A lot of people are opposed to the way Porter Goss is handling his job as head the CIA. Most of those are the entrenched bureaucrats he was sent to clean out. The failures of the CIA require a through housecleaning, however... and if Goss can't do it, then few others can. The CIA was essentially emasculated by Stansfield Turner after the 1975 Church committee, which recommended that covert action "should be resorted to only to counter severe threats to the national security of the United States." Since then, the CIA has frequently failed to protect this country from terrorist attacks, especially from the Middle East.
Though they were able to function quite well against other technologically reliant foes (like the USSR), we had no warning before the 1979 takeover of Iran by Shi'a fundamentalists. The CIA didn't have the means to prevent bomb attacks by Islamic terrorists in Beirut in 1983, Bogota in '84, Madrid, Frankfurt, San Salvador, Rome and Vienna in '85. They missed the hijacking of planes and the cruise ship Achille Lauro in '85. By that time it should have been obvious that the CIA needed an overhaul, but the USSR was still the primary focus of our foreign intelligence services. The CIA was focused on countering Communist takeovers of small countries, by which means the Soviets had been expanding their influence since the end of WWII. Unfortunately, the CIA was still operating under Turner's directives, which promoted the use of "ethical" intelligence-gathering -- meaning less reliance on turncoats, infiltrators and spies, and more on wiretaps and satellite photos. The CIA was unprepared to deal with a low-tech foe like anti-Western Muslim fanatics, who pass information by hand in face-to-face meetings. The entrenched bureaucracy of the CIA fought every attempt at reform, though Muslim fanatics bombed a disco in West Berlin and Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988.
Even after the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the CIA made no move to rebuild or reorient itself to deal with Middle Eastern terrorists. The rise of al-Qaeda sparked no reformation, even after the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the first Islamic terror attack on US soil. By 1995, al-Qaeda was on track to become the most powerful terrorist organisation on Earth, with the prestige of having driven the Great Satan out of Somalia -- as bin Laden saw it -- and even attacked us on our own home soil and gotten away without reprisal. The '95 car-bomb in Riyadh, the '96 Khobar Towers bombing, and the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam double attack went unprevented and unanswered. Even the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen met with no visible response. The CIA seemed unable to find these people, or find any information about their activities in advance. The January 2000 terrorist summit at Kuala Lumpur (attended, oddly enough, by a member of the Fedayeen Saddam) was probably our last chance to stop the 9/11 plot before it was set in motion, and nothing was done.
Through the '90's, the CIA also missed the fact that North Korea had reneged on its '94 deal with the US, and was working on nuclear weapons. The CIA gave us no warning that a nuclear scientist in Pakistan was running a nuclear proliferation ring, supplying nuclear know-how to rogue dictatorships. We also had no idea how advanced Libya's nuclear program was until Ghaddafi decided to give it up after watching Saddam's world crumble around him. They also failed to discover that Saddam Hussein was bribing half the world's governments and influential people, especially in France, China and Russia. He did this with money he bled from the Oil-for-Food program the UN instituted to reduce the effect of the sanctions on the Iraqi people. The program only reduced the effect of the sanctions on Saddam Hussein, as it turns out.
By 9/11, the CIA had managed to insert some operatives into al-Qaeda, but only at low levels in the organisation. We had no solid warnings whatsoever that such an event was coming, although the overall reduction in CIA personnel during Clinton's presidency can be blamed for part of that. Jamie Gorelick's "wall," erected to prevent the sharing of information between the CIA and the FBI, also had a detrimental effect on the CIA's ability to gather information about foreign terrorists operating inside the US. The main culprit, however, was still the entrenched bureaucracy at the CIA itself, and their adherence to technological intelligence-gathering over the old-fashioned human variety.
Liberals like to make a fuss over the title of a 6 August 2001 memo, "Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside US," but its title was the most interesting thing about it. The memo contained nothing more than a list of old information, and a vague warning. "We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a . . . service in 1998 saying that bin Laden wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of 'Blind Sheik' Omar Abdel Rahman and other U.S.-held extremists," the memo read. Just over a month later, three planes slammed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, while a fourth crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. The CIA had failed yet again. A vague, inaccurate, three-year-old uncorroborated warning was the best they had been able to offer.
It was after this, perhaps sensing the coming change, that the CIA began turning against the President openly -- almost defiantly. Czech intelligence insists to this day that Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague before the attacks. No one can definitively place Atta anywhere else during that time, yet the CIA never fully investigated the matter. The CIA sent an anti-Bush partisan to investigate the British reports that Saddam was trying to buy uranium from Niger. Though he actually uncovered the name of the man Saddam had sent to negotiate (Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, also known as "Baghdad Bob"), Wilson reported -- not to the CIA or the President, but in a New York Times editorial -- that it was a lie. Before President Bush committed troops to the liberation of Iraq, he asked CIA Director (DCI) George Tenet to confirm the existence of the WMD stockpiles the CIA had been reporting on for so long. "Don't worry, it's a slam-dunk," Tenet assured him.
The amount of so-called "classified" information leaked to the press since 9/11 is staggering. Pessimistic "top-secret" reports on Iraq's future somehow surfaced in the press right before the 2004 election. The CIA even leaked a report that some agents had doubted Saddam's ties to terrorism. All of this was an effort to fight back against Bush's plan to clean house at the CIA. An analyst named Michael Scheuer penned a book called "Imperial Hubris," which was cleared by the CIA as long as he wrote anonymously -- and used his knowledge to attack Bush. "As long as the book was being used to bash the President, they gave me carte blanche to talk to the media," he said. However, he believes that when he began to criticise the CIA's mishandling of terrorism, he was silenced. Before Tenet left his position as DCI, he forbade Scheuer to speak publicly, Scheuer told the Washington Post.
Now that Porter Goss is in place and Bush is re-elected, the reorganisation is just beginning. High-level bureaucrats and officers, including Stephen Kappes (the Deputy Director of Operations), have already left. The CIA is fighting back with a new series of leaks, including the details of Kappes' resignation in protest over Goss' policies, leaks of prewar intelligence estimates, leaks of internal memos -- whatever the CIA can use to discredit the President. How can we trust any of those "anonymous sources" the media has been dependent upon for years? The New York Times, the LA Times and the Washington Post frequently report "news" from anonymous CIA officials and officers, but that news can no longer be taken at face value.
It seems that whatever credibility the "mainstream" media had left is just "collateral damage" in the Beltway War.
