has developed in Washington concerning human operations over the last several years," Bruner said; a policy that limited the kind of people the agency could deal with.
"When you're dealing with a terrorist target you are dealing with what might charitably be called slimeballs -- very, very unpleasant type people who probably have criminal records," the former station chief explained.
But the people in a position to know about terrorists' plans were off limits under Clinton-era CIA regulations.
"We're not allowed to deal with them.... if the person you are trying to recruit against a terrorist target has questions of human rights or other kinds of crime," Bruner revealed.
Nearly a day before the former CIA official spoke out, a CIA source identified only as "Roger" told NewsMax.com's Christopher Ruddy that the CIA's "Human Rights Scrub" policy, developed during the Clinton years, made the recruitment of intelligence assets nearly impossible.
"Previously, I wrote how Clinton effectively stopped the recruitment of Chinese nationals by demanding that only high-ranking embassy officials could be recruited knowing this is almost impossible. Roger told me that. Roger reminded me again of this today.
"He noted that Clinton policies reached their zenith under CIA Director John Deutch and his top assistant, Nora Slatkin. The pair ran Clinton's CIA in the mid-1990s and implemented a 'human rights scrub' policy.
"Here's how Roger described it in an e-mail Tuesday evening: 'Deutch and Nora, Clinton's anti-intelligence plants, implemented a universal human rights scrub of all assets, virtually shutting down operations for 6 months to a year. This was after something happened in Central America (there was an American woman involved who was the common law wife of a commie who went missing there) that got a lot of bad press for the agency.
"'After that, each asset had to be certified as being 'clean for human rights violations.' "'What this did was to put off limits, in effect, terrorists, criminals, and anyone else who would have info on these kinds of people.'
"Roger says the CIA, even under new leadership, has never recovered from the 'Human Rights Scrub' policy."
Since that time, when almost all of the most experienced in the CIA were canned, the only successful spies in the U.S. have been those within the government who supported the Soviets.
George T. is a well-meaning bureaucrat and all-around nice guy, but not the man we need in that position to rebuild....a job that will take many years.
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