Tuesday, 7th of January at 8.30pm
"The left hand did not know what the right was doing." So says the ex-Director of the CIA, James Woolsey, when asked about the state of affairs at the US Secret Service prior to 11 September 2001.
Robert Baer, an agent specialising in the Middle and the Far East with 21 years of experience under his belt and who is, according to The New Yorker, "by far the best CIA agent ever," goes further. "A professional service could have prevented the attack of September 11. We could have caught these people beforehand."
And yet the failure was not merely that of the CIA and the FBI, but also of the Clinton administration. Many times in the years prior to the attack, the Sudanese government offered the USA precise documentation on the Al Qaeda network. This German documentary claims that Clinton’s administration, however, was not interested in the highly explosive material, because they objected, in principle, to the political situation in the Sudan.
Yet, even after the bombings of the US embassies in Africa, the FBI, the program, maintains, once more refused a Sudanese offer to hand over two of the main suspects. This documentary exposes how Saudi Arabia has been financing the fundamentalists for years.
AL QAEDA: ERRORS IN JUDGEMENT, screening on SBS on Tuesday, January 7 @ 8.30 pm, catalogues the extraordinary deficiencies in US intelligence gathering that resulted in valuable information about Al Qaeda being ignored.
The former head of the Taliban’s secret service met with CIA representatives in April of 1999 in Peshawar, to talk about "the problem with Osama". Elements of the Taliban leadership were considering exiling Bin Laden and Al Qaeda from Afghanistan. Bin Laden’s influence was too great for them and they feared American reprisals for Osama’s attacks abroad.
But, the program believes that the verdict is clear: US agents and the Clinton administration broke the golden rule, which states that one should check out all information, even that received from political opponents. If they had, then September 11 and the deaths of thousands of people could have been avoided.