Posted on 02/10/2002 9:23:42 AM PST by jmp702
Sunday Feb. 10, 2002; 12:01 p.m. EST
Gaffney: Tenet Should Admit 9/11 'Failure'
Former senior Reagan administration Defense Department official Frank Gaffney said Saturday night that CIA Director George Tenet was wrong to deny in testimony last week that the 9/11 attacks represented a failure of the U.S. intelligence gathering community.
"Of course it's a failure," Gaffney told WABC Radio's John Batchelor and Paul Alexander. "How could you describe it as anything other than a failure?"
On Wednesday, Tenet told the Senate Select Intelligence Committee that the terrorist attacks were "not the result of the failure of attention and discipline and focus and consistent effort, and the American people need to understand that.....
"When people use the word 'failure,'" Tenet continued, "-- 'failure' means no focus, no attention, no discipline -- and those were not present in what either we or the FBI did here and around the world."
But Gaffney strongly disagreed, telling the New York-based talk hosts, "Something happened. We didn't know that it was going to happen. It was a bad thing. That, by my lexicon, constitutes a failure."
The former senior Reagan Defense Department official warned that Tenet's comments suggested he doesn't think the CIA needed to improve its procedures.
"It certainly sounds to me as though George Tenet personally and the intelligence community he's leading corporately are saying, 'We didn't do anything wrong,' And that's the real rub here."
Gaffney said the CIA director's attitude reflected the intelligence community's reliance on high-tech information gathering rather than cultivating human assets on the ground, which was, he said, a product of "the Clinton administration's predisposition."
"You had a Clinton administration that didn't want to attack al Qaeda," Gaffney charged. "Except in maybe a spasmodic wag-the-dog kind of way in, you know, in blowing up some empty camps or an intelligence building in Iraq after hours."
In its lead editorial on Sunday the New York Post called for Tenet to resign, saying the CIA "failed - disastrously - on his watch, and thousands of Americans perished as a result."
Frank Gaffney currently heads up the Center for Security Policy, a Washington-based think tank.
However, he is right, Tenet cannot pretend he did his job by any stretch of the imagination.
Makes it kinda difficult to get intelligence from areas in which Al Qaeda liked to hang out, doesn't it?
Tenet may be no good but it is the Democrat Party which is responsible for gutting our intelligence services.
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