Senator Says Sept. 11 Report Too Soft On CIA,FBI

Reuters/Yahoo ^ | 12-11-2002

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Senator Says Sept. 11 Report Too Soft on CIA, FBI

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A leader of the Senate intelligence committee criticized on Tuesday a congressional inquiry into Sept. 11-related intelligence failures as too soft on U.S. agencies, especially the CIA.

The report stops short of assigning enough blame to the FBI and CIA, Republican Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and one of CIA Director George Tenet's harshest critics, told ABC television on Tuesday morning.

A joint inquiry by the Senate and House intelligence committees has drafted a final, mostly classified, report that is expected to face an approval vote on Tuesday.

"Some of the people on the committee don't want to assign the blame or the accountability," Shelby said. "I am not one of those people."

The CIA and FBI have been criticized for missing potential clues that, if pursued, critics say, may have led to unraveling the plot that sent four hijacked planes crashing into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon outside Washington and a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11, 2001.

More than 3,000 people died in the attacks, which prompted a review of U.S. security vulnerabilities to better protect against another strike on U.S. soil, and led to the creation of a new Department of Homeland Security.

"Perhaps some of it could have been prevented," Shelby said of the Sept. 11 attacks. "There were a lot of missed signals, a lot of non-sharing of information."

Shelby continued to heap criticism on Tenet. "There have been more failures on his watch as far as massive intelligence failures than any CIA director in history. Yet he's still there," Shelby said. "It's inexplicable to me."

President Bush , who often receives his daily intelligence briefing from Tenet personally, has expressed confidence in the CIA director since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Shelby hinted that he might support a minority report from the intelligence committee harsher than the one to be released on Tuesday. "I will come forth with minority views, with my own views, and I believe there will be others who will join me," he said.

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Shelby is PO'ed. (I think Shelby is scheduled to be leaving this position to go to the banking committee.)

[blam]

Ping.

[swarthyguy]

Good for Shelby. The TragiComedy of Errors that led to 9/11 was definitely avoidable and preventable.

[cynicom]

The FBI was too busy hunting down rednecks to pay any attention to terrorists. The CIA has had one loser after another as directors, Tenet, the last in line.

[Southack]

Shelby knows what we know, and then some.

He knows that the FBI and ATF will send an agent into EVERY new "white supremacist", KKK, or militia group that gets created. Put up a flyer for a militia meeting, and an ATF or FBI agent WILL attend (no doubt pretending to be Mr. Uber Conservative).

But the FBI wasn't infiltrating mosques. The CIA wasn't infiltrating nearly enough radical Islamic splinter groups, either.

Moreover, what little information that they did glean (probably from technical means or from our allies) was horded and not shared between intelligence agencies.

Furthermore, it is pretty apparent that the intelligence agencies weren't even viewing radical Islam as a threat that required any inter-agency cooperation on any level at all.

So I'm glad to see our good Senator busting some chops about all of this nonsense.

However, even with all of that said, I'm not convinced that getting rid of Tenent is the way to go. Perhaps he should be canned, but then again, there are times when the guy who made the blunder is the best guy to correct it. Whether this is one of those times is still in question, of course, but I suspect that GWB is on top of this situation and will handle it properly.

Homeland security under Ridge is certainly a step in the right direction. DOJ under Ashcroft is another positive (just listening to the Lefties whine about those two should tell you most of what you need to know - "you will know them by their enemies").

It wouldn't surprise me at all to see GWB giving Ridge enough time to get stabilized, and then once setup, to watch as more and more of the FBI and/or CIA gets transferred under Ridge, with the FBI slowly fading from existence over the years.

Not all purges have to be Revolutions, after all...